Bonanza 2025: Hits And Misses
What started in 2018 with a party on a beach on Colombia’s Caribbean coast and in 2019 was shut down last minute by the authorities, necessitating a move to the organisers’ Rio Hostel in Buritaca, last weekend celebrated its sixth edition in the form of a fully-fledged long-weekend festival with four stages, up to 1500 people and a hell of a lot of good music.
It was an ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC festival, but rather than do a whole review* — which would be beyond my abilities of memory and articulation — it’s time to wheel out everyone’s favourite format: HITS and MISSES! You will have guessed already that the Misses were thin on the ground, and predominantly things that were my own bloody fault rather than anything to do with other people or the festival, but I’ll try to be honest about them nonetheless.
Before getting into it, I want to thank Benny & Guy, Ximena, the rest of the Rio Hostel team, Enrique & Raquel, Nicolas and Julio, Gwenan and Dana, all the Belgians, and everyone else who made this such an easy and memorable and fun long weekend.
(*of course I ended up writing a whole review and a half)
HIT: The lineup
I know for a fact that some people looked at the lineup and found it a bit confusing. My take on that is: the more confusing the better. Already looking at the lineups for festivals coming up this year I’ve been getting frequent deja vu, so it was refreshing to see headliners as stylistically and geographically disparate as S.O.N.S., Roska, Adi, Ron Like Hell and Gabrielle Kwarteng on the same lineup, in the Colombian jungle.
There was big local representation, not just from the different parts of Colombia but from other Latin American countries as well. On the first night in the small El Nido stage I heard Madame Vacile — an NYC-based DJ originally from the nearest city, Baranquilla — connecting music from her native Colombian coastline with its manifold African roots. In the Control Room, another Colombian DJ, J.Roux was playing bouncy poppy tech house and breaks, the kind of stuff that would go down a storm in Berlin or Amsterdam. Warming up the Beach the following evening, Tati Pimont, a São Paulo-based DJ and record dealer, was deep into motivational tech-y electro-y rollers. Then DJ Villacariño aka Azkuenaga, a legendary DJ from Argentina with a pedigree that goes back to Ibiza in the 90s, played two sets on the Saturday, first psychedelic cumbia on the beach in the afternoon (which I heard, and is a HIT below) and then driving techno that night on the Terrace (which I missed). And that’s not to mention all the other local artists I wanted to see but didn’t.
Which brings me on to my first…
MISS: Missing loads of stuff
Yes, of course you can’t see everything. But I had my plan and I failed outrageously to stick to it. The plan was:
Stay at the site on Thursday for as long as I was enjoying it then SLEEP properly.
Relax on Friday ahead of my set that evening.
Go to the site around 6pm, absorb some vibes, play my set, get mashed to Gwenan, deliver myself to the swirl until Leeon at 8am, see where the afterglow took me, but definitely get at least SOME SLEEP early on Saturday evening, in preparation for…
Nicolas Duque, Gladkazuka (Live), Roska, SLIC Unit, Dorisburg and Adi on Saturday night into Sunday morning.
Once again SLEEP, potentially in a hammock close enough to be able to hear the Sunday’s daytime Terrace marathon through my dreams, before…
The final Sunday night spacetrip until close on Monday morning. Then more SLEEP.
What actually happened? Well, the first mistake was on Thursday night. When we arrived, Chez de Milo was playing Maurice Fulton’s ‘NR 17’ (which has been having a moment of late) and in the pure excitement of arriving I started drinking. I stayed through Ron Like Hell’s much-anticipated set and mostly enjoyed it, especially the more scuzzy EBM and drum track moments and the soft R&B-y landing. At one point they dropped a track that had a moment of silence in it followed by a voice going “1-2-3” and a drop: that was the first time I saw the Bonanza dancefloor properly ignite. But after Ron’s closing track, Gabrielle Kwarteng came on with a string of unmemorable 2008 Frankfurt-like bongo house tunes, and instead of calling it quits I doubled down on my aguardiente consumption and ended up sitting drunk and alone in the chillout area at 2am, waiting for 30 minutes for a shuttle back to the hotel as the strains of ‘Fly Life (Xtra)’ wafted over from the Terrace. (Can we all agree on a ‘Fly Life’ moratorium for a while, so that this spectacular tune can recover from this absolute mullering it’s received over the past few years?)
