Full on Ferry – The Recession Edition

After the smashing Full on Ferry 2008 show, which was by a mile my favorite party of the year, high hopes were set for this years edition. Boy did that turn out unexpectedly different.

It’s a known fact that Ferry, despite being by far the best producer of the original Dutch super trio, is also the one who pulls the smallest crowd in his home country. His gigs do not sell out in advance, in fact they do not sell out at all. I’ve always wondered why that is. He does everything right, plays his own productions till the cows come home while jumping around and making gay heart signs, the works. And still he doesn’t even sell out the small room at Ahoy, which for the occasion was made even a bit smaller than last year by blocking off the left and right corners in the front.

Maybe it actually is a recession thing. If your flagship gig is not the hottest ticket in town then it’s also the first to get chopped when people have to save money. I mean 45 euro is up there with the big boys. But the weird thing is that last years night was so spectacular you would have expected people to show up by the busload to be part of the next one. Except they didn’t. And in retrospect, they were right.

- What happened to the awesome flying DJ booth?
- What happened to the awesome multicolor lasers all around?
- What happened to the cool lineup?
- What happened to the awesome sound?

None of the ingredients that made last years show so epic were there. Instead we got a random episode of his TIABM World Tour with some guests and a stupid MC. Simple stage, kitchen table DJ booth, big LED screen, few green lasers, the end. I mean come on guys, my local bar already has an LED screen nowadays. And they have better graphics to display on it too.

In short, 2009 FoF was a disappointment. I’ll admit it is not easy to top something as spectacular as last years, but it would have been quite easy to at least equal it. And when it’s not easy, because ticket sales and budget are an issue, then let me make some suggestions.

First of all Ferry should do his own warmup. This not only saves the wages of the warmup DJ but it also gives the crowd more Ferry for their money. Plus it gives Ferry the opportunity to have already established a connection to the crowd when the big show starts. And best of all it will create a massive amount of people banging on the door to get in at 22:00. Now everybody knows the warmup is going to be boring so people don’t bother to show up before 00:30, with the side effect of a lower bar turnover. But most importantly, Ferry fans are not interested in listening to house for hours on end. This years guy was definitely better than last years epic fail with Sidney Samson, but still I did mostly see people who were bored out of their scull around midnight.

Secondly: Bring back the spectacle! We need that flying DJ booth. As a matter of fact we need two. Two half circular booths, that fly back and forth from two stages left and right of the floor and connect halfway to deliver or remove a guest. Give them LED panels all around and mount a bunch of lasers on them. Fire a smoke cannon when it takes off again after landing. The way the show moved around the arena last year was so totally brilliant. It made everybody feel involved, because wherever you were standing at a certain point you’d be in the front. And then in the back again. Really one of the best concepts I have ever seen, making the difference between a really special night and just another night.

Thirdly: Reconsider the back-2-back concept. Ferry and his music are strong enough to carry the entire evening by themselves. If Armin can do that then Ferry definitely can. Having a load of guest DJs is not only unnecessary, it also costs way too much money. Money that would have been spent much more effectively on an impressive show. Especially when you don’t have Tiesto numbers of ticket sales top priority should go to allocating your budget wisely. Another thing about the guest DJs is the actual selection. I think Ferry should take the musical taste of his average visitor more into consideration and leave his personal preferences more in the background. Aka no people like Marco V or Duderstadt. Guys like Solarstone or Super8 & Tab are excellent choices to complement Ferry, so why not make them the lead guests all night long and make them appear 3 or 4 times? Now a small fortune is spent on multiple guest DJs, half of whom don’t even fit in the musical theme of the night and all they do is spin 4 tunes anyway.

Lastly: Don’t wait a whole year with releasing a DVD of the event, do it immediately after the show. Especially when it is a spectacular show like last years. DVDs travel around the world at light speed, and not only bring in revenues, but are major free publicity for the next event as well. By releasing it almost a year too late a major opportunity to promote the 2009 Full on Ferry event was missed. As a matter of fact promotion for the event was too invisible overall. I realize advertising costs money, but it also brings in paying visitors, which in it’s turn keeps the event on people’s minds. Just look at Sensation: utter crap, yet it sells out in 5 seconds. This is not something that is easily replicated. But in the end of the day Ferry needs to decide what he wants to do. Go big or remain underground. Unfortunately this years event was neither.

Armin vs Tiësto: Too close to call

Contrary to popular belief that by winning both the 2007 and 2008 DJ Mag title Armin van Buuren is now for a fact the most popular DJ in the world I would dare to dispute that that is actually the case.

