18 June 2016 · Olimpiysky · Moscow
One night, one colour, one stage turning in the middle of the room. This was the fan site that counted down to it. Eight months after this night, the people who made Sensation announced there would not be another. The countdown stopped; the pages stayed.
What it was
Sensation called itself the world's leading dance event, and it was the only show of that size where what you wore decided whether you got in. White top, white bottom — a rule that never changed once it existed.
The other thing that made it look like nothing else: the stage stood in the centre of the room and turned through a full circle, so it was the decor as well as the platform. The crowd surrounded it instead of facing it. Everyone in white, one gold object rotating in the middle.
All of the above comes from a single page of this site: its history of Sensation, archived here in full.
How it started
Amsterdam. Miles and Duncan Stutterheim, the brothers behind ID&T, put on the first edition. It was called Shiva, and there was no dress code. Duncan did not think it would work and did not want to do it again. Miles did.
Miles had been killed in a car crash. Duncan staged the next edition to honour what his brother had wanted, and asked everyone to come in white. More than eight in ten did. The sight of it settled the question: white became compulsory, and the edition was called White.
16 April, Budapest — Mythology. The first Sensation held anywhere but Amsterdam, and the first step toward the claim it later made about being the planet's main dance event. More than thirty countries followed.
16 February: Duncan Stutterheim is given the Gouden Harp, among the highest honours in Dutch music, for what he did for the Dutch dance scene. Fewer than a hundred and fifty artists had ever received one.
5 March, on the day Welcome to the Pleasuredome played Hyderabad, the Amsterdam trailer went out: Angels and Demons, 2 July, Amsterdam ArenA. Two entrances, two ticket types, two dress codes — white for the angels, black for the demons.
18 June, Moscow. Olimpiysky. The Pleasuredome.
The line-up
The 2016 bill in full, in order of appearance on the main stage at Olimpiysky. On the page itself it sits second: above it, a heading for 2017 holds an empty space.
| Set | Artist | As the site introduced them |
|---|---|---|
| 23:00–00:00 | Mr. White | The official face of Sensation. There has never been a white party without him. |
| 00:00–01:10 | Lost Frequencies | The Belgian producer whose "Are You With Me" had just gone to number one internationally. |
| 01:10–02:20 | Sunnery James & Ryan Marciano | |
| 02:20–03:35 | Steve Angello | Platinum-selling, and one third of Swedish House Mafia. |
| 03:35–04:45 | Nervo | "And who said Sensation had to be men?" — the Australian sisters. |
| 04:45–06:00 | Sander van Doorn | The one who needs no introduction, including from people who know nothing about dance music. |
| all night | MC Gee | A Sensation regular, hosting. |
The night itself
There was no official stream. The site had spent weeks saying a broadcast was unlikely and promising a link if one appeared. None did.
What survived instead was second-hand and live: an audio recording off Radio Record, and four strangers' Periscope feeds held up over the crowd. That is the whole visual record this site was able to keep of the night it had been built for.
The tickets had gone the way the site kept warning they would. Dancefloor opened at 3 800 roubles, rose to 4 100, and the boxes — four to twenty-five guests, waitress service, parking beside Olimpiysky — ran from 80 000 to 300 000 and sold out first.
How it ended
This site was built for Sensation 2016 and nothing else. But it had already made room for the year after. At the top of the line-up page, above the names of the night it was actually built for, stood a heading — "Sensation 2017 in Moscow" — and under it a line saying the names would not be known before April, judging by previous years. It was the one thing on the site written about the future. In February 2017 ID&T announced there would be no 2017.
What they announced instead was a last night at the Amsterdam ArenA and a farewell tour. It was called The Final and it was set for 8 July 2017: Mr. White, Sunnery James & Ryan Marciano, Fedde Le Grand, Hardwell, Axwell Λ Ingrosso, and a guest whose name was held back. Tickets went on sale on 27 February.
The reason given was plain. Ticket sales had stopped selling out, the international touring had shrunk, and interest in the brand was falling; the organisers chose to close the story well rather than let it thin out. Seventeen years, more than forty countries, one colour.
Moscow, 18 June 2016, was the last Sensation held in Russia. The two people who opened and closed that night — Mr. White, and Sunnery James & Ryan Marciano, second on the Olimpiysky bill — were both on the final one in Amsterdam.
The closure and The Final: Sensation уходит в прошлое, EDM-News, February 2017. Russian editions and the count of countries: the Russian Wikipedia article on Sensation. The rest of this page comes from the archived site, apart from the acknowledgements below, which come from the person who ran it.
With respect
This was a fan site, run by one person. Nobody asked for it and nobody paid for it, and everything it had to write about was made by other people. Those people deserve saying so.
The white rule could have stayed a gimmick. Instead it turned forty thousand strangers into the thing everyone had come to look at — the crowd as the decor, the stage in the middle of it rather than in front of it. Very few events trust their audience with that much of the show, and fewer still hold the discipline for seventeen years without softening it once.
They also knew how to stop. The end was announced eight months ahead, with a date, a bill and a name, in daylight and in their own words — not left to fade out over a few thinner seasons. Ending something well is rarer than starting it well.
And to Brenda Munsterman, General Manager of Sensation International, for putting the event on — and for the conditional approval and the genuine interest she gave this site, which had no claim on either. A fan site lives or dies on whether the people who own the thing choose to notice it. She did, and she was gracious about it.
To Duncan Stutterheim, who carried on what his brother wanted and was given the Gouden Harp for what it did for Dutch dance music. And to Miles Stutterheim, whose idea it was in the first place. Thank you for the night of 18 June 2016, and for the sixteen years that led to it.
The site
The site began as a section of a larger listings project and was moved out onto a domain of its own, because — as its author put it at the time — Sensation deserved a closer look than a section could give it. Everything here was written for one date in one room.
It was also a test. In the last post before the event, its author called the fan site an interesting experiment and a useful one, and named what it was a prototype for: a news portal about festivals, then still in development. That project became Fest, which is also an archive now.
Still here
Forty-seven pages came back out of the Wayback Machine. Their text is the site's own and stays in Russian, the language it was written in; each page has a new layout and an English summary. Some images did not survive, and a link to a page the archive lost is left as plain text.
The same summer
Sensation was one date in a network of sites the same author ran. They have been restored from the archive too, and they cover the events that stood next to this one in the calendar.