So I had stayed up later and drank a hell of a lot more than planned. Naturally I then woke up early regardless, leaving me with a sleep debt before I’d even really got started. A walk to a stunning actual beach and a dive into some crashing waves helped revitalise me a little, as did seeing some pelicans flying by, but there was no opportunity for further napping before the evening got underway. I was in it for the long haul and, jumping forwards around 20 hours now, by Saturday afternoon that long haul found me laid out flat on my front on the beach, battling sandflies and a bad stomach brought on by intense sleep deprivation, obscene amounts of aguardiente, countless other substances and the wrong kind of food. To my friends I may have been outwardly bullish about my chances of making it back to the site that evening after a nap, but inwardly I was painfully aware that was highly unlikely to happen. And sure enough, once I dragged myself back to the hotel for a shower and a lie down, a 90-minute nap became a 6-hour accidental sleep became a reluctant but ultimately necessary 12-hour bed-bound recovery that saw me miss all those Saturday night acts and only manage to catch the final two hours of Adi on Sunday morning. The moment when I woke up from my accidental slumber at 2.30am, just after Dorisburg had started but already too late to make it in time to see him finish, was one of the weekend’s low points.
Yet you can’t have too many regrets about the best laid plans going awry. Festivals are living documents, and sometimes you have to accept some divergence from the script. The part I glossed over above — those 20 hours of long haul — consisted of festival joy and abandon par excellence. And then there was Sunday into Monday too.
HIT: Dana Kuehr b2b Walrus, El Nido, Friday evening
About half of the long haul was spent in a single room, the El Nido stage, where the original schedule was me followed by Gwenan followed by Sugar Free followed by Tech House Jack aka DJ Spud. In the days leading up to the festival we heard that Sugar Free was unable to travel to Colombia for health reasons, so a last minute replacement was needed. As luck would have it, Walrus was attending the festival as a staff member (and raver), while Dana Kuehr was nearby having just completed a four day hike in the jungle. Need I say more? They stepped into my 6pm slot, I took Gwenan’s 9pm slot and Gwenan moved to midnight.
There was no let-up in El Nido right from Dana and Michiel’s opening 30 minutes of groovy minimal house and slightly wonky acid tracks, each record deftly mixed and greeted by hands in the air from the mass of Belgians on the dancefloor. It was a vibe, and set the tone for the night perfectly. I found it very difficult to leave the room but I forced myself to take periodic breaks to sit down in the artists’ room and rest my back and legs. On the last of those breaks, during their final stretch, I heard the unmistakable sounds of ‘Vice’ emanating from the other building. Dana was in booty popping mode and I felt fully ready to continue her good work. When I went back down with 15 minutes to go and took up a position to the side of the booth, I could feel the buzz in the room and see the smiles on everyone’s faces. I couldn’t have asked for a better setup for my set. Bizarrely, these two friends had never played b2b before. They should definitely do it again.
HIT: El Nido soundsystem
This small stage had a clear, punchy Martin Audio system that hit just the right spot for the room. I found it a little too loud at times down the front, but there was usually always room to circulate further back or to the side. They also very kindly put in a filler speaker to the left of the booth where there was much more room and, importantly, two fans for ventilation. (In fact, all of the stages at this festival sounded great.)
HIT: My new earplugs
Having spent the past six months with a sub-optimal mix of custom and non-custom earplugs thanks to losing one at Adonis last August, I finally managed to get a new pair of custom ones just before leaving for this trip. By mistake the company had ones made that fill the full cavity of your ear — apparently popular in aviation — and at first I wasn’t convinced, but over the course of the weekend they proved a great pick. The only difficulty was when I was playing, because I can be quite violent pulling the headphones off my head when I’m mixing and they tended to catch on the earplugs. I’ll have to adjust my headphone-head technique, but if you see me doing that thing where people (actually, just dudes) wear the headphones horizontally across their foreheads, please do have a word.
HIT: Gwenan, El Nido, Friday night
As the person I’ve seen DJ the most times, you’d think I’d know most of her tricks by now. You’d be wrong. The groovy Chicago-y tunes that formed the bedrock of her set were largely familiar to me, it’s true, as were some of the more leftfield percussive bits like the evergreen Bell Everywhere EP, which got multiple airings. But gradually she started dropping in records I hadn’t heard before, and not just any records, but really good ones, slamming Detroity numbers, big and driving, faintly trancey (but not at all trance) bangers, syncopated hats and snares galore. Me and the crew down by the side of the booth gradually lost our tiny minds as the set just kept getting better and better. Usually I need to take an extended break after playing, but G kept me in that room from start to finish. If I could just be her warm-up DJ for perpetuity, I’d do it.