Clearly Armin has performed a great sprint to catch up with Tiësto, the guy who personally brought DJ worshiping to the highest level in recorded history. But has he really passed this icon of DJing in popularity?

This week the highly regarded IDMA awards were handed out in Miami at the annual Winter Music Conference. Armin won 4 of his 6 nominations:

- Best European DJ
- Best Radio Mix Show DJ (A State of Trance)
- Best Progressive House/Trance track (In and out of love)
- Best Video (In and out of love)

Tiësto however also won 4 of his 6 nominations and not exactly the small potato ones:

- Best Global DJ
- Best Full Length DJ Mix (In Search of Sunrise 7)
- Best Podcast (Tiësto's Club Life)
- Best Artist

This again confirms how popular Tiësto still is and how mega close the race between him and Armin has been in the past year. The organizer of the DJ Mag award has admitted (in Armin's book) that the difference between Armin and Tiësto for the 2008 DJ Mag title was less than 100 votes. On a total of 350.000 votes that is extremely close. Add to that the fact that Tiësto recently took the Mix Mag Best DJ award and now also the IDMA Best Global DJ award and it is pretty clear that Armin is not a mile ahead in popularity as a lot of people so often seem to think. He has done a great job in catching up, but in terms of popularity they are currently equal at best.

I am not writing this to dis Armin or promote Tiësto for that matter. I’m simply trying to look objectively at what's going on and how people are rating these guys. Personally I am quite critical about Armin's current live sets, but I will still take his over Tiësto's every day. Same goes for his radio show, although this poll does show that Armin's podcast format simply doesn't work and is unworthy of his position, something I've been saying from episode 1.

In terms of the other awards, there are a few that don’t really don’t mean anything to me. Tiësto best artist? What artist?! He hasn’t been an artist for 2 years, just a DJ and a remixer. Best (Progressive) House/Trance Track for In and out of love? That must be a joke. And the Best Video award for that same track should immediately be forwarded to Ne-Yo, because Armin’s vid is an utter ripoff of the one Ne-Yo made his track Closer in early 2008.

I would agree to ISOS7 being a better compilation than ASOT2008, however both fail miserably compared to something like Sasha's Invol2ver. Unfortunately the popular majority yet fails to see the sheer genius behind that compilation and the way it was produced and mixed. I do hope that these guys one day will see that they are wasting their energy and talent on all this endless worldwide touring, doing the same boring live sets over and over again. They would serve their musical legacy and their fans a lot better by spending more time and energy in the studio creating masterpieces that will last forever, instead of blowing it over and over on one night stands for a limited amount of people. I know that that money is a lot greener, but when is green green enough?

Oh well. Looking ahead it will be interesting to see how this develops during 2009 now that Tiësto has broken up with his manager. His gig list looks quite empty atm, but that could also have to do with him wanting to focus on his new artist album. But then again just like Armin's upcoming album it will most likely be too late to be of influence on the 2009 DJ Mag poll.

DVD Review: Armin Only 2008

Although still in the middle of the show’s world tour Armin van Buuren has already released a DVD edition of his Armin Only Imagine performance as recorded at the Jaarbeurs in Utrecht on April 19th 2008. Here’s my impressions.

Package/design
The double DVD comes in a foldout cardboard box. Not exactly my favorite packaging as it is very fragile, but it is finished in the well known glossy black Imagine theme and as such very well executed and nicely in line with all the other Imagine and Armin Only related productions. The first DVD presents a selection of the live show, the second one contains bonus materials.

Track selection
This is one of my two main beefs with this release. At the live show Armin played 96 tracks of which 23 were his own productions and 2 mashups partly containing own productions. That’s a self-promotion rate of 25%, which is high, but not uncommon with nowadays superstar DJ/Producers. Now since you can’t squeeze 9 hours of music into one DVD obviously a selection had to be made. However when that selection turns out to be 30 tracks of which 20 are own productions, that all of a sudden makes for a 67% self-promotion rate. And in all fairness that isn’t a genuine representation of what a 9 hour Armin Only 2008 set stands for. Of course the Imagine tracks are heavily featured and so they should. But the additional abundance of older Armin tracks really brings the value of this production down. What we ended up with here is basically a combination of the Imagine and 10 Years albums disguised as an Armin Only show, taking the “only” part out of it’s original context and painting a rather incorrect image of Armin as a DJ. Among his fans the reactions towards the “Sound of Armin van Buuren” classics hour during the show were already very mixed, but in this DVD release it is really out of place. Anyone who wants to see older Armin tunes played live can always go back to the Armin Only 2005 and 2006 DVD’s, so I truly fail to see the need for these reruns taking up 1/3 of the entire DVD and clogging up space that could have been used for an additional selection of the epic new 2008 tunes by other artists that were played during the night.

