Kala Festival 2025: Hits And Misses
I’ve been having a bit of a crisis of confidence with this newsletter, hence the radio silence. Back in April, Buttondown inexplicably deleted several long-time subscribers from my list, including my own sister, and for the six weeks since they’ve been seemingly unable to do anything about it. I like to tell people that I write this newsletter for myself more than for anyone else, but it turns out that I do care quite a lot whether people are receiving it, and this uncertainty has paralysed me somewhat. I’m still working on getting everyone reinstated. Thank you to anyone still here after this protracted downtime!
I’ve also been wanting to do a Hits and Misses for Kala Festival — held in Dhermï, Albania, two weeks ago — but certain elements of the weekend made me think twice. First off, my engagement with the festival was hardly comprehensive: I only arrived on Saturday morning, when proceedings had already got underway on Wednesday; and I left early, on Monday night, when the music actually runs through Tuesday. Further, during my time there I didn’t see everything — I didn’t go to the Yacht Club stage at all, and I only went to the Cove during the day. I did go out to the Gjipe beach party on Monday, but not for the full runtime. And I only did one sunrise. It feels a bit uncharitable to sum up a festival having barely seen half of what it had to offer.
I felt this even more strongly after dinner on Sunday night, when one of the founders of the festival introduced himself and mentioned he enjoyed reading my festival ‘reviews’. Of course this made me more self-conscious about potentially ‘reviewing’ his festival. Not that I mind too much about causing offence with what I write here. I generally assume it won’t get read anyway, and in the few instances where I have in fact caused offence in the past, when I look back at what I’ve written I stand by it. But in this instance there was the spectre of potential offence in the moment we were talking, and he could probably see in my eyes that I was recalculating exactly what I would feel comfortable saying about his festival.
But since then I’ve spent the intervening days reminding myself why I do this newsletter. It’s not meant to be ‘reviews’ or ‘journalism’ or any other supposedly objective things I could place in scare quotes here. It’s simply a personal diary, my highly individual and incomplete impressions based on unsophisticated observation and even less sophisticated critical inquiry. I don’t try to pretend it’s anything else.
So with that being said…let’s get into it!
(Apologies for the lack of photos in this newsletter…I took about five the whole festival and they were all terrible.)
MISS: Arriving in Dhermï at 5am after a three hour transfer from Tirana airport and going to the place I was meant to be staying at only to be met by three fourteen-year-olds manning the desk who told me there was no room at the inn. Not an auspicious start.
HIT: Randomly bumping into one of the festival’s Wellness team who, seeing how lost I was, very kindly got me onto his hotel wifi so that I could contact the artist team and find out what was going on.
HIT: The artist team responding at 5am and helping me find the right hotel. Big ups the artist team in general for always being responsive during the festival.
HIT: Managing to sleep in till about 1pm, which was very necessary given the two nights I’d had previously. I’m at the point now after a few months of intense travelling that my body clock no longer really relates to the actual time of day. So when the sleep centre of my brain arbitrarily decides to give me a long lie-in like this one, I really have to take it.
HIT: The panel I hosted on Saturday afternoon. The Kala team had asked me months ago if I wanted to host a session as part of their Talks programme. I was initially a bit sceptical since they didn’t have a topic and weren’t sure who would be available to contribute. But over the intervening months we managed to put together a reasonably interesting title about making it in the music industry while remaining true to yourself. I called it ‘So You Wanna Be A Star’ after the Mtume tune and the guests ended up being CC:DISCO! and Reflex Blue, both Australians living and touring in Europe. Overall I think the panel was a success: we had a small turnout that, I was told, was nevertheless more than usual for the talks at Kala, and people seemed engaged.
MISS: Being unable to resist staring at the floor and playing with my shoelaces and leg hair while listening to CC and Cooper speak. Remember my ‘sad Keanu’ look at Horst 2024 (here)? It was like that except I was sitting on a bean bag. While to others this pose may look like I’m bored, it’s actually a big part of how I listen. But obviously it also betrays a complete lack of media training. Next time: sit up straight, eye contact.
HIT: The Empire stage being pretty full while Sofia Kourtesis did her live set, directly before I was due to go on at 23h that night.