MISS: Going back to the hotel for a quick rest
If I could do one thing differently, I think it would be going back to the hotel for a quick rest that morning. In my head it was a good idea: I’d be able to shower, get some Horizontal Muscle Rest© in, and return refreshed for Leeon at 8am. The music on the main stage was also pretty pummelling and there were crowds of people everywhere, which chased me off. But for various reasons I think I’d have been better off just finding a hammock for a quick bit of HMR© on-site, followed by eating something substantial. I’d have got to hear Aurora Halal’s sunrise set in full, which was highly praised afterwards. I actually caught the final 30 minutes and she played a Marc Houle track, ‘Bay Of Figs’, which had me laughing until I remembered that I’d played ‘Meatier Shower’ just hours earlier.
MISS: The third shrimp taco
I had successfully put away two shrimp tacos ahead of my set and felt pretty good about it. The third I reserved for afterwards but, being an idiot, I failed to put it in the fridge. Many hours later, when I went to pick up my stuff for my Misguided Quick Rest©, I saw the taco box on the side and thought: yes I’ll eat that. ERROR. I lay most of the blame for my later state on that warm shrimp taco, and definitely not on everything else I had been putting in my body.
HIT: Leeon, Terrace, Saturday morning
I find it difficult to describe Leeon’s set partly because he played a lot of music I didn’t know and wasn’t really in my wheelhouse, and partly because the way he put it together was also very different to me. I have to reach for feelings and moods instead of tracks and technical ideas. When Enrique took over from Aurora Halal the sun was fully up and promising to be HOT. After her pretty epic finish he came in with his own epic opener, a UKG tune with a “boy don’t waste my time” lyric I first heard on a billy2chips track a couple of years ago. (I guess it was this one.) That was a palate cleanser rather than a promise of more UKG, though, as he soon slipped into methodical 4/4 stuff, loopy and long-form with patient, unobtrusive mixing. There was a very extended Brothers’ Vibe moment. I wasn’t sure this was what I needed after my MQR©, but I committed to it and persuaded my legs to keep moving, taking energy from the people around me who, in line with the general theme for the weekend, were a really great vibe. And gradually, craftily, Enrique brought in a sexy wicked energy into the set, wooshy techno noises and big low end, weirdo vocals and intensely satisfying percussion. This new Luke Slater remix of Marcel Dettman epitomises what I mean, and harks back to that golden era of superficially-austere-but-actually-totally-camp-circa-2008 techno that we all loved so much. By this point I was throwing shapes and drinking a basil smash cocktail. In his final hour or so he did what I love seeing DJs do, and love doing myself: a soft landing. House elements, hitherto sparse, now began to take over, with the kind of Prescription-style grooves you (or at least I) rarely hear out these days. They culminated in the big Acoustic version of Logic’s ‘The Final Frontier’ and Ben Cenac’s house version of ‘Who Loves You’ — pure late morning bliss.
HIT: Enrique’s sunglasses
MISS: Continuing drinking aguardiente all day
On Thursday night I’d have told you Aguardiente Antioqueño was the best drink ever invented. By the time we hit the beach on Saturday lunchtime, I began to understand it is the devil’s liquor. The combination of all the alcohol, all the bumplets of this and that which came my way, the wholly unnecessary downing of a shot of rum I was entitled to for entering a raffle supporting the El Rio Foundation, and of course, most crucially, the third shrimp taco, all conspired to put me in the position I described above: prostrate in the shadows next to the River stage, persecuted by sandflies and wayward frisbees and sneezing dogs. In fact, while we’re here…
MISS: Sandflies
MISS: Wayward frisbees
MISS: The dog that sneezed on me in my most vulnerable moment
HIT: The coining of the term ‘bumplet’
Which rather counter-intuitively describes something bigger than a bump but smaller than a line. The precise volume of its sister measure, the ‘bumplette’, remains undefined.
