How Marco Carola and Music On conquered Ibiza

Ibiza, Friday evening, and the island is taking in a slow belly full of breath in preparation for the weekend marathon. In the holiday apartments of San Antonio and Play d'En Bossa, make-up is applied, drinks poured, pick-ups made. At the airport, the final arrivals of the day grab bags from carousels while a few hundred yards away the final private jets for the evening unload passengers with dreams of red lasers in their eyes. Whether you work on Wall Street or San An's Sunset Strip, tonight is all about Music On.

Spearheaded by Italian megastar DJ Marco Carola, from its beginning in 2012 Music On has been widely agreed by industry insiders to be one of the island's top four busiest nights. No easy feat, considering the fiercely competitive Balaeric game of thrones that the island has become.

"Ibiza is a dog eat dog competition," entrepreneur Abel Matutes Junior, the son of the wealthiest club owner on the island, recently told tourism industry magazine 02B. Nowhere is that competition fiercer than on the island's club scene. Many parties have come and gone in the three years Music On has held its hugely successful residency at Amnesia. But tonight, like on every other night, Music On is a feeding frenzy for thousands of techno fans.

By 4am in the club, island favourite tINI is laying down a tough, all-enveloping set of quality tech-house to a packed floor. The lights flash blue around the room as the crowds pack onto the terrace awaiting the star of the show. At the back of the booth Carola, clad all in black, head and face freshly shaved, whispers orders in the ears of the production team. "Marco's kind of shy," explains Hector, fast- rising star and new Music On resident for 2015. "he's a little reserved and quiet but once you get to know him he's a really nice guy." With megastardom has come caution: these days Marco's become reluctant to speak face to face, preferring to answer questions
by email and avoid controversy.

In 2011, Richie Hawtin described him as a one of kind. "He used to come to our afterparties, he never played, he never even asked, he just listened and afterwards he'd make everyone incredible pasta. One day he stopped making pasta and asked to play, and that was the beginning of the Marco we know today."

As ever, tonight Marco is watching the world around him intently. As he takes to the decks at Amnesia the expectation in the air is so intense it almost has its own taste. A bouncer bundles a party of VIPs into the booth while the steps surrounding it swell to capacity. Every conceivable space is full, from the huge football pitch-sized dancefloor to the upstairs VIP areas that surround it like a modern day raving Collosseum.

As he plays his first track, the lights change from blue to red, the signature colour of Music On, and lasers bathe the room while the volume suddenly turns up to a chest crushing level. It's an old rock 'n' roll trick taken to heart by the big brand DJs: the boss always gets to play loudest.

As he begins to lay down the foundation to his set the energy of the room notches up a level. Marco isn't one for fist-pumping or Jesus poses. Instead he lays down one bass-heavy tech-house groove after the next. His gaze is firmly fixed on the middle distance, his expressionless face focussed on the crowd in front.

At home his selections might sound sparsely produced but on the big system of Amnesia they take on a whole new meaning. Claps and snares go from dry cracks to thundering crashes thanks to the cavernous room's natural reverb and punishingly loud soundsystem. It's made all the more climactic thanks to the Traktor effects and controller and guitar pedal at Marco's disposal. The breakdowns sound all the more dramatic with a bass cut, while he opens up his effects knobs and the high frequencies cascade into an ear splitting cacophony of delay and reverb. Every few tracks the ice cannons blast the crowd when the beats drop back in, submerging the dancefloor in a cloud of dry ice swathed in red, blue and purple lasers. Lighting aside, the aesthetic is stripped back, simple.

Similarly, Marco's set isn't out to win any awards for eclecticism; one signature Carola tech-house tune rolls into the next, tightening the tension of the room one notch at a time. But what it lacks in diversity it makes up for in unrelenting energy.

The craft of gunning a room the size of Amnesia is not an easy one. Sifting through the vortex of music a DJ must filter each week to find the select few tracks with the necessary energy is one skill. Applying them in a sequence that keeps a tight rein on a vast galloping dancefloor is another. Carola pulls it off week in week out, often playing marathon sets of nine hours or more.

It's this mastery of the big room that has kept him in the elite of the effects and laptop tech-house brigade since the early 2000s. He earned his place among them in the late 1990s thanks to a deluge of big hard techno EPs, albums and labels. His third 'Open System' album is still considered one of the best albums of the late 90s hard techno scene, and he became one of the era's leading big show DJs. While the BPMs might have been much faster, his signature knack for simple hooks, percussion and devastating dancefloor was apparent from his very first release, 'Hard Melody' in 1995.

In the early 2000s, though, the loopy hard techno scene was beginning to wane, and key protagonists like Richie Hawtin and Adam Beyer began to drift into the new wave of minimal techno sweeping the world. Marco's BPMs slowed as well (much to the howling rage of some of his die hard fans) but his knack for a big tune was as sharp as ever on tracks like 2007's 'Dancing Days' or 2008's 'Bloody Cash'. As the minimal wave swept the world, Marco dug in deep at the heart of the scene; Richie Hawtin's Minus and Plus 8 labels and Sven Väth's Cocoon night at Amnesia.

