ARMIN ONLY ‘MIRAGE’ MELBOURNE NYE 31/01/2010
ARMIN ONLY ‘MIRAGE’ MELBOURNE NYE 31/01/2010 http://www.futureentertainment.com.au/arminonly/
ANGUS PATERSON
‘Armin Only’ is Dutch trance powerhouse Armin van Buuren’s shot at doing something a little grander, a little more ambitious and a touch spectacular. It’s a nine-hour set that sees him selecting the tunes from the very moment the first punter walks through the door at 9pm, up until when they reach for the lasers for the final time before the lights come on at 6am; and that’s not even mentioning the posse of special guest vocalists and performers he brings along to help recreate some of those special ‘Armin’ moments.
The full ‘Armin Only’ experience ventured out Holland for the first time in 2008, for a limited run of events across the world that included two unforgettable events in Sydney and Melbourne, which have since been spoken of in hushed tones by those lucky enough to attend. With Armin keeping his crown as DJ Mag’s #1 DJ for a record fourth successive year in 2010, he also unveiled the next edition of ‘Armin Only’ with events in Holland, Argentina and Ukraine, and finally for New Years Eve – a party at the massive Etihad Stadium in Melbourne, the biggest stadium in the Southern Hemisphere that only weeks before hosted 70,000 punters for U2’s stupendous ‘360 Tour’.
While the evening didn’t draw quite as many punters as the Irish mega band, there were still tens of thousands of up-for-it punters trickling into the stadium during Armin’s warm-up set. The earliest arrivals were greeted with haunting washes of ambient sound, eventually punctuated with thundering percussion echoing through the stadium, leading into a selection of progressive trance from names like Gareth Emery and Nic Chagall, with Armin hidden from the crowd until the ‘big reveal’ at 11.30pm. This was when the visual screens and spectacular lighting fired up to full effect, with the dramatic MC that voices Armin’s A State of Trance radio show beckoning us into a bombastic 10-minute intro that fully recreated the opening track from his new Mirage album. A singing siren was lowered from the ceiling like an acrobat, dancers strutted across the stage, flamethrowers lit up the crowd, Armin’s brother Eller van Buuren shredded a heavy metal guitar and was joined by a live drummer pounding his kit – it definitely wasn’t short on melodrama. Only one or two tunes later and we reached the midnight countdown, which saw us ushered into the New Year with Swedish House Mafia’s ‘One’.
One of the defining elements of ‘Armin Only’ are the guest vocalists, of course. The first performer to stroll into the spotlight was Rapture songstress Nadia Ali to perform Who Is Watching?, and for the duration of the evening we saw a sizable chunk of the Mirage album recreated live. While previous ‘Armin Only’ experiences were more about taking the crowd on a nine-hour DJ journey, this time the ‘concert’ aspect took centre stage more than ever before. Christian Burns stepped up to perform This Light Between Us, as well as Sophie Ellis Bextor for Not Giving Up On Love, and seminal trance vocalist Susannah for classics like Shivers.
However, for all that the concert bombast this time around, there were still the moments for the enthusiasts reminiscent of Armin’s progressive trance journeys of the past. Namely, when he punched out his whopping remix of Faithless’s Not Going Home, or tech trance classics like Sander van Doorn’s groundbreaking remix of Control Freak.
As we inched closer to 6am, fellow Dutch veteran Benno de Goeij from Rank1 stepped up to perform alongside Armin for a whole host of classics – Airwave, For An Angel, Seven Cities and plenty more. If ‘Armin Only’ was lacking the deeper moments we saw last time, it more than compensated with more sing-a-long moments than you could poke a stick at. What more could you ask for on NYE?