MISS: 95% of the people at the Empire stage leaving within 20 minutes of me starting my set. The exodus was so dramatic that, even though I was understandably offended for a good few minutes, my rational brain managed to take over and tell me not to take it personally. I’m just not that bad at DJing. And I was playing good music: CC:DISCO!’s remix of Mildlife’s ‘Musica’ (she was playing later that night), my own no-Robert-Owens edit of ‘Silly Games’ by Arthur Baker, Shanti Celeste’s fresh classic ‘Thinking About You’ — all tunes that I would consider dead certs. It couldn’t be me! I just figured everyone had gone to see the bigger DJs playing on the other stages — perhaps Sugar Free and Fonte on the Splendor stage? But the next day at dinner Sugar Free told me that she too had played to an empty dancefloor. It seems that this hour at Kala — late evening into nighttime — is actually the graveyard slot, as people who’ve been partying all day take the opportunity to go back to their lodgings and eat, shower, rest and pre-game before the long night ahead. I didn’t know this at the time. All I knew was that I was playing vaguely clubby music to myself and the ten or so people that still remained, somewhat adrift, on the empty dancefloor. I paused for a moment, took a step back, and put aside the remaining string of bangers I’d been excited to play to a buzzing crowd. I brought out the leftfield selections: Kurc & Chausi’s ‘Ichi No Torii’, The Persuader’s ‘What Is The Time Mr. Templar?’ mixed into Mascara’s ‘Baja’ and, to finish, the soulful garage dub of ‘Yesterday’ by X-Men. Some might say this was not exactly setting the floor on fire before Bradley Zero took over, but there wasn’t really a floor to set on fire in the first place, so I felt justified — and satisfied — in playing musical, emotional tunes for myself. I handed over the decks with my ego intact, just.
HIT: Bradley mixing out of my last tune into Will Hofbauer’s ‘Moss On’, which was on my favourite record of 2024. This was very good sign.
MISS: Soon after playing ‘Moss On’ — not longer than the time it took me to go to the toilet and get a drink — Bradley was suddenly playing some hyped up mix of Junior Vasquez’s ‘If Madonna Calls’ to a now pumping dancefloor. I couldn’t help but ask myself: where did the ‘Moss On’ vibe go? Is a cookie-cutter Junior Vasquez track what it takes to satisfy a festival crowd? Was I doing it all wrong? A bit later I looked out at the now busy dancefloor happily bopping away to a rushy tech house tune with an asinine vocal repeatedly asking: “What is the sound? It’s music!” and I felt my spirits drop.
HIT: In his second hour, for a good stretch, Bradley actually put down the bait 90s tunes and played some fucking great music including ‘Skudde’ off Jorg Kuning’s latest EP (reviewed here), some grimey funky bassy stuff and a stripped-back rhythm track that outshone the bells and whistles of pretty much everything else in the set. (I plucked up the courage to ask Bradley about his later on and he said it was a DJ Fett Burger track. Guess I’ll be doing a DJFB deep dive shortly.) When I try to look back at it objectively, BZ basically did what I often try to do, which is get the crowd on side with some easier stuff in the first part of the set and then use that hard-won confidence to play more daring things later on. I ask myself: what if I’d opened my set after Sofia Kourtesis with some out-and-out bangers, would people have stuck around? But that’s a counterfactual world, impossible to validate. I console myself by asking instead: what if I’d opened my set with ‘If Madonna Calls’ and everyone had fucked off regardless? Then I’d really feel like shit!
HIT: CC:DISCO!’s three hour sunrise set. Two years ago she did five hours in this slot (write-up here), so I wondered if, this time, she’d be able to stretch out as much. But after the first section of jacking, uptempo bangers (for CC, at least; I think it was still a sensible <130bpm) she began to slow down a bit and explore. By halfway through the set she was playing Larry Heard’s ‘What About This Love?’ and everything was right with the world. As the sun came up she hit us with some hi-nrg disco, her own ‘Touch The Vibe’ (pitched perfectly for this time and place) and, finally, The Quick’s ‘One Light In A Blackout’, just the kind of slowjam you want to go out on at 6am.
HIT: The air conditioning in my room making just the right amount of noise — not too much, not too little — and producing just the right amount of cold — not too much, not too little — to help me sleep like a baby every night I was at this festival. It was like this particular hotel room and its aircon unit were somehow enchanted. If only it were always like that.
