I walk into Het Amsterdamse Bos, a sprawling green space and arboretum on the outskirts of the city that’s about three times the size of Central Park, and as I’m picking up my wristband for Dekmantel, I see there’s a box of about 40 or so empty vials sitting in a large cardboard box. They look like what a phlebotomist uses to collect blood samples, but quite large, as if someone were waiting to test the Hulk for Lyme disease.
I wonder: What are they for? Drugs? That doesn’t make any sense. Though, I mean, we are in the famously unstringent city of Amsterdam, and this is a left-of-center electronic music festival where 72 hours later a very charming British lad named Rory—no doubt one of at least 50 charming British lads named Rory at Dekmantel; don’t worry about me blowing up your spot, Rory Prime—will offer me a bump of K at 2 p.m. while watching the Kansas-raised producer Brian Leeds play a big-blendy, squiggly, and patient deep house set under his Loidis moniker.
I start to walk away and chalk up the vials to another node in the great network of foreign travel that I’m comfortable being perplexed by. But then I turn back.
“I’m sorry if this is a stupid question,” I say to the Dutch woman who just gave me my wristband, “but what are those vials for?”
“Oh they’re for your cigarette butts.”
The American mind cannot comprehend this. The Earth is our ashtray, to the extent that Americans are smoking actual cigarettes anymore and not just coping with our latent nicotine addictions by vaping constantly. But carrying around a little mini garbage can for our butts is unfathomable. I was incredulous, jealous even.
The care that goes into Dekmantel—the Dutch record label that celebrated its 11th year operating as a major festival destination for all-black-everything bass lords and weekend party warriors alike—starts here with these vials. It then extends to the thoughtful, if not byzantine, beer cup recycling token program. And then further up to its conference lineup, heady warm-up shows, and its seven main stages, each with its own unique character and lighting design that uses (or totally blocks) the sunlight of this (mostly) daytime festival to a subtle but enriching effect.
This care then extends to each stage’s astonishing sound design, highlighted this year by Sam Shepherd’s (aka Floating Points) pristine Sunflower Sound System installed at the Greenhouse Stage. Each of the eight massive cabinets stood like giant yellow sentinels guarding the dancefloor. The speaker system—designed in part by Shepherd and Tom Smith, co-founder of the famed underground Cosmic Slop party in Leeds—was meant to reference the disco setups at New York’s Paradise Garage and sub-heavy sound systems of Jamaica. Each stack is a giant four-way horn speaker, 13 feet tall, encased in buttery yellow plywood, augmented by a handful of super tweeters hung from the ceiling over the dancefloor. I’m not an audiophile, so I couldn’t tell you whether this system sounded as good as it looked, or whether there was any “phase cancellation” or anything like that, but it really knocked and made the tunes—especially dub, disco, and house—come alive.
For three days, the roots of electronic dance music were on sent through the Sunflower system in a expertly curated lineup that began with a massive 10-hour B2B set with Floating Points and noted selector and producer Palms Trax, included an isolator workout disco house clinic from the legendary Brooklyn-based DJ Joaquin Joe Claussell, and went on to feature several live performances that, for me, were some of the most foundationally awakening and spiritually moving performances of the entire festival.
Of all the producers and DJs at Dekmantel building a dancefloor with raw, foreign, or hazardous materials, there was something extraordinary about seeing that process happen out in the open. The newly reunited Sabres of Paradise, the house-techno-acid-dub band formed by the late Andrew Weatherall in the early ’90s, is perhaps the most grievous omission from James Murphy’s list in “Losing My Edge.” When bands of a certain age reunite, it can all feel a bit sluggish or labored—not the Sabres. They absolutely slammed, playing dense, dubby songs from their metallic 1994 album, Haunted Dancehall, that showcased the flexibility of the Sunflower system, which was able to handle a Fender bass with ease. If you closed your eyes and forgot about how everyone in the band was wearing these Peaky Blinders flat caps, you could be transported right back to a dizzying night at the Haçienda.
