- Eric Estornel has always been more of a head than his profile as Maceo Plex might suggest. Many know him for summer club hits like "Your Style," his 2011 smash on Crosstown Rebels. Fewer are aware of things like Indexed, his 2005 EP as Mariel Ito on Manchester's Modern Love. Mosaic, his residency at Pacha Ibiza, reflects the tension between his taste and his position in dance music's upper echelons. Over the last two summers, the weekly party has brought fresh, underground music to one of Ibiza's glitziest clubs, booking artists likes Solar, Avalon Emerson and Derek Plaslaiko alongside names that resonate more easily on the island. Perhaps inevitably, attendance numbers, all-important in Ibiza, were less than spectacular, especially when it comes to reserved VIP tables, which take up a good swath of Pacha's main room. But Mosaic's goal was a noble one, and the party succeeded in bringing something different to a scene at risk of growing stale. In this sense, it was a breath of fresh air.
Though Mosaic had what was billed as an "Extra Date" this week with Ben Klock, its official closing party went down at Pacha last Tuesday night. I arrived just late enough to miss the excellent Jennifer Cardini, who finished minutes before I turned up. Upstairs in Prism, Young Marco, the bandana-wearing Dutch digger behind one of this year's most inspired compilations, treated the small dance floor to a set of house and disco curios as lush as they were mysterious—Chez Damier's edit of Station 17's "Jabaluu" was the only one I recognized. Beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows opposite the DJ booth, Modeselektor pummeled the main room with heaving cuts of tech house, delivered with a kind of arena-rock grandeur: Sebastian Szary stood on the decks at one point to hype up the crowd, and their final track was nothing less than Underworld's "Born Slippy."
"They had to end with a classic," Estornel joked. Still, he followed this with no visible difficulty, dropping right into a medley of sleek and eerie rollers that grabbed the crowd from the off. Estornel has always had a particularly hands-on approach to mixing—in the past I'd seen him alternate between minutes-long blends and sudden, well-timed drops. This time he had an interesting new trick: while many of the tracks were moody and understated, he'd drum up grandiose breakdowns on the fly using a BOSS echo pedal and a drum machine. He brought the energy up and down with finesse, keenly riffing off the room's energy. The VIP section behind the booth might have been a little spare. But when the lights came on, the dance floor was packed, and everyone was sweaty and smiling.
Photo credit /
Mario Pinta