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

What about the location? You mentioned it being like a concrete jungle, what sort of venues and spaces can we expect? Will you be hosting day and night events?

Yes, we’ll be doing two days and two nights. The day venue is called the Jockey Club and it’s a hippodrome in the Western part of São Paulo. The buildings were founded in the late 19^th century but they have that typical late 30s Brazilian chic quality. Combined with the greenery surrounding the site it makes for a pretty special place to be doing a festival!

Fabriketa, where we will do the night programs is very different. It’s an old factory in the district of Bras and it has a very raw feeling to it, we will be using the open-air courtyard on both nights.

Do you have any ideas about capacity and pricing? Will it be an affordable and easily-accessible event for people in Brazil?

I think we always try to be reasonably priced across all of our events. In terms of capacity, it’s important, especially in the first year and at a new location, to keep everything as intimate as possible, so we’re aiming for just 4000 people a day (which is almost the same as the first edition of the festival in Amsterdam). From there we’ll take things step-by-step as we always do.

Without revealing too much will the line-up be similar to the other events? The mix of Dekmantel affiliates and big house and techno names has always worked well. Will there be more of a focus on Brazilian artists.

One of the reasons we fell in love with São Paulo, is of course the Brazilian music culture. We’re all big fans of all the older music, so you'll find Hermeto Pascoal and Azymuth on the line-up as proof for this, but we also got to know the talented local scene. Next to that we’re really happy that big names as Nicolas Jaar, Jeff Mills, Nina Kraviz, and Moodymann are joining us for this first edition and of course we also brought a couple of label artists like Palms Trax, Young Marco, and Fatima Yamaha.

Is there anything else that you’ll be doing to support the local community or to particularly engage with the local scene?

During the festival in São Paulo we’ll be of course collaborating with local artists, musicians and promoters. We want to give talent a chance on our festival and we want to give music from the older days a place as well. I think it’s going to be a great marriage.

Dekmantel São Paulo takes place in February 2017. Info and tickets here