Sunburn Release party: Marco V at the Blue Frog!

Sunburn fever is officially back as the whole country gets ready to envelope the music aficionado, the casual Goa reveler and their favourite step sibling — the bhelpuri in a melting pot of the best EDM that the country sees annually. Kicking off the tour at the Blue Frog with the lineup announcement was the massive Marco V with Shaan (yes), and Lost Stories (new and improved and how!).

With a weird concentric three-frame setup at the stage instead of the huge LEDs from last year — it looked disconcerting at first, but the moment they put the massive projector on, it was a surreal visual.

Rishab on the decks for Lost Stories was in a hurried mood as he banged his ‘opener set’ with great bigroom house hits and mashes by the dozen. Their new single ‘Roshni’,  SVD’s ‘Koko’ with a Hard Rock Sofa mash, ‘KNAS Coming Home’ and others in the same vein lit the bloody place up. Vigorous dancing had ensued and it’s great that LS could just let loose and forget the 128BPM fare that openers should contribute to the star DJ. Marco just starts on another spectrum of the gearbox and no matter how hard you’ll bang it — he’ll just wham it harder.

Starting with an unreleased track in ‘Rokker’ by himself, the volume is just exponential. Not just the decibels but the sheer energy bundled in every synth. Those kicks are just thicker, quicker on the high 138s, it’s so brisk- you’re dancing on a treadmill and so is your mind, it’s exhaustingly good. A ‘Dido- Thank You’ sample later, Marco’s shiny white hands unleash a flurry of some hard trance/tech trance one after the other — he’s mixing them so quickly you’re barely at one breakdown that a new build-up’s punching you in the gut. He suddenly breaks it down with Dominik de Leon and Gum Me’s ‘Awake’ with a ‘Push the Tempo’ sample, it gets breakbeaty on the breakdown and is quite electrifying.

The non-vocals take a bit of backseat at this stage as he brings in the hauntingly doped voice of Calvin Harris with ‘Feels So Close’, followed by the infectious ‘Morgan Page, Sultan, Ned Shepard, BT Feat. Angela McCluskey - In The Air (Hard Rock Sofa Remix)’—that tech-heavy quickish bassline keeping the treadmill on 13 syndrome awake and how! Filtering the slightly thinning crowd at this point, he brought all of them back by dropping the evergreen ‘Rapture’ in the Tristan Garner mix, allowing some of his bigroom sounds back in the set.

‘Reaver’ then comes in quick succession with ‘A Million Stars’ making a cameo—everyone sang it—we’ve much to thank Sultan for embedding the collective imagination of India with that one.

Marco V senses by now the vocals are doing it for him, as he unleashed more in ‘Unprepared’ and his treatment of The Killers’ ‘Mr. Brightside’. It’s one of his FINEST bootlegs and available for free download on his Soundcloud page. That brooding kick drum, with a scintillating riff—melodic as hell synths dancing on the build-ups. Everybody was singing at this point…a first all-hands-in-the-sky moment of the night.

‘Sonique vs Marco V It Feels so Booty (Marco V bootleg)’, Marcel Woods—Advanced (Marco V mix) (Best track of the night, HANDS down—its so dark, so evil, you can’t help but dance a little sluttily) and Nadia Ali, Starkillers & Alex Kenji – Pressure (Alesso Remix) soon followed soon after.

Marco is a true legend of the game, and you can tell how Sander van Doorn is so inspired by him (rates him as his favourite DJ of all time), the sheer monumentality of his set is hard to compare with. Most DJs work in peaks and troughs, taking the crowd a little high a little low, technically working the game. Marco on the other hand is subtly more aggressive than that.

The BPM is always high, the moment someone seems to come off the hook—the vocals bring them back—and there isn’t a single track that lets you sway, or float—you are constantly punching the air, gyrating violently and making a true nuisance of yourself. There’s no point discussing his mixing, you can’t tell a single intro from an outro and it happens so fast, its quicksilver smooth.

Ours ears are ringing, legs are watery jelly. But who cares? We probably lost a good kilogram and half in there.