I'm quite aware of how long-winded I am. This review is written more like a journal entry so it includes minute details, as you can see by its length. To be kind, I chopped my review up with subheadings so you know which parts you'll find boring and skim or skip accordingly. I'm not all that interesting, just as a warning, so read at your own risk. Mods, move me if need be.

DEPARTURE, FRIDAY/SATURDAY, BARCELONA - skip if you don't like boring details.

Friday, September 5th. Regina, Claudia and I waited 6 long months (looong months) to wheel our overweight suitcases into JFK airport. We had just found out on the car ride over that we had a layover in Madrid (Oh, so THAT’S why it’s a 10 hour flight!”) More waiting. We checked in quickly, grabbed some horrendous salads and wine at the airport bar, bought Vogue, water and some fruit and hopped on the plane. There weren’t enough Xanax in the world to keep me asleep the entire time but I made do by laying down in the empty seat next to me and listening to some Rone and Eluvium. After our layover in Madrid, a reasonable $6 coffee at Starbucks and another flight, we were in Barcelona. We spent the remainder of the afternoon wandering around searching for tapas that was shellfish-free for Clau, pork-free for Gina and fat, calorie, meat, preservative and taste free for me. There was some more walking and loud laughing involved before dinner at the marina (the mussels were excellent), sleep and our wake up call bright and early that Sunday 7th.

I do believe “Sasha” was the first word out of my mouth that morning. I froze my ass off and was still on only day 2 of my Z pack ( I apparently had a colony of germs living on my tonsils since Vegas and Toronto the week before) but I felt well enough to roll out of bed and do a happy little jig in honor of the party I had talked about non-stop for months. I tossed my shit in a suitcase while the girls carefully packed. We checked out, flew to Ibiza and checked into the Ibiza Playa Hotel in Figueretas. Claudia was nice enough to give me the window seat so I could marvel at the island on our way in.

-- And this is where our trip stops sucking so much --

SUNDAY, BARCELONA/ IBIZA - skip if you don't like Space, Sasha or English lapdancers.

I had heard a lot about Ibiza over the years. In my mind, it was a clubber’s Mecca – A place any trainspotter worth his minimal scarf had made a pilgrimage to at least once. I somehow failed to notice in all the pictures I googled that Ibiza is certainly not the pristine island getaway I thought it would be. Rather, it was a British Seaside Heights, complete with drink specials, booty shorts and souvenier stands. I’m pretty sure there was a Tilt-a-whirl lurking nearby as well. While this would not be the place for me to have a warm and fuzzy with nature, it was, true to what I was told and imagined, the right place to test your party parameters.

I didn’t bother unpacking. I put on a leather skirt, heels and a white t-shirt, vowed to get a haircut when I caught sight of my horrific Amy Grant curls and tried my hardest to tame the happy little knots in my stomach. Dinner blew. Sangria was fantastic. The cab ride was – interesting. Entering Space was - frightening. But before I knew it, we were inside. All three of us. After 6 months and 55 euros, we were there. To our dismay, Ben Watt was not on the lineup. Shitty. We made do by exploring the club. Smoking Jo almost kept us on the Terrace indefinitely. We pried ourselves away to check out Ben Corbel outside (awesome) and came back to hear Cassius, who was just relentless. We whooped and screaming over their set it for around an hour. After a bathroom break, I was lured into the main room by a Jay Tripwire track I hadn’t heard in years. Lo and behold, Clau found a platform for us to dance on. I spearheaded the trip upstairs, barged my way up front and leaned over the railing to see Nic Fancuili. I have NEVER heard this guy crank out a set like I did that night. He’s good in New York and Miami… very proggy but never ever like this. More whooping and screaming ensued when a cute girl named Rachel from Manchester in a gold lame bikini, bright green eyes [rolling into the back of her head] and brown hair teased up to wazoo came to join the party. She explained how she loved everything: her job as a lapdancer, Nic Fanciulli and Americans, which I found alarming. (She obviously had not been to a Walmart in the past few years.) She explained how she loved all the most exciting parts of the US, “Vegas, Texas, DC!!!” Very sweet girl. Must look her up on Facebook and tell her to avoid Texas.

We headed back onto the terrace at around 1 am with our new friend Ace (Hi Ace) to catch Sasha and James Zabiela tag-teaming. They were good, as expected. It wasn't the most energetic set I've seen out of either one of them but they played a solid set peppered with some of my favorite tracks (Zabs played "Holding the Moth" and Sasha played "Destroy" and "I Need Medicine"). We danced and drank in front of the booth with some nice Welsh people who apparently liked Americans as well (I still don't get it) until Sasha and Zabs left the decks at 4 am. 5:30 was when the club entered it's sad, scary and desperate hour, so we left. We got back to the hotel and each battled one quarter of a granola bar before bed. The granola bar won.


MONDAY, IBIZA - skip if you don't like techno, mullets or adjective abuse.

We woke up, gauged our head trauma from the night before, discovered that the Spanish won't make yolk-less eggs for me (though I'm sure they were obliged to add spit to mine for requesting such) and made it to the beach by 1. The water was calm with steady wave-lets. I swam out as far as the breakers and back then walked along the pier to check out Figueretas and the islands off Ibiza's coast. We lounged and called it an early day to grab dinner and head to DC10.

