Armin van Buuren @ Venue Thessaloniki Greece ( 9th of March 2005 )

This past Saturday I went to Armin van Buuren’s set in my homecity of Thessaloniki at club Venue. I had great expectations for this show. There are about a handfull of DJ’s that I enjoy and on my top spot lies Armin.
The first letdown of the show was that Armin appeared around 4:30 in the morning after a quite dissapointing DJ that played some 180 Bpms of craaaaap right before Armin’s set thus giving Armin a much faster pace to start with. Secondly the club’s soundsystem was clearly setup for techno and hardcore ‘whatever’ that seems to be popular in my country only. The bass and the kick were loud as f%&k and you could only hear about 10% of the melody. The thing that makes trance so great is the melody that follows the rhythm and clearly NOT the extreme and pointless fast repetitive bass. Strike three was the people in the club. It seems to me that trance is kept alive in my city by high school dropouts but on the verge of being extremely caustic for no reason I might leave this argument as it is.
On the bright side I have to say that Armin was a real sport. He would sign all the autographs he was requested, he would constantly smile for the camera and he would not stop dancing while he was playing his tunes. If only we could actually hear what he was playing. It’s a shame we are only relying in two clubs in my city for our trance needs and we always seem to get twisted versions of hardcore and techno parties. No worries for me though, I listen to Armin’s show every week and I get much more than my weekly trance fix.
Thanks Armin for dropping by but I must admit I enjoyed the last time ( at club decadence couple of years back ) a whole lot more.. I hope to see you again in my city, this time with a well setup sound system..