HIT: Playing on the Cove on Sunday afternoon. I wasn’t really sure what the beach vibe would be. They had said ‘downtempo/chill’, but I had an inkling it might be a bit more energetic than that: on the Saturday evening the Cove had been rocking to Egyptian Lover before the sun went down. I headed down from my hotel and found Jayvybz (who run the All Styles All Smiles show on NTS) playing house music to a pretty full beach with a few people dancing and most people lounging/swimming. The sea in Dhermï is fucking amazing, by the way: clear, not too warm, saltily buoyant and mercifully free of urchins. I went for a swim and considered what I was going to do with my set: play more house music and try to get more people dancing? I consulted with the sound tech and he said that, yes, people would probably expect something energetic. I took over from Jayvybz with some of the house tunes I’d been meaning to play the night before. Most people were still lounging and swimming, and after about 20 minutes I could no longer ignore the urge to switch to the downtempo/chill things I’d planned to play. My transition track was ‘Piano Terrah’ by Mahjong & Mayhem, an entirely obscure record off an Italian label unfortunately named Molest that I’d bought three years ago and never once played since. It opens with a good four minutes of beatless piano dreaminess, during which time I dropped the pitch largely imperceptibly from 127bpm to 115bpm. Once the beat dropped I mixed in Andy Stott’s ‘Made Your Point’ and dropped another few bpm. Over the course of the next 45 minutes or so I managed to get down to 105bpm and play things like Yazoo, Pleasure Planet, Photek and Stella & The Longos. I felt like I was DJing, and although there wasn’t much movement on the beach I now sensed an unspoken resonance with the people basking in the sun. It had been the right decision, but then about 40 minutes from the end of my set I suddenly realised I might have a responsibility to tee things up for the next DJ, so I started speeding up again quite rapidly: both ‘Short Circuit’ (my current Daft Punk obsession) and ‘Stranger In A Strange Land’ provided opportunities to jump significantly in bpm, and before I knew it I was back at 127bpm performing my latest ‘Thong Song’ vs ‘Brussels Electronic’ party trick to a steadily growing dancefloor. I once again checked in with the sound tech: “Who’s playing next?” “Qendresa. She’s a singer from London. She’s Kosovan so the local crowd are turning out for her.” “What kind of music?” “Dreamy and ethereal pop.” This conversation took place as I was playing the Zopelar remix of ‘Dance Fatal’ by Vermelho Wonder — not exactly dreamy or ethereal. With only ten minutes left there was only one thing to do: hit the brake pedal and try and end on a more ambiguous note. I mixed in long-time melancholic go-to ‘Cuando Nos Vemos’ by Lupone and finished with Roza Terenzi’s ‘Mwah’, which I’ve been reviving of late. This felt like a much better hand-off to Qendresa and I was very happy when she said she’d enjoyed the music. She came on and within ten minutes was singing a cover of ‘Paradise’ by Sade: truly the right music for the beach.
HIT: Getting invited to dinner. Although I knew plenty of people at this festival through general music acquaintance, I was flying solo for most of my time on site. But luckily a group took pity on me after my set on Sunday and invited me to dinner with them. I showed up at the appointed time to find out that this wasn’t just a dinner, it was a big festival DJ dinner with about 30 artists and staff at a long table. I ended up sitting next to Fantastic Man, which was obviously a bit awkward since I once wrote in this very newsletter about how that one time at Pbar a group of us had christened him ‘Terrible Man’ (here). It crossed my mind briefly to bring this up to clear the air, but my better judgement won out and I focussed on just being a normal person. I’m a big fan of his music and we had a good chat. The food was great and we all got espresso martinis in paper cups. Halfway through the meal the power went out in all of Dhermï — a true blackout, as if CC:DISCO! had prophesied it with her closing track the night before. After dinner I had a little lie down in my hotel room before heading out to see Maurice Fulton and Marcellus Pittman at the Splendor stage.
HIT: On the way to M&M I heard a DJ at one of the other stages playing ‘Right In The Socket’ by Shalamar — “blackouts don’t mean a thing to me/you generate all the light I need” — and I had to give it to them for up-to-the-minute topical selection.
HIT & MISS: Marcellus and Maurice’s set was the very definition of hit and miss. It felt like Marcellus was really DJing, working hard technically and also listening to what Maurice was playing and bouncing off it. It felt like Maurice wasn’t doing any of that, just slinging in whatever he felt like whenever he felt like, as is his wont. I guess it kind of worked? But often not really, like when Maurice repeatedly brought in a disco tune over the top of Kenlou’s ‘The Bounce’ only to whip it away again — an interesting idea that just didn’t work in practice. Never mind, I guess, every tune the two of them played was great and the crowd were dancing. (They also rolled out ‘Right In The Socket’ — clearly the DJ joke of the night.) I lasted about an hour and a quarter, dropped in on Eris Drew & Octo Octa who were playing reasonably good festival music at the Empire stage, and then headed back to sleep.
HIT: The journey next day, lunchtime, to the Gjipe stage, a beach only accessible by boat from the Yacht Club stage near the entrance to the site. I had been kindly given guestlist for the Gjipe party the evening before (another perk of getting invited to dinner), which included a speedboat ride along the coast to the hidden beach. I had to wear my earplugs as the boat captain started blasting incredibly loud EDM from the boat’s tinny speakers. The day was starting well.
