TuneLab
Joyhauser
Awakenings Spring Festival 2023
Joyhauser at Awakenings Spring Festival 2023: because sometimes you just need to be pummeled by a perfectly engineered kick drum in a field, and this tracklist is the blueprint. The spring air might be cool, but the tent is a sweatbox, bodies moving in unison to a relentless, driving pulse. This is hard, festival-ready techno, with an average BPM of 137.5 that never lets up, using the tonal stability of Camelot 12A as its primary weapon for building unshakeable momentum. The energy arc is a straight line trending upward, with Joyhauser employing a mixing style that's all about stacking layers of percussion and dystopian melody over that foundational low-end (0.52).
The mids (0.36) are where the hooks live, and the occasional high-energy spikes (0.12) are used for devastating impact. The track selection is both crowd-pleasing and clever. Victor Ruiz's 'Touch the Darkness' is a monstrous, atmospheric opener. The inclusion of Gigi D'Agostino's 'Bla Bla Bla' is a brilliantly stupid moment of peak-time meme-ery that absolutely works.
Jeff Mills' 'The Bells' gets its requisite, spine-tingling play, and the Bellini 'Samba de Janeiro' edit is the kind of left-field surprise that defines a festival moment. jfan's 'Synthwave Horizon' offers a dash of retro-futurism, and Several Spirits' 'Blue Coast (Red Eye Mix)' provides a deeper, hypnotic interlude. The set opens with the ominous swell of 'Touch the Darkness', peaks with the iconic, riotous bell tones, and concludes with their own driving, muscular original 'Wasted' as the closing track.