Sound quality, editing and polishing
According to Armin a lot of effort was put in the sound quality and 5.1 mixdown and that indeed shows in flying colors, because both are excellent. Another thing that is done very well is editing the selected songs together. For example the way the end of Fine without you flows into the official show intro is brilliant. If I hadn’t been there and knew it was different in the live show I would immediately believe that is how it was performed.

Unfortunately there are also a few flies in the soup and some of them could have been prevented. Since all audio was recorded on a multi track all separate channels of music, live instruments, live vocals and audience were available separately, which allowed the studio engineers to polish up any little mistake that might have happened. In some parts this was done very effectively, for example the horrible intro crash of MC Stretch was completely removed and Eller’s guitar solo in the Imagine intro (that was faded in too late in the live show) is now nicely restored. The sound of the crowd however has been cut back so much that it really reduces the "live" feeling that the original TV broadcast did have. Also a lot of the live vocals have been doctored drastically. Actually Jennifer Rene, Audrey Gallagher and Elles de Graaff’s live vocals have been completely replaced by the original studio acapellas. They did apply different reverb settings and left out second voice vocals to make it at least sound a little more live than just replacing the entire track with cd recordings like was done on the previous Armin Only DVD’s, but still it’s fairly obvious that this is not the real thing. Personally I’d rather hear Jennifer Rene sing a little off key live than the doctored up fake live performance we see now. The woman broke her hip only two months before the show for crying out loud and she was already back on stage dancing and singing. Much respect for that.

As there seems to be some sort of unfortunate curse resting on live performances at Armin Only shows in my opinion the only sensible thing to do is simply cut the bad performances out. Audrey Gallagher for example, sweet girl, but her performance was sub-par and should therefore have been cut, simple as that. But instead they decided fix it up with studio vocals. They also left in Going wrong (which was a complete fake playback performance to begin with) and then on top of that they cut out the brilliant performance of Jaren doing Unforgettable. Why all that was done is really beyond me. Another sorely missed performance is Sharon den Adel’s In and out of love. Supposedly this has to do with herself not being satisfied with her performance, but to be honest I think she is the only person on the planet who thinks that, because literally everyone I talked to thought it was absolutely great.

One last remark concerns the volume of the overdubbed vocals. In the Tuschinski preview I already noticed they have been mixed in slightly too loud, making them sound a bit too thick on top of the rest of the music. Initially I thought it had to do with the theater’s center speakers perhaps being set up incorrectly, but on my own system I still hear the same thing, albeit less intrusive. There is actually a noticeable difference between 5.1 Movie and 5.1 Music mode. If your system allows these different modes make sure you choose the 5.1 Music setting for optimal sound quality.

Video/Camerawork
When I saw the TV broadcast back after coming home from the live show I was already impressed with the camerawork and the way the whole thing looked on TV. And since this DVD is based on the same footage this part is equally impressive. Could have done with a bit less boob and butt shots imo but other than that very cool. Sharing the costs of a large camera crew with a TV station was a bright move and it obviously paid off. The shots of the Jaarbeurs building that were used to create the opening scenes are simple but very effective and even a little arty. Very nice.

Bonus DVD
Overall I think the bonus DVD is a very nice package. The menu design is again strongly in line with the theme and comes off even better than on the main disk because of the higher number of menu options. The rotating sunrays are a nice touch.

Behind the scenes documentary
This is simply excellent, it’s coherent and there’s a good timeline. Sound quality is absolutely ace.

Discography section
Unfortunately this part is very poorly executed. It doesn’t display any release prior to 2004, it doesn’t show any single releases and there are multiple faults in terms of years of releases. By far the most sloppy part of the release, and rather embarrassing for Armada Music to be honest. Things like this could have been easily prevented if more attention had been put into testing and evaluating the final beta master.

Overall
Obviously a lot of effort has been put in this production and it easily surpasses for example what Ferry Corsten made of his Full on Ferry DVD. I also think it’s more relaxing to watch than Tiesto’s Copenhagen production. However as a reflection of a major Armin Only event I think this release is disappointing, mainly because of the over the top Armin-centric track selection and the botched up live performances. The nice bonus DVD makes up only partly for this. As a production it seems to be designed to please the masses and squeeze out the maximum amount of royalty money, instead of being another milestone in Armin’s DJ career, which it easily could have been. Come the time I want to reminisce that night in April I will most likely grab the DVD’s I made of the TV recording. It’s like having the choice between fake breasts and makeup or pure and natural; the latter might have it’s imperfections but it feels much better.