HIT: DJ Villacariño plays cumbia Robert Miles
Despite my poorly state, Ricardo aka Azkuenaga’s beach set on the Saturday afternoon was a musical highlight, and as I lay there pathetically I still bopped my head and tapped my toes. Cumbia is an unknown quantity to me, but who could resist these free-wheeling, wildly mixed-down and frankly bats takes on ‘The Look’, ‘Macarena’ and, best of all, ‘Children’ by Robert Miles. (I think it was this version but can’t be sure.) He also played one of the first rap records ever released in Venezuela. It was the perfect soundtrack to a tripped out afternoon.
MISS: Missing the infamous Nicolas Duque three times
When I met Nicolas at the start of the weekend he told me he was playing three times over the course of the festival. I joked I’d miss them all. The joke was on me, because it came true. First he played the opening set, when we were still settling into the hotel. Then he played an R&B set in El Nido, when I was poleaxed on the beach listening to cumbia Robert Miles. And finally he closed the River stage that Saturday evening, when I was deep into my 12 hour collapse back at the hotel again. We later joked again that the unannounced final set on the beach was likely to be Nicolas again, but sadly it wasn’t. The one consolation is that the third set was recorded by The Mudd Show, so I will at least get to hear that one back later on. I heard he killed it.
HIT: Adi, Terrace, Sunday morning
I’ve already gone over my Saturday night. So after my extended stay in bed, I dragged myself up and out for the final two hours of Adi’s set on the terrace. The vibe was LIT and Raquel looked like she was having the time of her life. She sounded like it too — Raquel doesn’t play straightforward music but in full flow she was mixing it like it was the easiest thing in the world, bopping around the booth and revelling in the bombast of freestyle, trancey acid, techno, italo. I recognised barely anything and enjoyed it all. ‘Always’ by John Rocca aka Midi Rain was fabulous and emotional choice towards the end.
MISS: Me, during Vera’s set, not the Terrace, Sunday morning
Having talked a big talk to Vera herself about how I was going to be there for her set, I then proceeded to: chat in the corner; go get some food; struggle to eat said food; hang out by the bar; go for a swim; do anything except actually devote time to her music. In the moments I did, I heard lovely deep tunes and subtle yet powerful mixing (the kind I would never be able to do myself). At one point I think I heard a remix of ‘Starlight’ by Model 500, one of my all-time favourites, coming from the Terrace. But for some reason I was just off in my own little world for the whole of the set. Regret.
HIT: Benny, Terrace, Sunday lunchtime
As you might have gathered from these headings, on Sunday the festival programme focusses in on only one stage — the Terrace — so everyone’s energy is dedicated to a single lineup. And an imposing lineup it was: Adi / Vera / Benny / S.O.N.S. / Vlada / DJ Rino / Ivan Smagghe / Unai Trotti. Benny is one of El Rio’s founders and his Sunday lunchtime slot featured many records I know and love, and many other new ones to me. I especially enjoyed hearing ‘Meditation’ by Syzygy, those rounded bass tones sounding fat through the Terrace subs, and Viewfinder’s The Second Phase EP. Ben’s mixing was slick and energy-giving. It was also just a real pleasure to see one of the people responsible for this whole event have his moment — the crowd showing their appreciation with whoops and vigorous-for-Sunday-afternoon dancing.
MISS: Taking another MQR©
I should have stayed. S.O.N.S. was on next, followed by Vlada, and I should have stayed to check both of them out. A hammock would have done. But I repeated my mistake of trekking all the way back to the hotel, lying down unproductively and generally missing out. S.O.N.S., who came all the way from South Korea for this one gig, apparently brought only around 30 records which he played across three decks for three hours — a feat I really wish I had seen. And everyone had good things to say about Vlada, who took the stage from sunset into DJ Rino. It was about an hour into the latter’s set when I finally returned from the hotel and threw myself, one last time, into the fray.
HIT: DJ Rino and the Belgians, Terrace, Sunday night
I liked what I heard of DJ Rino’s set a lot: great records, unshowy and effective mixing, the odd flash of emotion and humour, especially in a couple of great italo instrumentals. I did find my enthusiasm waning a little as the set drew on because he focuses so strongly on a particular sound. The records are all unfuckwithable, but I found myself missing a funky drum track, for example, to open things out a bit, and if there were any properly broken beats I don’t remember them. But whatever misgivings I had about the single-mindedness of the sound were more than compensated for by the sheer enthusiasm of the Belgian contingent there to support their boy. I’d had a taste of it during Dana and Michiel on Friday but this was the real deal, three nights into the festival and all the Flemings rolling as if it was the first. It was beautiful.
