Pete Tong
Transatlantic producer heads up the IMS Finale
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haring the same acronym, and even dates, as the unlikely International Microwave Symposium, this year’s International Music Summit (IMS) took
over the plush surroundings of the fi ve star Ibiza Gran Hotel from 26th – 28th May. With top rooftop suites, overlooking the unfeasibly expensive yachts fi lling the harbour of Ibiza Town, offering a marble Jacuzzi, private pool, and Bang & Olufsen soundsystem, this was a reminder that, despite recent scare-mongering, the dance music industry is still in rude health and, from the look of it, has a pretty hefty wedge in the back pocket of its designer jeans.
Founded three years ago by a team of partners including Radio One mainstay Pete Tong, the IMS has plenty of reasons to be confi dent. House has climbed into bed with hip-hop, the not-so-spiritual home of gaudy, ostentatious bling, funded by the kind of huge record sales that dance labels can only dream of, while the conference’s schedule of panels and talks includes a cross-section of dance music’s rich depths, with everyone from Steel City ragga- renegade Toddla T to Mark Ronson, this year’s key- note speaker, in attendance alongside industry movers and shakers. “Myself and the founding partners have spent so much time on the island, some of them live here, and it’s given us so much, that we wanted to give something back,” Pete Tong tells us by the vast outdoor pool, just metres from where Busy P is sprawled out on a sun-lounger recovering from the night before. “We’ve all had a great time in Miami, but the conference element has kind of disappeared. ADE is good but it’s right at the end of the year. So to have something at the beginning of the season, we felt there was a gap and it seems that people agree.”
Including, that is, the President of Ibiza who was here the day before to announce a major initiative securing funding from the central Spanish government. Dance music, Ibiza seems to have decided after its recent years of doubt, is good for the island after all. Which might explain how IMS secured Baluarte De Sant Lucia, a Unesco World Heritage Site at the top of Ibiza Old Town, for their Friday night Grand Finale Festival. Sporting a line-up as wilfully eclectic as your typical iPod playlist, with Ronson headlining alongside scene stalwarts, Sasha and Pete Tong (billed side by side to avoid any ignominy), and young gun Skream, while Buraka Som Sistema and David E Sugar provide the live entertainment.
Climbing the ancient, winding streets of Ibiza Old Town you’re given a glimpse back in time to when
Sasha
Mark Ronson
this was just another sleepy Spanish island, the booming bass echoing down from above the only continuity error in the scene. Now, it’s the kind of setting that DJs dream about playing, the stage where Pete Tong is in action giving a panoramic view over Ibiza Town. Less 18 to 30, and more 16 to 60, the assembled throng lives up to its billing as a festival. Parents carry kids in industrial strength ear-defenders on their shoulders as they dance in front of the towering speakers to Tong who drops Tim Green’s remix of Cassius’ ‘1999’, a fi tting precursor to the setting of the sun. A remix of Tracey Thorn keeps the family-friendly vocals going until he drops into a chugging, arpeggio track. The night, it announces, is here.
Having missed Skream’s ridiculously early slot, dubstep obviously the sound of choice for the kiddies who disappear with the sun, it’s Ronson who steps up next under a pile of expectation. Busting out an early barrage of funk-break sampling hip-hop
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from Missy Elliott and Rob Base & DJ EZ Rock, he touches on soul with Smokey Robinson’s ‘Tears Of A Clown’ before heading into a heavy ragga excursion that concludes with ‘Pon De Floor’. Dance music mixed with the quick-handedness of a hip-hop DJ, a misjudged excursion into the pop of The Sugababes and Britney’s ‘Toxic’ is soon replaced by a Dizzee Rascal melody, the rest of his set displaying an equally free-fl owing taste that skims the surface of many genres with populist, crowd-pleasing aplomb.
After this easily-digested menu, Sasha’s turn of the century prog-antics take a while to sink in, a breakbeat excursion halfway through generating the required amount of energy to kick-start proceedings again. But it doesn’t prove a problem for kuduro cats Buraka Som Sistema, who come bouncing onto the stage like a band of rogue Duracell bunnies. They provide the perfect rowdy outro, pounding carnival drums sending an irresistible wiggle into everyone’s hips, before singer Kalaf fi res a Super Soaker over the front rows to further dampen the sweaty crowd. Borrowing a trick from DC10, the last song has them get everyone to crouch down before leaping up as the track kicks in.
It’s a melding of cultures that signals all that is great about dance music at the moment and which, with the help of IMS, is set to continue into a bright future.
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