- From the outside, the Luv Club looks like any other ordinary modern building in Athens, but each weekend the multi-storied club with its leather-clad dolls hanging from the high ceilings is a visiting ground for top international DJs such as Laurent Garnier, Miss Kittin and Dave Seaman. Sure, it doesn't attract the most clued-up of clubbers, nor is it my favourite Athens club, but with tonight's program consisting of two big guns of the Greek progressive scene, Dousk and Christian Cambas, not turning up would have been sacrilegious.
We arrived at 1 a.m. to an almost empty venue with local warm-up Mike Garcia spinning some deep house and tribal. By 2 a.m., the club had started to fill with Booka Shade's 'Shimmer' raising hands and getting the bodies of the mostly under-20 crowd moving. It wasn't one of Garcia's better warm-ups - he struggled to keep the pace steady for most his set, eventually bowing out with two big Ame cuts: their remix of Rodamaal's 'Insomnia' and the unstoppable 'Rej'.
Dousk wasted no time getting down to business, opening with a big progressive track that got the almost packed-out dancefloor shaking. A smattering of breaks, and suddenly I was taken back to the eighties thanks to Donna Summer's 'I Feel Love'. Nice stuff. Over in the booth, Dousk looked to be enjoying himself too despite a few technical hitches with the turntables. His 2.5 hour set was made up of twisted electro, breaks and one standout melodic progressive track that was probably one of his own. At times during his set I felt like I was in the middle of a laser battle with beeps and bleeps echoing across the room.
At 5 a.m., Christian Cambas stepped up, dropping the dark, electro brooder 'Uninvited Visitor' by Scorpio from his net label Devilock, and bringing back some of the crowd who'd earlier left the dancefloor. The middle of the floor quickly spiralled into total chaos with everybody jumping (and singing along) to Eric Prydz's reworking of Pink Floyd's 'Another Brick in the Wall', while later the Henrik B remix of DJ Delicious 'Let it Drop' caused extra devastation - Cambas' set was bomb after bomb. From there until the end, it was textbook Cambas: hard progressive, fast beats, acid basslines and sinister guitar riffs. Yet again, he didn't fail in his mission to destroy the dancefloor, and we left the club exhausted.