WiSH Outdoor – Dive into the deep blue, Caribbean sea, experience the beauty and excitement of undiscovered worlds and fight the terrifying Kraken with your fearless Pirate-Crew – Welcome to WiSH Outdoor 2017!
It is Friday, 30th June, we arrived at the festival venue around 6 pm! Today WiSH Outdoor opened its doors for the first visitors and campers, time to kick-off the weekend. The festival opened up 4 areas: The Mainstage, the “Ace of Spades” hardstyle tent and two smaller areas.
Starting with Jones, some classic hardstyle tracks marked the beginning of our personal journey. A quick check at the mainstage: It left us speechless! What an amazing design. Holy Crab! We loved how people are celebrating this stage, as the current “Pinsir” phenomena made people associate the crazy dance with the mainstage.
The stage was awesomely detailed, and the 3D construction of the crab made it feel like you’re facing it in real time. Furthermore, the stage was stretched around the dancefloors on both sides, making you, the visitor, become part of the stage. Packed with lots of lights we couldn’t wait to see the results by night!
The hardstyle area, as it was today, consisted of a huge Ace of Spades logo, some square LED screens and banners. We felt like this stage seemed a bit off the topic, however, it did fit the hardstyle feeling pretty good. It represented the hardstyle area today and will offer the best raw hardstyle artists tomorrow.
But now it was time to see Adrenalize – we can just recommend to check out this young talent. His sets are always highly enjoyable, flawless and offer a great mix of classic hardstyle tracks, his own productions and current euphoric bangers! This kid from Denmark knows how to spin a good set and create a great vibe since the very first minutes.
With Cyber Live we experienced one of the first Live sets of this weekend. Besides the fact that Cyber Live was worth to witness, as he went through his whole discography in a slightly faster mix, we can conclude, he becomes better with every performance. We kept an eye on this guy since years and we are glad he made it that far. We think he should keep it up, production-wise and performance-wise.
Next up was ANDY SVGE and damn, we are glad he’s in the scene. What a damn good set! Starting with Breakthrough by Devin Wilde, he went to his remix of Ran-D’s My Way, Gravity, Hit Me With The Hard, his collab with B-Front and his latest production: the Dreamfields anthem 2017 – The In between! His style is just amazing, melodic, rough, energetic and mysterious. The set had a good drive and made us curios about further performances.
The boys are back – D-Block & S-Te-Fan are finally back with some new music. Besides Angels and Demons, which is serious floorkiller by the way, they also dropped Wildstyles remix of Great Spirit by Armin van Buuren, their latest psy trance influenced track, The Sound of the Thunder Defqon.1 edit and of course Shiverz. The 1,5h set felt like 30 minutes and the vibe was amazing! Great performance.
It’s dark outside and we felt like we need a quick change before facing Ran-D! A quick check at the mainstage, Sander van Doorn was playing and made us feel very separated. As some tracks were really cool, the fact that he had some trance influences and an overall good mixing quality made us enjoy the set. However, some tracks just didn’t fit and made us questioning its choice. Underlined with an amazing show, it was still kind of special.
Back to Ran-D! What a kick-ass set! Starting with Renegades, The Unknown and a new track – Victorious?! – he started quite melodic. But with Band of Brothers, his Zombie Bootleg and finishing his set with No Mercy and Welcome to Death Row he pretty much blew us away!
Last act of the night, a 30 minutes rollercoaster ride was ahead. An outstanding performance, a live act from the books, a vibe and feeling like most other artists can’t deliver: Warface brought destruction and pain, tearing down the hardstyle tent with his new live act Heavy Artillery. What can we say: Starting with Mash Up 6.0, The Undercover, Fear of the Dark and a mash up of Turn down for What and Lean On, which he already premiered at Intents, he state clear: No Survivors!
What happened during the main part of his set felt like a mash up of all of his tracks. The mixing was incredibly fast, spiced up with great live edits, stuttering kicks and vocals, he delivered the ultimate live set! Total War, Path of Extinction a Cosmic Sin edit and Welcome to the Jungle passed by. By finishing his set with Release The Kraken and a hardcore edit of Art of War were left the tent sweating like it was 40 degrees outside. This set was crazy and ever more devastating than his Intents performance!
With that said, the first day of WiSH Outdoor was over. The production already seemed great, the sets were nice and we seriously can’t wait for WiSH Outdoors main festival day!
Photos: WiSH Outdoor / WiSH Events