NYE Amsterdam

Spent New Year in Amsterdam and ended up at the above, dancing like a bag of spastic elbows all night at the mysterious Ruigoord, an old hippie commune / hangout about 22km outside Amsterdam (that 22km seems a long way at 5 in the morning on freezing New Year's day). A great barnstar venue, in a village full of fog and fireworks and odd sculptures and old hippy buses and an old church that they've turned into some kind of psychedelic temple, complete with a DJ mixing dutch folk with tribal techno and oddly affecting Snow Patrol covers. Reminded me a lot of the old Megatripolis nights at Heaven, with any number of people who could be Frazer Clarke's progeny bouncing around like machine elves, tossing firecrackers and generally grinning themselves an injury.

The music was good too: none of yer poncy dubstep or minimal here, just balls-to-the-wall techno and trance - I'm as headnoddingly awed as the next man to the lure of a Villalobos remix (that Fabric 36 album is a killer, isn't it?: constantly skidding along the divide between pretension and genius / delirium and death-eating) - but sometimes (and NYE is one of those times) you just want sound to be energy, you want to feel the drums in your eyes and you want multi-coloured hippy girls dancing around you like their beads depend on it...

I buggered my leg with so much dancing...

NOTE TO SELF: adopt less frantic, less bouncy dance style for next year.

The night ended when we managed to catch a lift back to Amsterdam with some decidely dodgy, bourbon quoffing homeboy ravers in a car that seemed somehow whittled.

Anyway, the pics come courtesy of Rob Triskele's site (most of my pictures look like they've been to the cleaners). I'm in there somewhere!