My two most memorable acts of the entire festival also happened on the Greenhouse stage. First, on Saturday, was the Ndagga Rhythm Force, a Senegalese mbalax dub percussion ensemble conducted and manipulated in the shadows by German techno legend Mark Ernestus. Led on stage by the life-giving vocalist Mbene Diatta Seck, the group locked into polyrhythms on an array of traditional sabar hand drums and a small trap kit, while a synth player sent dubby tones swirling around them and Ernestus lurked around the dancefloor, in what I assume was some kind of specific teutonic durag, manipulating the sound in some way beyond what I could see or hear.
Second, on Sunday, also at the Greenhouse stage, was percussionist extraordinaire Valentina Magaletti performing a new piece with the Ugandan drumming ensemble Arsenal Mikebe. Like Ndagga Rhythm Force, this was a conversation between the past and the present, folk music and electronic music, the skin of a drum and the wires of a drum machine. Reaching speeds of 170bpm, the crowd bounced and rocked side to side like they were on a teetering ship in the ocean—or at a proper drum’n’bass set. As the drummers vocalized and chanted into headset mics, a Shepard tone started to creep in above the thunder, spawning from a custom instrument reverse-engineered Roland 808 steel-cast “percussion machine” deployed on stage, and on record, by the Portuguese experimental composer Jonathan Uliel Saldanha.
Since time immemorial, dance music has been about the drum—it is the one instrument that has traveled across civilizations and has been the beating heart of religious ceremonies, weddings, wars, and funerals. Every crate of records or USB stick a DJ carries around is just a transmutation of a drum, and to see the ancestral root of what dance music is—a communal ceremony, a spiritual summoning—on stage at what is nominally a festival where at any given point 50 Rorys are trying to tune in and drop out for a weekend was quite special. To feel the past and present within your body and to feel connected with some other time or place within a scope that feels too vast to comprehend—isn’t that what the best DJ sets are all about?
If it seems all too predictable that an American Pitchfork editor goes to a Dutch techno festival with some of the best DJs working today, only to come back to write about Floating Points’ bespoke sound system, cigarette disposal tactics, and the handful of actual live bands he saw, well, what I don’t know what you expected. “Write your truth,” as they say. And if you think that’s predictable, wait until you get to the end of this sentence, where I mention how amazing Djrum’s headlining set was. Felix Manuel is a magical soundwright. Per usual, he played an all-vinyl set on three Technics and dropped little dub creatures and big bass monsters, bringing the tempo up only to slice it in half and get most of the crowd around me to be miming flicking a frisbee and then throwing up finger guns.
After the festival, a friend added me to a music group chat called “Bngrz Ltd” where the whole conceit is that there is no actual group chatting, just links to “god-tier club tracks” witnessed, played, or imagined—and you can only react with emojis. It’s so elegant because there is a truth beyond words about what a song does on a dance floor. There are shorthands in the dance music community, slang that revolves around war terminology: weapons, bombs, fire, destruction. But while we continue to do the work on finding new non-militarized words to talk about why a song brings a crowd together on the dancefloor, nothing can really top a list of god-tier songs, and a simple recognition that those tracks worked, and they were, indeed bangers. And so here are the great unifiers that I witnessed, Shazamed, and later ID’d at Dekmantel 2025:
Floating Points: Aretha Franklin - “Jump to It”
Eris Drew: A tech-house banger that sampled Aretha Franklin’s “Jump to It”
Djrum: AZ’s verse from the remix of D’Angelo’s “Lady” over some swampy dub
Call Super: The Cure - “The Forest (Edit)”
Mafalda: Di Melo - “Kilario”
Young Marco: “Love on a Real Train - Tangerine Dream (Alex Kassian Edit)”
Hunee: Blancmange - “Blind Vision”
Loidis: DJ Sneak - “Delta Trippin’”
Sasha: Sasha - “Xpander”
Verraco: Joy Orbison - “Hyph Mngo”
Avalon Emerson: Björk - “Big Time Sensuality (The Fluke Magimix)”