It’s every partygoers dream, every beach-lover’s Night of The Year, and every taxi driver’s nightmare.
ZoukOut is all of that, and more.
Celebrating its 10th year of bringing dance, music and art in the happiest marriage conceivable in the form of South East Asia’s largest out-door dance music festival, the people at Zouk really outdid themselves this time.
As if the past 9 years of staggering line-ups of international, regional and local DJs haven’t been dizzying enough even for the music-starved souls out there, ZoukOut 2010 flew in the two music powerhouses themselves: David Guetta and Tiesto, not forgetting house and electronic stars with the likes of Afrojack and Booka Shade. It’s no wonder that the number of beach revellers reached an all-time high of 30,000, scores more than the humble 9,000 that ZoukOut first attracted back in 2000.
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It is immediately clear that ZoukOut’s reach has extended past the Asian boundary, accumulating loyal followers and drawing in curious music lovers who jet in from all over the world for the event alone. And they come in droves, a massive river of people passing through queue lines from the moment it all begins at 8pm.
The sky threatened to break with threats of rain around 1am, but the drizzle stopped eventually – not that it dampened the sizzling atmosphere or thinned the crowd in any way. ZoukOut carries on after all, rain or shine. Everyone knows that.
With the entire Siloso Beach ablaze from the get-go, powerful laser strobes piercing the night and heart-thumping music emanating from all three music arenas across the stretch of sand so good that your bones rattle, you know it can only get better.
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It’s easy to see why you don’t get to hop off the roller coaster ZoukOut takes you on because there’s never a dull moment amidst fire-throwing acts of bar-tending prowess, surges of electronic beats from towers of speakers and that moment of amusement from stumbling upon abandoned flip-flops in the sand.
“One World, One Music, One Tribe, One Dance” it truly was. The buzz leading up to the stellar acts of Tiesto at 3am followed instantly by Guetta at 5am was palpable, culminating in an explosion of wild excitement and frantic jostling to inch as close as possible to the one with the finger on the heart of the people. The human wall that resulted brought tangible meaning to ‘One Dance’ and as Guetta’s driving beats drew closer to sun-rise, the hoards of cavorting merry-makers stopped to cheer at the fireworks that lit up the dark sky in an extravagant display.
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Every year, new records are broken, and just when things can’t possibly get any better, the people at Zouk manage to put all the previous 150 acts they have planned in the decade before to shame with even bigger acts on an unimaginable scale. If ZoukOut’s 10th anniversary is this mind-blowing, then ZoukOut 2011 will be phenomenal.
Written by Christine Leow
SMU Broadcast & Entertainment (SMUBE)