Carola was one of Cocoon's biggest draws thanks to the legion of Italian fans who flocked to his sets each season. In 2012 – and, according to Island insiders, much to the irritation of Cocoon – he decided to set up another techno night at the same venue. As career moves in techno go, it was about as ballsy at it gets. Marco's choice of Amnesia on Fridays was on face value suicidal, but it's proven to be a stroke of clubbing business genius.

Fridays were once considered a dead day for partying on Ibiza. There is a handful of DJs who can anchor a big night on the island, but most avoid Fridays, preferring to cash in on their regular weekend circuits. The only club to successfully make a go of Fridays was Pacha, thanks to the bottle service crowd that flocked in for a weekend break of glamour raving. Marco and Music On, however, had two aces up their sleeve.

Prior to Music On, Amnesia hosted a series of MTV parties which had failed to set the island on fire. But before that, Fridays at Amnesia were all about Made In Italy Ibiza, a night of house and techno firmly aimed at the huge numbers of Italian tourists in Ibiza. Thanks to its close proximity to Italy and similar Latin rave culture, Ibiza has always had a strong Italian connection. Made In Italy was long running Island institution, but ran out of steam when its biggest stars' powers of attraction began to fade.

The foundation of Marco's status as Italy's techno titan is thanks to his legion of fans from his home town of Naples. The southern Italian city is renowned for its hard partying culture and devotion to techno, and its fans follow home-town heroes like Carola or fellow Music On resident Joseph Capriati with the devotion of football fans following a favourite team. Counting on one of the island's most formidable army of ravers only a stone's throw by plane away to turn up in their thousands gave Carola some space to breathe.

"I was nervous from February!" says Marco, remembering the run-up to Music On's opening night back in June 2012. "Ibiza is a great party island, but not many people know it is also very difficult to start something there. Promoters are scared of change and of the success of other parties, afraid that a new event that could change the balance on the island, so a new event is never really accepted well. That makes it difficult. I focused more on doing it well rather than listening to what other people said about it. To be honest, on the third week of the first season I was still nervous. It was probably after that when I started to really relax because I saw the club full and a really good atmosphere."

His partners provided the second master-stroke. Fellow Neapolitans Ernesto Senatore and Roberto Postiglione earned their reputation as two of the island's key promoters in the mid-1990s thanks to their beginnings throwing free parties. Rather than fight them, the powers that be decided to employ them, and the pair found themselves promoting at Pacha, where their Zenith parties became hugely successful. At Pacha they developed a masterful knowledge of the bottle service crowd that was to become Music On's second key to success.

Thanks to EDM and the explosion of dance music culture in Miami, New York and Las Vegas, dance music has found itself a new elite of ravers. This small but tight-knit group of party people spend their weekend hot-footing from one date on the socialite calendar to another: Cannes one week, WMC the next, with money and distance no deterrent. Fridays at Amnesia provide the optimum opportunity to park a private jet in Ibiza straight from work, party like crazy and still be back behind a desk in New York, Paris or London come Monday morning. "We have a group of fans who fly from New York to Music On every single weekend in the summer," says Luca, Marco's manager and the founder of Music On. "It is unbelievable how dedicated they are."

Luca is one of Marco's right-hand men, starting first as his graphic designer before founding Music On with Marco and becoming his first partner. He insists that the majority of fans aren't just Italian, with strong contingents of fans from the UK, Spain and The Netherlands. "Music On is a religion to many people, and the variety of fans is very organic," he adds. That religion includes an impressive set of celebrities who are no doubt also regulars at Music On's two main residencies outside of Ibiza: bottle service-friendly super-clubs Story in Miami and Marquee in New York. "Naomi Cambell, Paris Hilton, Neymar and Leonardo Di Caprio are all big fans," says Hector. "Marco is really good at creating an atmosphere, a lot of the VIPs probably hadn't a clue about techno before Music On, but Marco has made them feel like they belong."

The power of the VIP clubber is firmly on display tonight as even at 7am the top deck area reserved for high rolling table jockeys is packed to the rafters. Even during some of Amnesia's other biggest underground nights, the VIP posse rarely come out in arms like they do for Music On. Luca is tight-lipped about how much money an event like Music On costs and profits, but an anonymous Ibiza club business insider is adamant that Music On is Amnesia's biggest earner thanks to its VIP credit card spend and loyal underground pound.

But while the VIP crowd and Italian patriotism no doubt benefit Music On, it's the appeal of Marco's music in this venue, on this soundsystem, that is the real key to the night's success. It's the music that packs out the dancefloor, and the music that allows everything else to happen. On the lower floor the Terrace is still a sprawl of people from across Europe. A Scottish twenty-something bounds past us in blue shorts and vest to hit the dancefloor after recognising a favourite tune, while a dehydrated team from Belgium plead with the bar staff for ice to avoid having to buy a bottle of Amnesia's overpriced water. As yet another round of dry ice pounds the crowd a bedraggled crew clad in designer clothing reach
down to wave at Marco.

Some of the people here arrived by private jet, some by disco bus, but all are united in adoration
of an Italian techno icon and curiously distant soul: Marco Carola, who meanwhile stares blankly ahead, reaches for his effects unit, and unleashes havoc once again.

Catch Music On every Friday at Amnesia, Ibiza