MISS (or HIT?): The bell
The category depends on who you talk to. And even I flip-flopped in my opinion. The bell hanging over the main stage bar was a fun novelty factor on the first night, the bar staff occasionally clanging it to make known their approval of the tune being played — or at least that’s how I took it. On Saturday various people took to dancing on the bar — one moment it would be all girls, then suddenly all muscle boys — and they would occasionally ring the bell in response to the rising energy in the room. But by Sunday night the bell ringing had become incessant and seemingly detached from whatever was going on in the room and the music. (It reminded me of the guy who brought an entire array of percussion instruments to the Garden dancefloor at Equation festival in Vietnam last April — and proceeded to play them relentlessly out of time.)
MISS: Ivan Smagghe plays The Lighthouse Family, Terrace, Sunday night
I was a bit nonplussed by stretches of Ivan Smagghe’s set, and really enjoyed other stretches. Some of it sounded to me, once again this weekend, like mnml techno from the late 2000s, which wasn’t a bad thing. But then some of it was overly busy and long-form for my liking. He played one absolutely insane electro tune that I wish I could hear again. But then he also played The Lighthouse Family. “At the end of the day / Remember the days / When we were close to the end” — fuck OFF. The fact they rhymed “day” with “days” when they could have used “way” tells you everything you need to know about The Lighthouse Family. I had to send an audio clip to my friends just to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. I looked it up the next day and discovered it was an E-Dancer remix, but not even Kevin Saunderson could polish a turd like ‘High’. When I asked the other people in my artist transfer if The Lighthouse Family had ever crossed over to Colombia, the answer, luckily for Colombia, was no.
HIT: Unai Trotti, Terrace, Monday morning
It’s an ongoing embarrassment to myself that I’ve never made it to Cartulis at Fold. Having seen Unai now at Bonanza, I want to see him doing that at his home party too. I really enjoyed the opening hour or so, all bombastic italo synths and emotional harmonies over a pounding EBM/industrial stomp. Unai’s mixing was fascinating: on getting things lined up, he’d sort of lean in to the mixer a bit and start attacking the EQs, flicking his hands at high speed and occasionally recoiling backwards before going back in again for more adjustments. Sonically it was immaculate. It’s so unlike the way I mix (basically as little expressiveness in my hands as possible) so I was gripped watching him. In the middle part of this extended closing set he went down a bit of an acid trancey techno wormhole, which isn’t my thing but was still technically impressive. I took the opportunity to have some breakfast, from where I could still hear his occasional forays into lighter, more wavey tracks. Then in the final hour I rejoined the dancefloor as he did what Enrique did and gave us all a soft landing: IDM-y electro, cute vocals about computers, a dreamy harmonic finish.
HIT: The invincible final transfer
With the dust settling and the Belgians firmly installed on the beach for yet more bumplets, our little group somehow managed to converge at the festival site entrance ready for our final transfer back to the hotel. I haven’t mentioned it yet but one of the main attractions of this festival — that is, one of the experiences that most stays with you — is the dirt track leading from the main road to the entrance. What looks like a relatively short distance on the map in fact involves about 10 minutes of drunk-camel lurching over bumps, potholes and near-crevasses next to the river. The transfer vehicles are these little mini vans displaying varying degrees of degradation — missing seatbelts and doors that fail to close — and as they take you along this track you will pass, on average, about 20 motorcycles, 50 pedestrians with a deathwish, four other transfer vehicles and, if you’re lucky, a giant pick-up-truck that probably shouldn’t be on the road in the first place. This was our final gauntlet. Enrique was yelling, I was holding on for dear life, and then Nicolas suddenly noticed that the windows of the vehicle had a glimmering rainbow shine to them, an effect not really obvious from the outside but now, in the strong Monday morning sunlight, impossible to miss from inside. The fantasy was immediate: this was our disco-flashing star-powered Mario Kart to take us on our final ride home, impeccable in its handling of potholes, impervious to banana skins, implacable in the face of whatever blue shells might come our way. Nothing could stop us: “Dee-dee-dee de-de-de-de-de” we sang, as we finally made it back to the hotel.
There was so much else that happened, and I haven’t really said anything about the other aspects of the festival that El Rio nailed: the design, the layout, the food + drink, the logistics, etc. It was all great. But most importantly, I left the weekend inspired about music, DJing and even, surprisingly, people. I hope to do it all again one of these coming years.