- For four days in early September, Dimensions Festival, held in and around a 19th-century Austrian fort on Croatia's dazzling Adriadic coast, becomes the embodiment of a particular sort of European summer experience: skies are mostly clear, bodies (lathered in SPF 30 by day, dusted in glitter by night) are lithe and nights are thick with the pleasant thump of carefully curated house and techno. If you spend the better part of your year cooped up in a university building in Manchester or sliding less-than-gracefully across ice sheets in Berlin, then Dimensions might be your happy place. And as fall pounces early on much of Europe, the 2013 edition should be painfully fresh on the minds of more than a few of its young attendees.
In its location and lineup, Dimensions has a lot going for it. It's not alone, of course. By now Croatia is perhaps the hotbed of the festival circuit—by Visit Croatia's count, the country played host to 18 of them in 2013—and the two-year-old Dimensions is in a thick pack of upstarts. So despite what a winner it is on paper, the festival has to work hard if it wants to break away from its competition (and reach capacity, as its far-larger and bassier sister event, Outlook, did the week before). Dimensions certainly didn't seem content to let its stunning locale speak for itself. Think booking Theo Parrish two years in a row is impressive enough? Better secure all of 3 Chairs for a nine-hour session instead. Think having L.I.E.S. don Ron Morelli and Bristol's Livity Sound open for the entirety of Hessle Audio in a drained moat is enough to scratch the leftfield itch? Better kit that moat out with a multi-tiered, crystal-clear, loud-as-fuck soundsystem or get the hell off the Istrian Peninsula. (Then stick Ben UFO, Pearson Sound and Pangaea on a three-hour booze cruise the following night with rookie-of-the-year Anthony Naples, because, you know, vibes.) At nearly every turn, Dimensions gave festivalgoers more than the average punter knew she needed, because any less won't cut it anymore. Yes, it was still a big festival, with all the lousy food, rank toilets and the occasionally epic queues they entail. But it rose to the occasion admirably.
Photo credit: Benjamin Eagle
This was true of the performers as well. Festival sets often feel rote and impersonal, but DJs at Dimensions weren't just going through the motions. Morelli's three-hour opening set on Thursday night at the Moat Stage showed a DJ hardly preoccupied with banging it out. Over in Fort Arena 1 on the same night, the one-two punch of Move D and Prosumer also bucked convention, sending one of the festival's larger venues into a crazed state with an admirably light touch on the decks. (Move D's turn in the booth wasn't so far removed from the set he played at Freerotation this year, a festival about a tenth of Dimensions' size. It proved just as potent.) DJs even made the Clearing, the closest thing at Dimensions to your standard, sprawling festival stage, feel cozy. Jets, for my money the best new act on the festival circuit this year, certainly played to the venue's size, but the directness of their bassy techno got everyone in sync. It was Daphni's Friday night closing set, though, that pulled off the big-stage thing most impressively: his mixture of disco, funk, up-to-the-minute house and his own tracks glued the disparate crowd together with good feeling. As color crept into the early morning sky, I didn't see anything but smiles.
Photo credit: Benjamin Eagle
Highlights were spread more or less evenly across the first three days of the festival—Surgeon pulverizing the Moat, Juju & Jordash improvising their way into the hearts of an intimate Courtyard crowd, Tikiman toasting over Scion's hefty dub in Mungo's Arena and a ravey tour-de-force from Roman Flügel on the RA boat that damn near capsized the thing—but they came fast and furious on Sunday night. The obvious one, 3 Chairs' night-long takeover of the Outside The Fort stage, truly lived up to its potential. They didn't play the deepest set at the festival, but it felt like an education nevertheless. Tracks you've heard many dozens of times—Michael Jackson's "Off The Wall," Patrice Rushen's "Haven't You Heard," "Rappers Delight," even "Inspector Norse"—sounded better than they ever had before, due in no small part to Theo Parrish's E&S DJR-400 and the stage's absolutely unreal Void stacks. Moodymann and Marcellus Pittman kept things rooted in the classics, Rick Wilhite played ringleader and Parrish was the crazed football coach under administrative review, and together they made the stage unmissable for much of the night.
Photo credit: Benjamin Eagle
I managed to pull myself away from 3 Chairs a few times, and I'm glad I did. Peverelist was deep-tissue massaging Mungo's with buttery low-end, using Livity Sound records as base camps on a journey through ever-rising tempos. South London Ordnance was pushing the tiny Ballroom stage (capacity just north of 60) to a breaking point. And in the Moat, Steffi, a Panorama Bar resident who's been logging a lot of hours in Berghain of late, was rinsing the sort of rough-and-tumble acid sound you'd guess she's honed at that club. The whole of Sunday was special, but what 3 Chairs were throwing down had a once-in-a-lifetime feel to it. Dimensions will have a hard time topping that one next year, but I have no doubt they'll try.