20 years of Cocoon

The opening party of Cocoon Ibiza, 2016. Up on a VIP balcony inside Amnesia crammed with friends and Cocoon family, Sven Väth grabs two glasses of champagne and clambers over the back of a sofa, exchanging hugs and hellos along the way, to offer one to Mixmag. Marking his 35th year as a DJ and 20 years of his creation, he has plenty to celebrate. “I get nervous before the opening party,” he says, “But also super excited. I’m a DJ, of course, but I’m also the company owner, the promoter. We give our best and we want to have success. We want to make people happy.” Below us the club is pretty much full even at this early (for Ibiza) hour. Ilario Alicante, one of Cocoon’s brightest stars, is lighting up the main room with tracks like the KiNK remix of Sven’s ‘Accident In Paradise’, while Dixon weaves his web in the terrace. It’s the first of 19 weeks of parties at a club that holds more than 5,000. Add the dozens of festivals, club nights and arenas this summer, from Tokyo to Temple Newsam in Leeds, and that’s a lot of happy people.

Naturally, Cocoon – booking agency (renamed ‘Flash Artist Booking’ in 2014), record label and global events company – started with a party. The first use of the Cocoon name was for a 1996 rave in an industrial building called the Alte Brauerei in Frankfurt. On the bill were Sven, DJ Hell, Underworld, Alter Ego, the Advent and more. Talida Wegener, who started out doing Sven’s bookings in 1994 and would become a key figure alongside Sven in the growth of the organisation before leaving in 2009, remembers it well. “There were acrobats swinging across the dancefloor, stiltwalkers, people hanging from the walls, it was very high-end, everyone who was there loved it.” Unfortunately there weren’t quite enough people there. “We lost a lot of money!” she says. “An event that size, normally you would do promotion, marketing, you’d get a sponsor, but Sven disagreed – he didn’t want anyone compromising the passion, the realness. And he was convinced that if he just called up all his friends the night would be full!”

Even pre-Cocoon, Sven Väth was already Germany’s biggest ever DJ, a pop star thanks to smash euro hit ‘Electrica Salsa’ and famed throughout Europe thanks to his regular radio shows, DJing, his labels Harthouse and Eye Q and his first club, Frankfurt’s Omen, which opened in 1988. “Back in ’93, when I was 17, we would drive all the way from Sweden to see him play,” recalls Adam Beyer, now a regular at Cocoon events all over the world. After the overreach of the first party, Sven went back to playing the Omen for a while, but in the meantime the brand was spreading its wings. “The motivation was first to start events,” says Sven, “but with events came the idea of supporting artists, creating a platform with Cocoon bookings, using my contacts and my experience in my job, supporting young talent and featuring them at parties”. Soon Cocoon was signing up not just the cream of German and European DJing talent, but handing European bookings for US stars from Josh Wink to Carl Craig. Today the Cocoon roster includes British artists like Eats Everything, Tim Green and Subb-an alongside the likes of Wink, Frank Lorber and Dana Ruh. By 1998, licensing problems had shut down the Omen and Sven was throwing monthly Cocoon nights for a couple of thousand people in Frankfurt’s U60 club. That’s when the call came in that would change everything, and eventually catapult Cocoon to its current place as perhaps the most famous techno party in the world.

“Back in the days when I started with Cocoon,” recalls Sven, “I said ‘One day I want to realise my dream and make it a dream come true in Ibiza’. I had the feeling I had to give something back to the place, to the island. That was my motivation at the time.” Ten years after his first Ibiza gig at Ku (now Privilege) Sven was asked by Martin Ferrer, son of the owner of Amnesia, to host four parties at the club over the summer of 1999. Sven invited Richie Hawtin to play what would be only his second gig on the Island alongside Ricardo Villalobos, an old friend of Sven’s from Frankfurt. It was the heyday of UK superclubbing on Ibiza, with nights like Manumission, Cream and Gatecrasher: “Through the 90s the club scene in Ibiza was dominated by the English super-clubs,” says Sven, “and the music became really cheesy. Cocoon was a reaction to that – to try to recapture the spirit of the club life on the Island that I’d first fallen in love with.” The music was hard, and sometimes as fast as 142bpm. On Monday nights, it competed with the king of Ibiza, Manumission, and there are echoes of that first night in Frankfurt as only locals (who got in free) and a few hundred Germans and die-hard techno fans turned up. At the final party, Sven played to 150 people ’til 10am.

