- Sometime around 6 AM on the morning of Tuesday, October 6th in Ibiza, I wriggled my way out of the DC-10 Terrace to take five in the Garden. The music had stopped outside by this point, but it was still swarming with smokers and ravers splayed out on the floor. A vast spider's web of fairy lights hung low over the crowd, a replacement for the usual lasers, which the club had apparently dismantled after they started interfering with the neighbouring airport's radar system. I sat down and began chatting with three English lads. They'd arrived at midday on Monday with no hotel and only a small manbag between them, containing toothbrushes, some spare pairs of socks and their passports. Their flight home was in a couple of hours.
Back inside, the Terrace was fit to burst. I made my way towards the middle of the floor—the room's sonic sweet spot—and ended up surrounded by familiar faces. Seth Troxler and Steve Martinez were shaking their shoulders to my left, while a few metres behind me Ben UFO stood expressionless, eyes trained on the final DJs of the night, Kerri Chandler and Black Coffee.
Short-stay clubbers and well-known DJs on the dance floor aren't common sights in Ibiza these days, but at the closing of DC-10 and Circoloco they're nothing out of the ordinary. For both the punters and the artists, the 13-hour-plus finale is a time to throw caution to the wind and really get stuck in. Musically, it's an opportunity to see your favourite DJ putting in that extra 10%, and to make sure you catch that DJ that you kept missing all summer. Simply put, it's the blowout to end all blowouts.
The 2015 edition lived up to the mark. Ellen Allien was my first port of call, serving up thick-edged classic house (Farley Jackmaster Funk's remix of Femme Fion's ''Jack The House'') and acid in the Terrace, before Dixon dropped Omar-S's "Psychotic Photosynthesis" amidst other tough, percussive workouts. The Innervisions boss was too often guilty of resting on his laurels in Ibiza last year, so it was good to see him using his clout to challenge rather than please the crowd. Ben UFO was a couple of minutes late into the booth for his back-to-back with Jackmaster in the Main Room (he'd closed Panorama Bar for the first time the night before), but he quickly found his feet and outshone his counterpart with a weirder, ruder batch of bangers.
The Main Room, where the music is generally darker and trippier, doubles up at the closing as a safe haven away from the crush. Sure, it's still packed, but finding space to dance is easily done, which can't be said for the Garden or Terrace. Nina Kraviz, who played Circoloco seven times in 2015, was this summer's exciting new addition to the party's heavyweight roster, and she followed Ben UFO and Jackmaster with 90 minutes of hard, emotional techno. She closed with her own "Desire" mixed into The Age Of Love's epic "The Age Of Love," a one-two punch that caused Kraviz and the entire room to simultaneously lose their shit.
Later in the Terrace, Apollonia caused another, more blissful freak-out with Larry Heard's "The Sun Can't Compare," just one of several high points in the trio's funky, first-rate performance. Kerri Chandler and Black Coffee were tasked with bringing it home, a decision that speaks to the latter's rapid rise through the ranks. Their set was everything you want when your legs are really starting to feel the burn—catchy, rhythmic, fast-paced—but come 7 AM, the party's official closing time, I had to get out of there. The past two years I've considered the Circoloco closing the best party of the Ibiza summer. That's not the case this time around—DJ Harvey's residency at Pikes gets the nod for novelty—but the DC-10 marathon was a very close second.
Photo credit: Tasya Menaker