Marc's Blog: clubbing - Paul Oakenfold at Audio SF

Marc's Public Blog - Clubbing and Trance

Popsicle Halloween 2004

As a matter of fact, after another 10 years (2015 and beyond) the good news is that Trance has grown quite a following in the US, and places like the SF Bay Area, and while Trance has been declared dead a few times in the last 10 years, it's still going strong here.
Trance Family SF is definitely strong in the area, we've been getting more big trance parties every year, including many top DJs that come visit us what feels like every other week now (as of 2018-2019), and through those events, I made many friends in Trance Family SF. Thanks to you all.

Over those years, I got the chance to meet a few of my favourite DJs, including Armin more than once, and my last hobby has been to work on lights for my shirt and pants (version 3) and (version 4)

all the pictures here

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2019/04/05 Paul Oakenfold at Audio SF

π 2019-04-05 01:01 in Clubbing

I can't believe it had been 15 years since I last saw Paul Oakenfold in a club, namely Ruby Skye, and funny thing enough the last 3 times I saw him after that were at Burning Man (2005, 2007, and 2014).

Paul has alwasy been special to me, because he was the first Trance DJ I started listening to in the late 90's. I had 3 of his albums on loop in my not so portable battery powered hard drive archos MP3 player :)
Sadly, he's falling a bit out of favour over the years, but then again it's been 25 years. It's hard to stay at the top for so long. At the same time, I can understand it must be hard for him to go back from big arenas to smaller clubs (and to be fair Audio SF was a disappoitingly small club). On the plus side, many of the people who showed up were likely his true fans from over the years, so hopefully that was heartwarming for him.

Chris Willscape opened the evening:

Around midnight, Oakey took over for what was supposed to be a 2.5H set.

The first hour of the set was so so, and a slow transition from the previous DJ who was not playing uninspiring music, and then he transitioned into nice trance. Honestly, he didn't seem to have much of a good time initially (he was probably also a bit tired as he made a few DJ mistakes during his set like a very poor off beat transiton, or even playing the same tune twice by mistake), but he eventually warmed up and started playing more nice tunes.

In the end, the set turned into almost 3.5H because we were all having a good time :)

By 03:30, the club had thinned out a lot given that it was late, but his true fans were still there, and he was nice enough to stay for pictures, which was the best news of the night for me, a picture with my first EDM DJ, the one who brought me into this rabbit hole:

Thanks Paul, thanks for the night and all the years before that.

See more images for Paul Oakenfold at Audio SF