“I used to say to Sven that he was like a motor boat,” remembers Talida, “and we were like a paddle boat, trying to keep up with his ideas and his vision”. A few years later, Ibiza, and dance music, finally caught up with Cocoon. “I remember staying at Richie Hawtin’s villa about 2003, 2004,” says Adam Beyer. “Listening to two hundred new, obscure records he bought in the Kompakt store in Germany. Ricardo was staying as well. We’d go to Cocoon, and the afterparty at the house would last until the Tuesday or Wednesday, one time until the Thursday, just listening to interesting records from the little labels in Germany.” Beyer calls the interface of Richie’s new sound and the platform afforded by Sven’s Cocoon “a perfect synergy” as the music at Cocoon, the first proper techno party on the island, started to reflect the new, sexier techno.

“Suddenly the music was warm again,” Luciano told Mixmag a few years ago. “Where techno had been hard sounds, straight square and cold, now it was warm. It wasn’t about dark rooms with just a strobe and hard sounds, but something you could play in Ibiza in the afternoon, and that changes how people feel and dress… you want to bring out colour, you see faces smiling. And girls like that very much. It changes the attitude, and the changed attitude changes the music in turn.”

With Amnesia’s (then) open-air terrace, its creativity in production and design, uncompromising yet open-minded music policy, afterparty culture, and talent like Richie, Ricardo and Sven, Cocoon was perfectly placed to nurture, amplify and surf the wave of the hottest new development in dance music as techno became first ‘minimal’, then made an epochal shift to warmer, slower, sexier sounds. By 2003 the whole terrace was programmed around Ricardo and everyone from Mr C to John Digweed would be on the dancefloor. “I remember my first time coming to the island and seeing the flyers for Sven’s parties,” says Carl Craig, who mixed the new Cocoon Ibiza compilation with Sonja Moonear: “The star painted around his eye, like an updated version of one of Kiss! It put personality into techno, creatively and visually.”

Since that year, Cocoon Ibiza has never looked back. In 2001 Johannes Goller became head of the Ibiza team, having previously flyered for the club and driven DJs around the island. “What we have on a Monday is so unique,” he says. “There’s always a group of five or six hundred people from the island, they all know each other, they all know where to find each other on the dancefloor so sometimes me and Sven will be standing in the DJ booth, scanning the dancefloor and we’ll see the Italian group, the Swiss group; there are the Argentinians and there’s our friends from the first parties, the regulars.” The club changed Ibiza: in 2016 there are dozens of techno nights, from Onyx at Space to Music On to Circo Loco, while Cocoon’s opening up of musical horizons has broadened the depth and range of all the music played, from Jamie Jones’ Paradise to Do Not Sleep and Fuse.

Of course, it hasn’t all been plain sailing. At times the club has been a victim of its own success. An afterpary on Talamanca beach attracted 4,500 people back in 2004: “they were parking their cars two miles away and walking in,” says Johannes. “The police turned up by boat as they couldn’t get close by car, and they didn’t tell us to stop, they told us to keep going. They said, ‘If you stop this party now the road will collapse!” At other times the volatile political atmosphere that surrounds the Ibizan authorities’ love/hate relationship with the clubs has made life difficult: in 2006 they were told that the closing party had to finish at 6am, although the club could re-open at 8am using the next day’s licence: Johannes and Sven solved it

by telling 5,000 people go to the car park, broadcasting Sven DJing on their car radios and giving out free food and drink for two hours. At 8am they piled in again for Luciano, Richie and Ricardo. In 2007, 72 hours before the opening party, the whole production had to be moved across the road to Privilege after Amnesia was closed down for a month. And while Sven and co are proud of their influence on the island, it clearly saddens him that some of the DJs they gave a first Ibiza residency to and even introduced to the island have split, sometimes acrimoniously, to start competing nights. “I saw all my babies were growing out of their children’s shoes and wanted to go their own way,” he says. “I’m not friends with all of them any more because some were very rude. They didn’t say goodbye properly, or in a good way.”

