DJ Parade - Euro

While in Moscow the club-and-dance movement is going through yet another period of decline and a rethinking of its aims and goals, in Petersburg people aren't rethinking anything and instead persistently throw raves. Very traditionally - the best DJs, in the biggest venue - the "Yubileyny" Sports Complex.
So now go figure: it seems the same thing happens every six months. Logically you'd assume everything should get better and better, and each time there should be more and more to take away from it. But it turns out that it doesn't turn out.
This time they brought over foreign guests - the English jungle legend Aphrodite, the German Eva Cazal, and a couple of Finnish house-thumpers (Eden & Oded Peled). On top of that, the organisers gave a chance to play to any DJ from all over the country who had sent in their applications in advance. As a result, though, in my opinion, only the organisers came away satisfied. More people showed up than the sports complex is able to hold (by my own sense of it, about 20 thousand). It felt as if the Petersburg crowd ignored the event, so the positive socialising that's traditional for such occasions didn't happen. The dancefloors were packed so tightly that walking across them - let alone hearing or seeing what was going on - was out of the question. The air was full of sweat, steam and the smell of beer. As for pluses, only one can be noted - for the first time in the last couple of years there was no bomb scare and evacuation.
A bit about the dancefloors. A very strange situation was unfolding on the main floor with the music - of what was there, the only ones that fit, perhaps, were Pimenov and Fonar. Also fitting in were some Petersburg DJs unknown to me who were covering for the absent DJ Kolya. The foreign Eva would have fit far better with her experiments on the techno floor, since on the main one her music sounded, to put it mildly, strange. Perhaps everything was fine only on the trance and jungle floors. True, "everything's fine" in this case is a relative notion and is rather a matter of supposition. (I think that those who were there considered everything to be very good.)
On the trance floor everything was very traditional for any trance event - fluoro decorations, the smell of incense, the dancers' eyes wide with joy, the appropriate music. The jungle floor, on the other hand, was a real meat-grinder - the hockey rink was filled to bursting, sweat streamed down from the ceiling, the happiness of the dancing junglists hung in the air, and DJs came out of there completely soaked but content. About the house floor the historians are silent; despite having a map, a compass and the other accessories of a true tourist, it was never located because of the obstacles in the form of human bodies in the way.
Very mixed impressions; I can say firmly that relaxing in such conditions is impossible, which means it was a bad rest, at least for me. Let's see what "Vostochny Udar" (Eastern Strike) has in store for us.