100% independent: Why Draaimolen isn’t your average dance music festival

It’s a late-summer Thursday, the day before 13,000 people descend on Tilburg's MOB Complex, a forested area on the outskirts of the city which formerly served as a mobilisation complex for the Dutch army. During the Cold War, these complexes were built all over the Netherlands to aid their war efforts. The location criteria: near a main road, remote from habitation, and hidden by woods, happens to be the perfect place to throw a rave. I’m chilling in the backstage area for staff, sunken into a beige, plushy sofa. There's an open fire pit cooking up barbecued meats, another area grilling veggies and serving fresh watermelon. In walks Maya Bouldry-Morrison, the DJ and producer Octo Octa, scruffy-kneed and clutching a shovel. She stacks a paper plate with slices of watermelon and marches off, back to the Forest stage that she’s curating with her partner Eris Drew. Both are internationally touring DJs with gruelling summer schedules, so it begs the question–what the hell is Octo Octa doing with a shovel?

“Truly, it’s an important anchor for what’s going on in our lives. We love it and appreciate it and appreciate everyone involved in it,” Octo Octa says of their relationship with the festival. “It’s one of the most important things we do every year.” Eris concurs. Maya and Eris have been curating the Forest Rave stage at Draaimolen for three years now. But here’s the thing, they’re not just curating it, they’re in there, getting their hands dirty, helping to build it. They’ve even gone to the hardware store themselves for extra concrete blocks to stabilise the turntables. And they brought their own sound tech to “wrangle” the wall of the L-Acoustics speakers that expand outwards from the shack-like booth. It’s all about the details.

Draaimolen isn’t your average dance music festival. One crucial reason, that’s not often talked about, is they don’t work with sponsors; they’re completely independent and not-for-profit. But what does this mean to the average punter? Well…when you frolic around the woods of the MOB Complex, there’s no Coca-Cola or Red Bull logos plastered anywhere. “As an organisation, they prioritise the artistic quality of the festival above everything else,” says Sjoerd Oberman, DJ Oberman and head of the label Nous’klaer Audio, who curates Draaimolen’s Aura stage, “[having] no branding is a hard decision, but it’s really special. If you're here for two days, you're almost brainwashed in a very positive way.”

It’s normal to see an artist or collective do a takeover or livestream from a festival. At Draaimolen, they invite a bunch of artists to curate stages which are all billed separately and have their own individual line-up posters–which is less common. Eris and Maya are in The Forest, Nous’klaer are at Aura, there’s KI/KI on STR/OBE and Blawan and Pariah at The Pit. The Chapel and The Tunnel are the only stages curated solely by Draaimolen. This collaborative approach allows unique worlds to exist within the festival, aided by careful stage placement and quality soundsystems with no sound bleeding between areas. It follows a similar principle to old free party raves, where different soundsystems would rock up and share their music, albeit this one has significantly sharper production value and a door tax.

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It all started back in 2013. After years of travelling around Europe to catch his favourite DJs, founder Milo van Buijtene decided to start something in his hometown, Tilburg. As an organisation Draaimolen hosts three main events across the year: the festival in September, Holy Pink in July to celebrate Tilburg pride and then Draaimolen Island in May (this year in collaboration with Sustain Release). The first Draaimolen festival happened in 2014 with van Buijtene and three friends, who all worked side jobs to make ends meet. The first edition was 3,000 people, but by 2015 they moved to a forested location, Charlotte Oord, and hosted 9,000 people there. This former location is now a Decathlon, along with other industrial units and car dealerships around it. The festival’s current home, MOB Complex, is directly over the road; a little green oasis safely tucked away from encroaching capitalism and commercialisation.

Our Friday starts down at the Aura stage, where Polar Inertia performs live for four hours. Although the sky is overcast, ther are some people sitting down or lying on the grass – one guy sat legs spread doing some yoga stretches–others standing, swaying; all calmly embracing the experience as a collective. There was one punter – already thrashing around in front of a sub – who may have raised some eyebrows at any other festival, but at Draaimolen it’s a different vibe; as one onlooker endearingly put it “ohh! he really wants to feel it!”. The crowd at Draaimolen feels like a gathering of music lovers (dare I say, a meeting of the heads) which, thankfully, doesn’t feel chin-scratchy either. Those who attended Draaimolen last year may have recognised the glass boxes perched in Aura’s corners. Designed by Lumus Instruments, the boxes were suspended above ravers at The Tunnel last year. They fill with smoke and, with strobes shot through, are meant to resemble a thunderstorm inside. Now at Aura, the installation, entitled Entropy, gently comes to life alongside Polar Inertia’s set, which aptly unravels like a storm that gathers out at sea, lets rip when it breaks land, and eventually gives way to glorious sun.

