Dekmantel São Paulo: "It's a special place to do a festival"

First of all, tell us a little bit about the year so far. The Amsterdam event was really well received and you just launched Selectors, how did that go?

It has been really great to see what we’ve managed to accomplish with the Amsterdam festival in the past four years. We have now reached an ideal size that allows us to put together a respectable production, with accompanying bookings, yet we can still create an atmosphere that feels intimate in a way. And the opening day specifically was an amazing eye opener this year. We added three new venues, and with the concerts programmed there we were really able to further deepen the program and explore all of our musical interests.

And as much as we’ve enjoyed seeing the main festival transform more and more into what we ideally had in mind when starting it, we somehow also felt a strong urge to set-up something slightly different. We thought it would be nice to organize a mini festival as well, where, together with all our friends, we would get to see some of our favorite DJs in a truly idyllic setting. We found the ideal location with The Garden site at the Adriatic coast in Croatia, and looking back the feedback has been overwhelming to say the least. If anything, it has given us even more energy to carry on doing the things we really love.

In a very short space of time you’ve managed to establish a really strong ethos which comes down to amazing artists, great curation and interesting locations. Did you expect things to take off like they have?

That’s an interesting question. Sometimes we try to envision together what we will be doing a couple of years from now. But it always turns out that the simple truth is that we just don’t really have a clue what the future has in store for us. Longterm planning may be useful for some, but for us it works much better to take things as they come and to try and make the best out of what we’re doing in the moment.

What about the releases, you’ve put out a lot this year, what else have you got coming up before the end of 2016?

We’ve without a doubt had the best year ever so far with the label, and we even have a lot more coming up which we can’t wait to have people listen to. It is nice that we’ve found a way to export some of Dekmantel Festival’s characteristics to the label with the Selectors compilation series and the UFO sub-label. And it has been great to put out some of our best releases by old friends and new, talented artists. Starting with Makam’s new album, the next months will see an abundance of key releases by Dutch producers. This is something that we are especially excited about as we’ve known these guys since we all were in our early 20s. It’s amazing to see them do so well, while at the same time we can now be of a real benefit to them with the label.

So you’re launching a festival In São Paulo, Brazil as your next big event. What made you choose Brazil?

This year São Paulo was one of our first destinations with the series of label showcases we did all around the world. The party was amazing, and we spent two weeks extra hanging out with the Gop Tun crew. We had great fun, really got to enjoy the amazing city, but we also found out that we shared a lot of similar interests with these guys. We had an honest and genuine chemistry together, talked about music for hours. Very organically we came up with the idea to do Dekmantel festival in São Paulo. One thing lead to another and on our second trip the guys from Gop Tun showed us a venue that we were instantly sold on. The response on our announcement last Tuesday has been rather enormous and I guess you could say it shows as well that many Paulistanos – and Brazilians in general, for that matter – have been waiting for such a festival for a long time.