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Written By Marco Bombaci.
Last week we witnessed history with Tomorrowland hosting its first-ever virtual festival. With Tomorrowland 2020 in Belgium cancelled due to COVID, many people are confined to their homes and travel bans made attending the festival impossible, this would be a Tomorrowland that will now go down in history.
In true Tomorrowland style, no stone was left unturned with epic production, suspense trailers and even party packs that featured the famous Tomorrowland bracelets.
Now the best part of all was that the people of Tomorrow proved it didn’t matter where you were watching from, that we were all united through music. For my friends and I in Sydney, we were lucky to be able to host a COVID-Safe house party with ten friends. A projector and nice speakers as a “main stage” in the lounge room, and a smaller TV screen in one of the bedrooms as the “alternative music stage” - I am not going to lie, it was mostly techno that played in this room. We even got a cheeky live set from our very own resident in our group Möki!
So how did the festival stack up? We ask the BTD team for their thoughts on Tomorrowland Virtual Festival 2020. Today to finish up with BTD Lead Content Creator and Techno guru - Marco Bombaci for his take on Tomorrowland Around The World Digital Festival, The Reflection Of Love: Chapter 1.
The MVP set: Having missed day two of the festival, I have had to go back and watch some sets through the relive platform. However, for me, it has to be our very own MaRLo. It is so great to see him grow and grow, and I think this set was incredible!
Expected more set: VER:WEST (aka Tiësto) - While it was a good set and right up my alley, I believe it lacked originality and he could have easily been mistaken as a DJ from the Afterlife label. For a brand new side project, I would have liked to see more from the veteran DJ.
Favourite stage of the festival: The Core stage was just absolutely insane! I hope that Tomorrowland can build this in real life. It completely blew me away!
Room for improvement: I would've liked to be able to customise my avatar and the ability to connect with a group of friends. I also would have liked to see the avatars populate each stage in real time, and have an “attendance” count for each stage.
New Discovery Artist: Yves Deruyter! I had never heard of him, and he played the first set at the Core Stage. I was blown away by this high energy techno set.
My highlights from the festival: First and foremost, after spending months with no gatherings, it was really nice to be together with my friends and have a bit of a party.
Secondly, seeing Eric Prydz’s visuals incorporated into a stage that was remodelled just for his new [CELL.] show. It wasn’t quite like his Holosphere performance in real life back at last year's Tomorrowland, but it was still an incredible spectacle.
I cannot go without saying how incredible the stage designs were, and how accurate the Atmosphere and Freedom stages were to the real deal!
So what are my final thoughts on the festival overall? Once again, Tomorrowland exceeds expectations and is to be commended on how much time and effort went into producing a digital festival of this calibre. Being a bit of a tech nerd myself, I was completely in awe of the detail in each stage, and all the real life camera angles, and fireworks that seemed so real. Not to mention how quickly this went from concept to product in a matter of months, and a team of 200 working around the clock to deliver this experience in a matter of a few months.
It was also so great to see the artists embrace this change, and perform as if they were performing to a live crowd, and also deliver us a great show to wherever we were in the world.
Overall I would say well done to the team for bringing to life something that we could all share in, with so limited time to do so. Now, let’s hope that next year the world is in a better place and we can meet on the Aussie Hill in Boom once more!
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