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The music offering at Draaimolen is such that on both days, at any given moment, you are searching for ways to teleport, multiply or divide yourself. One of Friday’s biggest conundrums – besides the closing set clash nightmare – is the toss up between Mancuanian MC and artist Chunky at Blawan and Pariah’s The Pit or Astrid Sonne’s new live show at The Chapel. After some strained consideration, the latter takes the biscuit. Sonne put out a stunning album back in January which saw the Danish composer switch gears into singer-songwriting territory. Sonne’s command of the stage is impressive, backdropped by a mirror installation that reflects and refracts the wires and amps that surround her into a topsy-turvy, Camera Obscura-style puzzle. She effortlessly croons through personal album favourites like ‘Gave My All’ and ‘Staying Here’. With the mic she moves between centre stage and a table just behind, laden with her electronic gear. Sometimes she twiddles and sings at the same time, other times she brandishes her viola with a number of knock out solos.

Live sets are of parallel importance to DJ sets at Draaimolen and that part of the festival truly shines on Friday. In general, The Chapel has a femme-forward running order, with Upsammy and Valentina Magaletti into Astrid Sonne into LUXE, who presents her live show in collaboration with an amateur choir from Tilburg; the first time they ever performed together was in sound check the day before. Just a short stroll up the mud-track at STR/OBE – effectively the festival’s big main stage – Kikelomo and Berlin-based choir A Song For You present a fully choreographed performance that draws on joyous house classics like Roy Davis Jr and Peven Everett’s ‘Gabriel’. Over at The Tunnel, Underground Resistance (with Mark Flash and Mike Banks) make their return to the Netherlands. It’s always a treat to hear the classic’s belted out live on hardware. Their choice to close with the twinkling, always effervescent ‘Jaguar’ is the cherry on the cake.

Draaimolen takes on a whole new shape on Saturday; it’s a much deeper trip. Once again, the day starts at Aura which feels almost ritualistic, even in a two-day festival. There are many similar faces around as Mama Snake and Martinou gently creep through four hours of minimalistic cuts under the blazing sun. Draaimolen is by now known for the back-to-back sets they pull together, but this one in particular was less about bringing two interesting people together and more about switching up the format; giving established artists, who would usually play a closing set, the chance to do a warm-up. This opportunity allows Mama Snake's lesser heard minimal side to shine (a side we’d love to hear more often). Eletun Selona’s ‘Safe’, played by Martinou, sets a poignant start for the day with the vocalist repeating “I’m safe / maybe I’m safe?” over a neat groove and deep chords.

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Donato Dozzy plays twice at Draaimolen this year; a credit to the relationships the team build with artists who want (and even need) to return year on year. On Friday, he went into turbo mode at The Pit with a 90-minute sprint of drum’n’bass, jungle and dubstep, peppered with a brief psytrance moment for good measure. Come Saturday, he meets his friend and now-label partner Neel at The Tunnel to perform as Voices From The Lake. The two make stunning ambient techno together, but this year Draaimolen asked them for a special full-power techno set. For me their ambient techno is a place I go to for headspace – to zone out/in. Their full-power techno brings that same level of headspace to a pumping dancefloor context, devoid of any formulaic build-and-drop format. Their build ups instead expand or swerve onto new planes, and it was in those pockets of expansion that headspace existed. By the end they land on markedly different terrain to where they started. Their two-hour playtime felt like four. It reduced me to tears.

Prior to this, the winding, sometimes snarling psychedelic techno of Japan’s DJ Maria finds a wonderful counterbalance with the bouncy-yet-tough proggy lean of Oceanic in their b2b. Kia follow, which completed the collective warm-up of dreams and a smart piece of programming that left me feeling musically fulfilled with five-hours of festival still to go. A wander via The Forest Rave to catch the end of CCL and onwards to Aura, however, threatened to overflow my cup. Arriving at Aura, it feels like the deep hours of a rave in some nondescript forest clearing. Dancers are locked as Oberman and Aaron J play on a similarly psychedelic tip to The Tunnel.

At Draaimolen, there’s always an element of surprise. There’s unannounced acts, art and light installations that you really need to see to believe and of course, secret B2Bs (or B3Bs in the case of this year with KI/KI, SPFDJ and Special Request together on Friday.) This year’s biggest surprise was found tucked away in the ditch of an old firefighting pond: the secret stage. Here it felt as if Draaimolen set themself an extra special challenge–let’s see how far we can push the production within the festival’s smallest space.

Bumbling down its steep dirt path on Saturday, I peer up to see a long pointed beard and a pair of thin round specs behind the decks. This is not a wizard, it’s Vladimir Ivkovic. He plays b2b with ISAbella, which brings out the less pumping parts of her collection. It’s impossible to separate the selections as they form a perfect match. Perched on one of the surrounding banks, the lasers feel tangible as they engulf the huddle of ravers below, all bobbing along, bathed in the luscious low-end of Addit Audio’s 3-D printed soundsystem, which gathers in the basin like warm water. In a festival which actually misses its cosy spaces, the very existence of this magical hidey-hole encourages people at Draaimolen to scratch beneath the surface. A life-lesson we could all do with being reminded of once in a while – if you look closer and deeper, who knows what wonderful things you will find.

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Sophie McNulty is a freelance writer, follow them on Twitter