What We Thought of ZoukOut 2014
PUBLISHED December 16th, 2014 07:00 pm | UPDATED May 18th, 2020 04:31 pm
We’re still (shamefully) recovering from ZoukOut 2014, which everyone knows happened last weekend. You’d also know by now that the annual dance fest on the beach attracted the largest turnout in its 14-year history of 50,000 festival-goers – it definitely felt like there were that many people across both nights.
The Awesome
Although the crowd was immense, the organizers definitely get a thumbs-up from us because the human traffic flow was smooth, albeit a little slow at peak periods. Along the way, you could also see how big the festival has grown international, with people toting their flags – we spied Japan, South Korea, Germany, Thailand, and even the Netherlands.
ZoukOut 2014 is also one of the best festival productions we’ve seen, and that helps (more than you think it does) in keeping the energy level of the crowd high. The visuals and effects (pyrotechnics, laser beams, and confetti blasters amongst others) were amazing all-round, period.
The lineup this year was stellar – especially for the huge electronic dance music fans – and the DJs who had us jumping on Day 1 were Dutch triple threat Dannic, W & W, and Nicky Romero. The latter is the only DJ I’ve heard live, and this was at the Spring Awakening Music Festival in Chicago last year. He’s certainly improved by leaps and bounds! Admittedly, we entered the festival grounds a lot later on Day 2, but again, Dutch DJs Showtek and (18 year-old) Martin Garrix showed us a very good time.
If you stayed till the end of Steve Aoki’s set the first day, you’d have caught Nicky Romero crowd surfing on an inflatable raft – priceless.
The Not So Good
You might disagree but our only major beef was that 1.5-hour sets are too long. Bigger events like Ultra Music Festival or Tomorrowland either limit their sets to an hour or offer 1.5-hour long sets solely to the headliners. We did sense quite a lot of people getting restless in the middle and people kept streaming in and out of the crowd.
As for the acts, English trance trio Above & Beyond and Steve Angello were disappointing because we were really looking forward to them playing. The former started strong but faltered less than three-quarters into the performance, and the ex Swedish House Mafia member just wasn’t up to the standards we’ve set listening to his other festival sets on Youtube.
Overall, our virgin (yes, don’t judge) experience of ZoukOut went a lot better than expected. We’re glad that this isn’t the last festival ever; let’s just leave it at that.
Written by Emily S