MISS: Despite the festival’s best efforts to inform me of the beach’s remoteness, I completely ignored the multiple warnings about taking cash to the Gjipe beach. “I’m sure I can pay by card at one of the food places. Or there’ll be an ATM,” I said to myself as we skipped along the immaculate coastline. Well, the Gjipe beach is completely cut off from civilisation and obviously has no ATMs to speak of. It barely even has internet service, and when it does it’s sometimes Albanian sometimes Greek (a nightmare for roaming charges). The first place I went to for food was cash only. The stage bars took artist credit but were only serving alcohol. I was hungry and felt stupid because I HAD been stupid. The sun was intense and although there were many deckchair + umbrella combos for hire on the beach they were also cash only. I found refuge under a tree next to the stage and listened to the warm-up DJ play an unplugged version of Prince’s ’17 Days’: “let the rain come down” felt appropriate, if only figuratively, for my unmoored state.
HIT: Going for a swim in the crystalline sea and briefly forgetting my moneyless predicament.
HIT: Finally deciding to explore the area a bit more and coming across a group of DJs from the dinner the night before having lunch at an establishment that, mercifully, took artist credit as payment.
HIT: The seafood linguine in said establishment.
HIT: Returning to the stage on a full stomach to find Haseeb Iqbal, a DJ I didn’t know anything about before, playing sick tunes on a sick soundsystem to a bunch of sunburnt Brits dancing it out in the dust. This was a vibe I could get into. ‘Southern Freeez’ by John Rocca’s first band, from 1981, sounded as fresh as the first day I heard it. A version of ‘Summertime’ by Nina Simone told us Haseeb was going thematic with this set. A left-turn into T2’s ‘Heartbroken’ gave the soundsystem (and the dancers) a full-body workout. Haseeb occasionally got on the mic to shout out the sun, the crowd, the seafood linguine. It was pitch perfect for the setting, time and mood.
MISS: Alex Kassian came on after Haseeb with rolling house music. The crowd were up for it, but I wasn’t. It also sounded louder and more distorted, a real shame after how good the more instrumental tunes had sounded off both vinyl and digital. I decided to call it a day at Gjipe and went to catch the boat back to the main site.
MISS: One of the boat shuttles had gone completely missing so there was a significant wait to get back to the main site, which I spent in a queue of anxious beach ravers doing that thing of shuffling forwards even though the thing you’re queueing for is not actually there yet. We might all have ended up in the sea.
HIT: The boat, once it arrived, had a different captain with significantly better music taste than the one before. He opened with ‘Freed From Desire’, chased that with ‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)’ and closed with ‘Rasputin’. I’m not exaggerating when I say this speedboat ride was one of my top 5 sets of the festival.
HIT: The Pano Marko set menu living up to its billing. The vibe too.
MISS (for her): Ciel, that evening in the graveyard slot at Splendor, playing two hours to a dancefloor consisting of, initially, me and a few kids from New Zealand, then just me, and then, every so often, one or two other people who would come for a twirl and then leave again. I know it can’t have been easy for her playing to only one person but from my side it was a…
HIT!: Having a private listening party with Ciel for two hours, in blissful isolation, getting to dance in the soundsystem sweet spot with no one bothering me as she carefully constructed a tech house groove that branched out here and there into deeper proggy stuff, garagey stuff and even some minimal stuff. I kept thinking how lucky I was to hear a proper DJ doing proper DJing and to hear all these interesting records over a pristine system with no interferences. Selfishly, it was my highlight of the festival, even better than the camp-as-hell speedboat from earlier in the afternoon.
MISS: Getting blanked by Ivan Smagghe when I waved at him as he wandered onto an otherwise COMPLETELY EMPTY dancefloor during Ciel’s set. Thankfully, since the dancefloor was empty, there was no one else there to witness my embarrassment.
HIT: The Luigi’s Mansion fantasy I developed while dancing to Ciel’s set, thanks to the Splendor stage — with its faintly Middle Eastern scenography, cartoonish lighting, obligatory palm tree and full moon shining over the water (see top) — looking absolutely luminous. If you’ve played Luigi’s Mansion you’ll also know that its larger than life settings are completely bereft of other living beings. For those two solitary hours, I was Luigi.
MISS: The 6am wake-up call I knew I had to comply with if I was to catch my shuttle back to Tirana airport the next morning. This meant I left immediately as Cindy finished her set, missing that night’s festivities.
and last but not least…
HIT: The big arms and winning smile of the open-all-hours gyros stand man I stopped by on my final walk back to the hotel, who sent me off with a full stomach and the satisfaction of having spent all my artist credit exactly down to the last cent.
Well that’s it. If I were to do it again I would definitely be more strategic with my time planning, knowing which stage to do when and how to approach the Gjipe day parties (not that complicated: take cash). I’d be curious to see what could be done to mitigate the imbalance between the stages at certain hours, though I think it’s kind of a no-brainer that people want to take a break between the day and the night. Oh, and I’d make more visits to the gyros stand.
Finally, thanks to all the Kala team for inviting me, putting up with my complicated travel logistics, giving me three different opportunities to express myself on stage, and generally being available, friendly and supportive.
Glad you regained the confidence!