- If you live in one of Europe's electronic music hotspots, you can spend nearly every weekend dancing to great international artists. Many Europeans aren't quite so lucky, though, which is part of what makes Time Warp such a treasure. With editions in Mannheim—about as centrally located as it gets in Western Europe—happening annually for about 20 years, Time Warp manages to round up a lion's share of the circuit's top jocks for a peerless one-night techno marathon that unofficially kicks off the festival season in Europe. It's a massive party, sure, but it's also a reunion of sorts for the artists who play there and the legions of fans that make the trek every time. If you only go out one night each year, this one's a pretty obvious choice.
Time Warp has remained a big deal mostly through consistency. The lineup isn't particularly trendy or cutting-edge, but it isn't supposed to be: it's where you find the DJs you know doing the things they're known for. The best sets this year came from those who completely inhabited the mindbogglingly enormous rooms they found themselves in. Sven Väth is the perfect example. Though he played to a seemingly endless sea of revelers on Floor 2, he treated the place like his personal listening nook. During his four-and-a-half hours of prime time, Väth bent adventurous fare like Herbert's "It's Only (DJ Koze Remix)" into crowd-pleasing anthems as if by the sheer force of his enthusiasm.
In the techno-focused Floor 1 next door, DJs enticed the crowd with a thoroughly pleasing sort of darkness. Carl Cox, another Time Warp veteran, proved his worth with big rhythms and a hefty dollop of his oversized personality. Dancers were eating up his set, and you sensed their enthusiasm was feeding right into his own energetic mixing. Marcel Dettmann followed with what felt like the set of the night. He played the sort of anonymous techno you'd imagine wrecking a dank basement, but somehow got a room of thousands on board. Unfortunately, the visual spectacle around him—cloyingly brash lighting and un-ironically cheesy visuals—felt like it was meant for someone else's DJ set. But Dettmann's zoned-in and playfully punishing mix made it easy to transcend whatever rave clichés Time Warp threw at you.
I found it more difficult to get in the groove on Floor 3. A relatively wide and vibe-less box of a room, it didn't do its DJs many favors, and neither did its soundsystem. Dixon, a DJ with personality in spades, played a perfectly apt set to a reasonably full dance floor early in the evening, but he sounded a little lost in his surroundings. Ricardo Villalobos' solution was to bring the party onto the stage, which looked more rammed than the dance floor itself. With a good deal more flair and variety than most others at Time Warp, he managed to sneak an admirable amount of experimentation into the standard festival framework, but I wondered how much of the good feeling was actually making it off the stage. The crowd was certainly moving, but it felt a little disparate, like we were having a hard time rallying around anything in particular.
Of course, if you weren't feeling a particular set, crowd or room, you had plenty of others to choose from at any given moment. And as night transitioned into day, the festival switched gears from standard two-hour festival blocks to epic closing sets from Richie Hawtin, Laurent Garnier and (my pick) Visionquest, which surely presented a conundrum for plenty of attendees.
What Time Warp lacked, though, was something to spice things up—a stage that truly stood out from the others. Floors 5 and 6, intimate spaces by comparison, presented more underground acts like Niconé & Sascha Braemer, Agoria and Mathias Kaden. But this wasn't Time Warp pushing the envelope so much as bringing a few new names into the fold. The tens of thousands of revelers who came through the gates didn't seem to be wanting for much, though. As my cab driver noted on the ride back to my hotel, Time Warp has long been the biggest night of the year for him and his colleagues. Something tells me that won't be changing anytime soon.