I Love Techno 2006

Not long ago this festival brilliantly celebrated its 10th anniversary, gathering more than 45 thousand clubbers. And yet it began as a relatively small event, when Richie Hawtin, Jeff Mills and Daft Punk played at the club "De Vooruit" and there were about 700 people on the dancefloor. This festival very quickly gained strength, and in the following years, with a few exceptions, it was already held at the Ghent "Expo Centre" - the Flanders Expo exhibition complex. Thus "I Love Techno" became so famous that in the neighbouring countries companies sprang up organising tourist trips to the festival

The concept of the festival will remain the same: 5 dancefloors with performances by the most famous musicians and DJs. The headliners of the Yellow zone will be the godfathers of electronic music - Kraftwerk, backed up by Tiefschwarz, James Holden, the Frenchman Philippe Zdar, Ellen Allien & Apparat (Live), as well as the king of electro - Dr. Lektroluv. In the green zone the music will be heavier; it will be opened by the American hard-techno master DJ Rush. The envoys of other countries will be Marko Nastic (Serbia) and Valentino Kanzyani (Slovenia), Pet Duo (Brazil), Miss Djax (Holland), while the honour of Belgium will be defended by Q-IC. In the orange zone everything is built around the performance of the Dewaele brothers (2ManyDJs), who create utterly insane musical collages. They'll be joined by the Canadian star Tiga, Soulwax Nite Versions, Boys Noize, Justice and Digitalism. The blue zone is a kind of roll of honour for techno veterans: Carl Craig, Laurent Garnier, Jan Van Biesen and T-Quest, and Deetron. In the Red zone one of the festival's oldest friends, Dave Clarke, will appear once again. Technasia will present their new release "Popsoda". The rising Belgian star Joris Voorn will also be setting the place alight there. The best of the festival's performances will be shown simultaneously in the video zone

For a short-term entry into Belgium (no more than 90 days within 6 months) you need a foreign-travel passport and a Schengen visa obtained on the basis of an invitation or a tourist voucher. Such a visa costs 35 euros, and processing it takes 3 working days. There are two ways to get to "I Love Techno": the ordinary one - directly from Russia, and, let's say, the exotic one. Let's start with the second - if for some reason you have to travel to the festival not from Russia but from another country, then in Germany, Italy, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands there are companies that organise runs to "I Love Techno" (see the festival's website).
The ordinary way: a flight to Brussels will cost you 230-300 euros one way, then it's a train to Ghent (Gent-Sint-Pieters), and from the station to the venue there's very little left: 7 minutes on the shuttle running between the station and Flanders Expo