TuneLab
Adam Beyer
at our virtual Gashouder for Awakenings Festival 2020 | Online weekender
The great lockdown virtual rave was a bizarre experiment in collective solitude, where we danced in our living rooms to streams from empty clubs. Adam Beyer's Awakenings set, beamed from a digital Gashouder, captured that strange energy with a pounding, industrial-strength techno sermon. The vibe was surreal—the iconic venue rendered in pixels, the crowd represented by a chat scroll, but the music utterly, physically present. This is peak-time Drumcode techno, mean and functional, averaging a brisk 133 BPM and finding a gritty home in the 7A key.
The energy is squarely in the lows and mids (0.568 and 0.410 respectively), crafting a dense, rhythmic wall where every kick drum and clap is a structural element. Beyer's crate digging here is about power and precision. After the steely groove of the SubSight opener, he deploys Nic Fanciulli's 'Understand' as a hypnotic, looping mantra. Maurizio Palmacci's 'Robot' is a jacking, old-school weapon, and the inclusion of Armin van Buuren's 'Shivers' in the Rising Star mix is a genuinely unexpected slice of trance-tinged melodrama.
The remix of Yves Deruyter's 'Calling Earth' is a classic re-energized for a new peak-time context. The journey is a relentless build, from that first mechanical groove, through the mid-set pressure of tracks like 'The Gwana March' remix, culminating in the colossal, asteroid-sized kick drums of Enrico Sangiuliano's 'Moon Rocks' for a fittingly monumental close.