MAD MONEGROS

MONEGROS DESERT FESTIVAL

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/7e0a3a_8e6ea5688c4545c1be134a2fab97760f/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

41.5216° N, 0.8739° E

One minute and a half of what felt like perfectly curated, continuous, top-tier techno and its many derivatives, if we have to get technical.

Monegros is a 22-hour non-stop festival that, for over 30 years, has built a temporary city dedicated entirely to music in the middle of the desert in Fraga, Aragón. Ten different stages, each with its own identity, sound and crowd, somehow melt into each other across the desert.

This year, Monegros also joined forces with the well-respected DJ and producer Klangkuenstler, who has been selling out shows around the world with his party OUTWORLD. This edition marked OUTWORLD's first stage at Monegros and its move outside the warehouse, and what better place to do it than the desert?

I decided to start the night at the Face 2 Face stage in Industrial City. One of my main goals was to finally hear Adrian Mills and Cloudy live after countless hours listening to their sets on SoundCloud.

I arrived around 8pm, just as the dancefloor was starting to fill up, and found what became my perfect dancing spot: next to the metal scaffolding that formed part of the stage, with no one directly in front of me or to my right. Enough space to properly dance, important when you know you have the whole night ahead.

My first dance was with Alarico and SHDW. The sun was setting over Industrial City and the weather was almost perfect for dancing. It was warm, occasionally very windy, but the breeze made the whole dancing experience even better. Their chemistry translated directly into the dancefloor: punchy, rhythmic techno that kept everyone moving almost to the same rhythm non-stop.

A little after 10pm, Georgian DJ Yanamaste and the versatile Fumi took over the decks with a more hypnotic sound. Of course, Fumi played one of my favourite songs, Tes Ma We.

By midnight, a surprise F2F. I was buzzing to listen to a set from Serafina and MCR-T, but for some reason the schedule changed. Frederic and MCR-T arrived with something groovier, funkier, a bouncy sound that makes you literally do that "bounce". The now-packed dancefloor was unforgiving; the party was just starting. The set moved perfectly through different rhythms, like pure house, before suddenly throwing in tracks like Alarico's Iruka and MCR-T's own euphoric, gabber-influenced sound, like Buurman Uit Berlijn.

It was exactly the kind of set I needed at midnight: pure dopamine to keep pushing after hours of dancing, but playful enough to remind you that the whole night and morning was still ahead.

After almost five hours of relentless dancing, the moment I had been waiting for finally arrived.

Cloudy and 240's own Adrian Mills opened with their characteristic “probando, probando” before taking the stage into their usual playful madness. Controlled chaos, fast grooves and an immediate crowd response. Everyone around me was dancing their lives out. For many people there, myself included, it became one of the highlights of the night.

But Monegros doesn't really give you time to stay anywhere for too long.

The night was moving fast, but I wanted to move faster. It was time to seriously increase the BPMs, so the next stage was the frenetic UNREAL stage.

It was close to 3am and the stage was completely packed. Dancing started to feel less individual and more like one collective movement, everyone's energy melting together under KUKO's aggressive but emotional sound.

The desert had been completely taken over by the night. It was getting colder by the minute.

I made it to the front row of The Dome, curated by Awakenings, where SHDW was playing again, this time in an immaculate intergenerational B2B with Ben Klock.

I only stayed for around half an hour, but the collective energy was captivating. They built tension slowly and hypnotically, layering textures while keeping the pacing almost immaculate. It felt like a dialogue between techno's past and present.

Leaving was difficult, but Klangkuenstler was about to start.

So I headed towards the brand-new OUTWORLD stage, catching the last few minutes of Dax J and Daria Kolosova's ferocious, raw set before 5am finally arrived.

The moment a lot of people had been waiting for.

Klangkuenstler.

For two hours, his pounding, frenetic schranz took over my entire body. I genuinely couldn't stop dancing. But beyond the thunderous sound, what made the set memorable was looking around and seeing the entire crowd moving together while the sun slowly started to rise over the desert. Without any doubt, it was the most musically magical, memorable sunrise I have ever experienced, and I've had like 10 thousand sunrises already.

Fire explosions warmed the Monegrinos through the colder early-morning hours. Lights, smoke, metal structures, people dancing with their eyelashes and clothes completely covered in dust, and pounding schranz transformed the desert into a scene straight out of Mad Max when daylight arrived.

As I headed out of OUTWORLD, I got seduced by the unmistakable Ibiza-style groove of Joseph Capriati at Techno Catedral. Sadly, I couldn't stay longer as I was heading to UNREAL Stage again. This time for Spain's finest, Fátima Hajji. Of course, energetic from the beginning. Her hard-hitting kicks mixed perfectly with the dance-pop anthem Where Have You Been and the iconic makina classic Atlantis.

7:30am. My phone vibrating in the pocket of my tiny True Religion shorts reminded me I still had more than four hours of dancing ahead, so it was time to fuel up. Lucky for me, the food stands were in front of the Awakenings stage, so I got lucky enough to hear one of the defining funky-house anthems of the 2000s, The Weekend by Michael Gray, and immediately realised Fumi was playing the last minutes of her second set at Monegros.

The queue, as you can expect after a long night of dancing, was huge, but I was completely fine with that, as not only did I get those extra minutes of Fumi, I also got to dance to the opening of the set of the favourite DJ of your favourite DJ, Mister DJ Pepo.

Couldn't leave Monegros without stopping at Techno Catedral for Amelie Lens and a bit of her signature hypnotic, driving, high-intensity techno.

Sadly for me, my energy levels were descending faster than I expected, so I decided it was my time to go. On my way out and without planning it, I ended up again where everything began for me, at the Face 2 Face stage at Industrial City, where one of the key figures of Spain's makina scene, Buenri, and Aragón's own Andrés Campo were closing the stage with a good dose of old-school Spanish bakalao energy to the desert.

As I was walking through the desert, completely exhausted but still in absolute awe of the music and the experience I'd just had, I could hear the desert still roaring in the distance as Héctor Oaks started one of Monegros' two closing sets. For the first time this year, Monegros had two simultaneous closings: Héctor Oaks at OUTWORLD and Detroit techno icon Richie Hawtin at Techno Catedral.