DC10 was what I imagined Ibiza to be: A small space crammed with 3,000 of the most unique, insane, dynamic people fueled by love of the music, mountains of drugs and a rare type of energy so intense and volatile and wonderful that just being in the room makes you feel excited and a little nervous all at once. There were wall to wall mullets, facial piercings, pixie wings, painted faces, buckets of sweat dripping from every happy dancing maniac under that no-so-soundproof makeshift roof, plumes of trapped cigarette smoke burning your eyes and big bad security shoving through, zeroing in on That Guy and escorting him out with a trail of concerned, equally fucked up friends. No matter the state the people around us were in and no matter how many times I got burned with a cigarette or had a drink dropped into (into, for Chrissakes) my boots, track after filthy fucking track kept us in that unbearable insane asylum for 4 hours. There was not a single filler track played the entire time we were there. I had no idea what dj's were on since we couldn't push close enough to the booth. We did hear Tania though, which was quite evident by the chanting and "Tania Volcano". I've never been in a room with that many people that seemed to feel the same way about the same type of music my friends and I dig. I wouldn't know how to recreate that energy in another venue - and I don't think you could, even with the same dj's. I guess it was the people that made that party... they certainly were dedicated, to say the very least. To spend hours on end on that enclosed terrace with a smile on your face shows that you mean business. If Sven Vaeth weren't playing at Amnesia, we easily would have stayed all night. We should have cleared our entire day and night for this party though. And we should have worn disposable clothing.

We freshened up at the hotel before heading back out and made it to an empty Amnesia by 12:30. We hung out in the side room for an hour or so, moved back into the main room and staked our claim on the first step of series of platforms. We parked it there for the entire night along with our new NYC Space Invader friends Bill (who looks like Billy Corgan) and Claire (who is a cute little ball of spunk). Amnesia did a great job keeping the theme of the party, Disco Invaders, going with dancers and the most theatrical performance I've ever seen in a club as Sven Vaeth came on. This inspired Clau and I to quit our jobs next spring to come back and be part of it. Definitely feasible.

Sven was a lot trancier than I thought he'd be. I expected the uniform of mullets and pixie wings at the Cocoon party as DC10 but noticed a more polished crowd. Nevertheless, the music was enjoyable and though it was trancey, we weren't subjected to the same synthesizer sounds for 4 hours as is customary practice for other big room dj's. I'm P not naming V names D.

The night wound down and we decided to leave. Bill gave us the name and number of his friend in Barcelona whom he said could show us around. Claudia screamed over an aggressive pick-up attempt, which caused the guy to flinch and me to snicker. We left happy, tired and without voices.

TUESDAY, IBIZA - skip if you don't care about my desire to leave you forever.

Tuesday was mellow. Breakfast, Bora Bora (which barely had music playing until 5:30 pm), near-heat stroke and dinner in the only non-tourist spot we could find in Ibiza town. Fantastic wine and mussels. Afterwards we did some shopping and tequila shots. I declined a 16 year old Italian boy's invitation to "go to bed with him" but I did help him pick out a Pacha t shirt for his girlfriend.
Claudia had been feeling under the weather all day. Regina and I were ready to rage at Carl Cox at Space but we all decided we'd have more fun if we kept things low-key until the following night at Pacha (ah, hindsight...), thus we retreated to the hotel.

It's about this moment that I commenced what Claudia calls the greatest meltdown she's ever seen, thank you very much. Now, I don't quite know if it started as I was walking downstairs or in front of the confused yet fascinated man at the front desk (who was so very creepy and charming all at once) but I started to get the overwhelming feeling that I was missing copious amounts of awesomeness all over the island. Then I realized I would be leaving in one day and I would miss all my favorite dj's and parties (I had STILL never seen Luciano) after I left for home. By the time I got back up to the room with a Formentera ferry schedule in hand, I was on the brink of tears. Then I opened the door and cried that hideous silent cry that closely resembles a full body dry heave. The girls laughed. I cried some more. There was a little cursing involved. We had our obligatory mid-week heart to heart where I vented about wanting to move far far away indefinitely. I also expressed my fear of getting old and losing precious time. Then Gina pointed out that I was, "...still wearing my retainer for fuck's sake and [am] not old." We all laughed again, turned out the lights and went to bed. Epic night.

WEDNESDAY, IBIZA - skip if you DO like Erick Morillo, you tacky motherfucker

We had the best beach weather on Wednesday, our last day in Ibiza. We baked, befriended and berated some nice British men in the water (they tore into my Jersey accent which sent me into fits of giggles), ordered fruity drinks, survived death cab on the Disco Highway and came home to shower and change for Pacha.
Aaah, Pacha. Something inside me told me to avoid Morillo at Pacha at all costs. However, I listened to advice from Ibiza veterans all summer long, so much so that my judgement was a bit skewed. Normally, I know exactly what dj's I do and don't like and where I want to and refuse to go. But people assured all three of us that dj's we would never go see in New York are great in Ibiza. Lesson learned: Erick Morillo may be a good Erick Morillo in Ibiza, but he will never be a Sasha. Ibiza's an island off the coast of Spain, not Never Never Land. It was an unrealistic assumption that Morillo would morph into a techno dj just because of the venue. Even the club wasn't "my thing". I'm used to dark, dingy clubs with dirt and fraggle rock rooms. Pacha was a bright, flashy club with vocal house and a [very good] restaurant attached. [red flag #1] Still, we gave it a shot.

Inside, we hung out on the terrace while drinking to lounge music, passed through El Cielo (the room Cielo in NYC's meat packing district is named for) and hung out in the main room, complete with carousel horses (red flag #2), twiggy dancers in lingere and a sparkly "Subliminal Sessions" sign. Morillo bopped around behind the decks in his shades, occasionally fist pumping (HUGE RED FLAG #3) to his own catchy tunes. We heard some local favorites, including the track that assured us that, "We love house music," the one that reminded us that, "This is house music," just in case we forgot and my personal favorite, the one that enticed us to, "Open our minds... to house music." Claudia left at 2 because she felt sick. Regina and I tried our damndest to stick it out but decided to leave around 3 because the musical fruitiness was escalating exponentially. ...[continue reading]