Techno Tuesday: Gorgon City dish on The BPM Festival and bringing Kingdom to Playa Del Carmen
Techno Tuesday is a feature on Dancing Astronaut documenting the culture of underground dance music. We’ll bring you exclusive interviews, tracks, and narratives from artists within the techno, tech house, and deep house world in an effort to shed light on some of the best talent outside the world of mainstream dance music.
Since Gorgon City’s tremendous breakout year in 2013, the North London pair have helped shape the trajectory of deep house with their thoughtful, yet infectious productions. From club-ready records like “Ready For Your Love,” to more emotionally-driven ballads such as “Here For You,” the pair’s musical range is admirable.
As Foamo and RackNRuin prepare for their third year as a featured artist at The BPM Festival, 2017 has much more in store for the duo. For the first time in The BPM Festival history, Gorgon City will bring their ‘Kingdom’ party concept to Playa Del Carmen. Named after the pair’s eponymous sophomore album, ‘Kingdom’ has since blossomed into a global series curated by Gorgon City themselves – one that allows them to showcase their latest string of influencers including Kidnap Kid, Oliver Dollar and Amine Edge & Dance.
Ahead of The BPM Festival, Gorgon City take over Techno Tuesday to share some of their favorite memories from the festival – including seeing Richie Hawtin perform a secret show at a local taco shop.
On January 7, Gorgon City will present Kingdom at Playa del Carmen’s prized venue Blue Parrot, with support from Amine, Edge & Dance, Kidnap Kid, Solardo, Latmun and special guest Kerri Chander. Tickets to Kingdom are available for purchase here.
Photo credit: aLIVE Coverage for TheBPMFestival.com
“This year we return to The BPM Festival for the third year in a row. It’s also the third year for us playing at Blue Parrot, where this time around we’ll be bringing our ‘Kingdom’ party to the club.
We started the ‘Kingdom’ project to showcase all that we’re about. We launched the Kingdom playlist, where we have been steadily releasing new music, one-track at a time, whether it’s our more song-based tracks, or our deeper club tracks. We wanted to do it all in one playlist to show all of our influences, and all the sides to our production.
We also launched our Kingdom party series this year at SW4 festival in London. We had Pete Tong, Redlight, Kidnap Kid, Shadow Child, T.Williams, Claptone, Amine Edge & Dance, NVOY, Camelphat, Oliver $ all play for us.
When we got the invite from BPM to host our Kingdom party at Blue Parrot we were hyped, as it’s been a really special club for us, we even wrote a track named after it!
Blue Parrot is such a good venue, both day and night, there’s definitely a unique vibe to it, I spent pretty much a whole day there last year when John Digweed was playing, I went down just on my own, to soak up the atmosphere. We’ve spent a lot of time there!
Our track “Blue Parrot” was made inspired by the club, and The BPM Festival as a whole really, as every time we play at BPM we turn it into a bit of a vacation, we stay in Mexico for a week or two and really get to experience the festival fully, which is rare for us to be able to do, as often by the time we’ve finished playing our set at one festival, we’ll have to fly off to another. When you spend that much time somewhere, the whole energy of the place really gets to you and inspires you.
BPM is almost like, an entire Ibiza season, crammed into 10 days. The line-up is always huge, pretty much any house & techno DJs you’ll want to see will be playing at some point. There’s always so much going on everyday, whether in the town of Playa Del Carmen, or some of the off-parties in the jungle. There’s this whole ‘back-to-basics’ feel about the whole festival, none of the production is over the top, all the venues are raw, and no-frills, and that’s how we like it, its got this old-school Ibiza vibe.
Some of the most fun parts of The BPM Festival are the ‘surprises’ and unannounced shows. We saw Richie Hawtin playing in a taco shop last year, it was meant to be an intimate private party, but like 2000 people turned up. There’s been some other cool stuff like that, like stumbling across Apollonia playing a pop up party in the middle of the street, or getting a taxi to a random villa in the middle of the jungle for a secret techno party, and watching the sunrise, with your toes dipping in the sea!
As the festival is 10 days long, you might want a couple of recovery days in there, so if you want to chill out and recharge, you can explore the Mayan ruins of Tulum, or go swimming in cenotes, or indulge in the Mexican food.”
