Sunburn Goa 2013: Day 1 Highlights

The first day of Sunburn went off with a bang. The new venue at Vagator is their biggest yet, with a special mention to the Sunburn Sunset Point and the Space Jungle stage that’s situated on a cliff. The seventh edition of Sunburn included new additions of adventure sports like zip-lining and bungee jumping, not to mention a ferris wheel, and especially dedicated cruises.

It was clear that not just the crowd was ecstatic, but the artists as well were pumped for the inaugural day of Sunburn’s largest flagship festival yet.

All the stops were pulled out when it came to stage design. You could tell that the producers and designers went all out in terms of the set up and visuals. The most stunning was the Dance Temple, the biggest stage in Asia with a massive idol resembling Shiva in his Natraj avatar in the center.

The mainstage was fittingly titled the ‘temple’, as it attracted throngs of worshippers to witness the gods of dance music like Afrojack and his ‘Jacked’ crew including Shermanology performing live. They took over the stage as the former headlined the night, dishing out massive electro, progressive house and big room hits.

A refreshing change from the regular festival culture in India, everything was well spread out to ensure that there was enough space for all at every stage. Each stage had a theme, and a specific genre of dance music associated with it. The Bass Machine stage, which featured a life size tank that shot out hearts was bass heavy, focusing on genres like drum ‘n’ bass and dubstep. This stage proudly presented a slew of upcoming domestic talents, including Big City Harmonics, Madboy-Mink, Sandunes, Sick Flip, and Ox7gen.

The artists at Space Station, resembling the interiors of a huge metallic space ship, played tech and deep house. and Space Jungle, which featured pure unadulterated psy-trance, was perched on top of a hill and modeled after the likes of a psychedelic world, similar to international psychedelic trance festivals such as Noize Poison. There was a free stage outside the entrance near the box office, especially placed for people waiting in queue to exchange their tickets to be treated to quality music.

One of Sunburn’s signature arenas, the Cubezoid stage with 3D mapping on a pyramid of cubes, initially featured electronica with fantastic live acts by Dualist Inquiry and Goldfish, but then switched over to progressive trance with Richard Durand followed by Andrew Rayel.

Though the Dance Temple stage attracted the most crowd, the star of the evening, however, was Andrew Rayel. Andrew blew the house down with his electro-trance mash-ups. No wonder he’s the toast of the trance world. It takes a certain panache to mix the two completely different sub-genres of dance music and still have a powerful product that does justice to both sub-genres.

Not only the audience, but the artists were effusive in their thanks to the Sunburn family for an epic Day 1. Onto the next one!

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Written by Shule Puri and Mallika Pal

Edited by Kabir Uppal