While Ibiza was taking off Sven was powering ahead with more plans, more dreams. In 2004 he opened a purpose-built 1,500-capacity club in Frankfurt with a Michelin-starred restaurant attached that remains perhaps the finest temple ever built to techno in history. “It was so futuristic, the main room was like a spaceship,” says tINI, the German DJ who has become an Ibiza icon with her tINI & The Gang parties, and mixed last year’s Cocoon Ibiza compilation with Dana Ruh. “It was a masterpiece,” says Talida. Unfortunately the club only lasted until 2012, eventually trying to make up money by compromising with hip hop and commercial nights before finally going into administration. “The same thing happened as with the very first event. People couldn’t believe it when they got there, that it was built for them. ‘Can I sit here? Can I touch this?’ Maybe it was too good.” A statement announcing its closure made it clear that Sven hadn’t been involved in its day-to-day running.

Fortunately, other areas of Cocoon were thriving. In 2000 Sven launched Cocoon Recordings with ‘Cocoon Compilation A’ and ‘The Sound Of The First Season’ mixed by Sven himself. Since then the label has flourished as a place not only for regular, stunning compilations, but also as a platform (that word again) for discovering new talent. “It’s my label,” says Sven, “so I said, ‘No compromises. I’ll just do what I want to do’. It’s very exciting and satisfying, signing up new artists like Ricardo Tobar. His album [‘Collection’] was one of the best of last year.”

The label ranges far and wide across electronic music, and DJs have varying views on what unites them. Adam Beyer has a theory: “The best word is ‘organic’. By that I mean a journey – every track with a start and an end, melodies and emotions, more like live jams compared to other labels. I think that’s down to the way that Sven DJs – he likes to play full songs. Let the music speak, that’s his style.” Richie Hawtin agrees: “Sven has always supported music that tells a story; songs that have a narrative and take people on a deep, euphoric, melody-induced trip. This characteristic runs strong in all Sven’s sets, and the releases on Cocoon.” Ilario enjoys the freedom that the label allows. “When I do tracks I send to Edgar the label manager and he listens together with Sven, then they decide whether to release them. [They don’t tell me to change things]… I’m free to do whatever I want, normally even choose the remixers as well, which is really important to me.”

So here we are in 2016, Cocoon’s empire stretching across the globe. “The event department tells me this is their strongest year yet, looking at the number of events and also the variety of territories,” says Maurizio Schmitz, who took over from Talida as Sven’s exclusive agent in winter 2009/spring 2010. “This year we had the eighth edition of Cocoon in the Park in Leeds, residencies like Watergate in Berlin and Tomorrowland; we did Cocoon in Australia recently. We have a residency in Tokyo at Womb and festival stages all over the world, from Europe to Dubai, Australia and South America. At Sónar we do a Cocoon event and we have two other shows in Spain; in Italy we are really strong. In England we have Studio 338, we did Fabric and Electric Brixton. We are on every continent except Africa.” More happy people, more parties, a bigger platform for artists and DJs who share the Cocoon philosophy. But what is that philosophy? What’s the golden thread that has kept Cocoon surviving and thriving for two decades now?

“It’s about music,” says Luciano. “it’s about Sven, it’s about sharing, it’s about love, it’s about the experience, it’s about a musical genre and a musical philosophy.”

“A cocoon is a protective covering that envelopes and protects a creature while it grows and develops,” offers Josh Wink. “And perhaps Cocoon and Sven’s philosophy is that his brand envelopes and provides for a like-minded colony of creatures that are symbiotic and share a special musical bond and experience.”

“I’d say Cocoon is a lifestyle, says Maurizio. “Cocoon is a certain platform, a certain possibility. Everybody has the chance to express themselves: it could be an artist from the agency, it could be someone who’s working for Cocoon, but most of all it’s the people who join the party. We want people to express themselves, to be free, to live this experience.”

“Sven’s philosophy for Cocoon,” says Johannes, “is to create a platform for everyone to create our own metamorphoses. Without the possibilities that Sven gave me, I would still be a butcher somewhere in Germany. It’s the same for so many young artists. He gave us the platform to be creative, to start our own metamorphoses.”

The main man should, of course, have the last word. “We know what we do comes straight out of our heart, full-on, with our passion,” he explains. “The music is always the driving force in what we do because we all love to rave, we all love to dance, we all love to go wild – but we also want to deliver. We want to show people what we can do, to show them all this at its best.” And with that he finishes his champagne and bounds off to play his DJ set, ‘super-excited’, as always, to do just that.

Duncan Dick is Mixmag's Editor. Follow him on Twitter here

Carl Craig and Sonja Moonear’s two-disc Cocoon Ibiza mix is out now