April 1st, 2011 - SEKOIA - the lovechild of MIDI Fight Club (Studio K, Amsterdam, NL)

[safefire]

More danes ?! Next step on the euro MFC tour is a gig in KBH I guess

For sure, the dubstep scene here is pretty huge.
Hell, we could wrap it up with a trip past AIAIAI, grab some headcups :P

[tekki]

More danes ?! Next step on the euro MFC tour is a gig in KBH I guess

That would be so awesome!

Still wanting to go to Danmark once in my life, what better opportunity, providing you'll want me there as well.

[Whyte]

Alright, things have been silent for a while. Things went haywire for a bit, before becoming ALOT more awesome and after that we had to turn it all down for a bit. Let me explain, i'm going to be totally transparent with this:

Been a bit silent here for a while. But we've been reaally busy making this all happen.

So the changes have come through.. and i must say, these are some damn positive changes .

I'm waiting for some more confirmation before going public with this, as i don't want to make the same mistake again.

This was the last post i made in this thread.

The original Sekoia was to take place on the 1st of April in Amsterdam at Studio-K, a venue in the southwest of Amsterdam with 2 areas with a total capacity of about 600 people.

This was all sweet and me and my partners were working hard on getting artists, logos and a website going.

Until the venue started to give some problems. The smaller area of the location (which would hold about 200 people) is normally used as a cinema, and has a fold-up gallery with chairs on it; they can move the chairs in and out as they please. Our event was to take place on a friday, starting round 11p.m. Normally on friday nights, the venue plays a movie at the cinema-area that finishes around 11.30 and they weren't planning to make an exception for us. Also, they didn't want to request a special night permit from the city for our event, which would mean we could only stay open till 4a.m.

So, if they played the movie 'till 11.30, moved the gallery out of the way as fast as possible, we moved in with our stuff (stage, lights, sound) and did our soundcheck a.s.a.p (say 1,5hours) that would mean we could open it up at 1 a.m... which would give us 3 hours in that room.. and we could still pay the price for the whole night.

We didn't really like this idea, and played with the concept of scaling Sekoia down to a 1 room party, it could work. But silently, without the knowing of my partners, i started looking around at some different locations again.

After a week or so i got a call from a venue in Amsterdam, saying they loved our concept and wanted to meet us in person to discuss the possibilities. This venue was Hotel Arena, one of the most beautiful locations in Amsterdam, consisting of 2 areas, one of them being an old chapel (beautiful), with a combined capacity of almost 1200!

We had a great appointment and decided to move Sekoia to Hotel Arena. This meant we'd have to scale up again, and expand our line-up as well (we would need to fill up a bigger venue, so bigger artists were needed). So we postponed the date from the 1st of april to the 14th of may.

So from there it was all hard work. Lots of contact with bookers, programmers and other people. Turns out (this was all the start of jan), almost every big artists already had their schedules full for 6 months ahead, so it was really hard to get some decent artists, especially if you don't have a reputation or the right contacts. Seeing as we are new in the business, this was pretty hard to get around.

Besides the artist-booking, we needed to set up a business. A party for 500people is pretty easy to get off the ground without getting too official, but events pulling in over a 1000 tend to need more paperwork.

The biggest problem however, was money. As said before, if you have little experience on this side it's really hard to make it work. We've been looking for investors all over, but in these days of economical crisis, and the over saturated party culture here in the Netherlands, people aren't giving away their money so easily (and they are right not to do so).

This is what killed the time we had. The search and worries about getting enough money on time is what made us realize we need more time to make this work.

As this whole thing is getting quite serious, we need to pull our shit together. We're gonna need a business, some people that know what they are doing, some cash in the bank to start with and some strong concepts and paperwork to back it all up. We won't get this done AND organise a kick-ass event before may 14th. And in the end, that's what we want: to organize a sweet, unforgettable events with many follow-ups. To make that work you have to make the first, kick-off event as memorable as possible and we just don't have the resources to make that happen right now.

This is not to say Sekoia isn't going to happen, on the contrary: Sekoia is going to be bigger, better and more amazing than even we could hope for. We're gonna have to move the date to the end of the year or the start of the next one though. It's sad, but for the greater good.

TL,DR version: We don't have enough time -> moving the date till further notice.

-----------

Long post, but i just wanted to explain what we've been busy with, so you guys won't think we've been sitting on our asses .

Let me know what you think, and if you have some ideas, skills or anything that you think might help Sekoia become even better, let us know .

Whyte out.

[Whyte]

To all participants of the Sekoia-contest:

Thank you so much for entering! We are still planning to have one or more contest entrees play at the Sekoia event, so all participants that have joined in will be kept up to date about further happenings with the comp.

We're sorry we won't be able to host you on the 1st of april of 14th of may, but really hope to see you in the future!

[bumtsch]

Thanks for the update and backstory. Best of luck with this !
I checked the venue's website yesterday and it did seem like it would be a challenge to host a house/techno gig just with the already known lineup then.

@Danes : De skulle vaere så dejligt at rejse til kbh igen - og jeg vil gerne spiller digitalplader også Men hvorfor ikke straight techno ? (ok... jeg har nur et dubstep track )

[3heads]

To all participants of the Sekoia-contest:

Thank you so much for entering! We are still planning to have one or more contest entrees play at the Sekoia event, so all participants that have joined in will be kept up to date about further happenings with the comp.

We're sorry we won't be able to host you on the 1st of april of 14th of may, but really hope to see you in the future!

So I guess due to the changes in plan the competition deadline is kind of moot right now? If it is, I would rather add 3-4 tracks to the warm-up set I've already done and re-record it in a 1h-format than putting together another 45min set for the peaktime part (even though I'll in any case do a matching peaktime mix, and actually also an afterhours mix as a third mix in like a small concept "mix series") this week. And then deliver something more recent for the contest at a later point.

[Whyte]

So I guess due to the changes in plan the competition deadline is kind of moot right now? If it is, I would rather add 3-4 tracks to the warm-up set I've already done and re-record it in a 1h-format than putting together another 45min set for the peaktime part (even though I'll in any case do a matching peaktime mix, and actually also an afterhours mix as a third mix in like a small concept "mix series") this week. And then deliver something more recent for the contest at a later point.

Yeah dude, no worries about the deadline. We're gonna relaunch the whole comp when the time is right

[Flaekiface]

Sad to hear it didnt work out for you guys. But happy to hear that its gonna work out even more for you next year :-). Looking foreward to being a part of the comp. in the future.

[Den Erello]

Although it's not going to happen in April I'd say good happenings!

[Afterhour Ali]

Thanks for pointing this out Whyte. Pushing it back is no problem. In the end it is going to be much better. Looking forward to this.