Tobacco Dock is the new place to be on Easter Sunday. The grade one listed 19^th century warehouse hosted some of the finest names within Techno and House to 5,000 lively and colourful ravers.

The lineup was very strong, the wonderful Balaeric vibe and helped us forget for 11 hours that we were in East London and not a stone’s throw from Bora Bora beach.

To start the day off, up and coming DJ Bowler got us going in the car park. He fully embraced that magical car park right from his first track and started testing out more experimental minimal sounds. The tracks had very distinctive rollers and baselines that made you scrunch up your face and lose control of your entire body.

We couldn’t help but notice his set had a Romanian minimal twist to it, which is right up our alley! To close off his set he played ‘Monkey Coops – The Bad Guy feat. Greg Turner’ which got everybody, including Guy Gerber, smiling, grooving and ready for the rest of the day.

SidexSide is an event that is supposed to challenge the DJ’s to dig deeper into their record bags, explore new music and adapt themselves to their partner’s style in a fast paced environment. Due to this, we were very curious to see how Guy Gerber and Dubfire would work out, as they usually play at rather different spectrums of the techno scale.

However, we were very pleasantly surprised. They seemed to find a perfect middle ground for both, with Guy Gerber upping his tempo a little bit more towards darker sounds of techno and Dubfire mellowing his usual fast paced, dark minimal techno more towards a funky minimal tech. It worked absolute wonders. The music took us on a fantastic journey throughout the pitch black car park, with some rather trippy, ambient minimal techno followed by a funky, upbeat track. You could see just how much those two were enjoying this. A truly fantastic set to witness in a location seemingly built for moments like these.

The last set of the day in the great gallery was reserved for two of the greatest DJ’s to play DC10, Nicole Moudaber and Jamie Jones. People often associate Nicole with a more Techno sound, and a few had questioned her ability to play ping pong with Jamie Jones as a result. However, these doubters were soon silenced as the entire crowd erupted to their opening track.

Both of these frizzy haired legends got the crowd going fantastically wild as green lasers started to light the great gallery and tracks started to go more towards techno than house. Nicole really brought the best out of Jamie and you could see just by how much he was dancing behind the decks how much he appreciated that.

The gallery was literally overflowing with colourful ravers from all over Europe and not one was looking sad. There was a sense that they were constantly challenging each other by trying to pull the other more into their usual direction, which was fantastic for us on the dance floor as it created a completely unpredicted, yet highly funky set. At

At half past ten the gallery was still filled to the brim, and the closing track was a remix of the legendary ‘Eurythmics- sweet dreams’. A very suitable track because that day truly was what our dreams are made of.

All in all Tobacco Dock 4/4 events are never to be missed, but if they do bring this DC10 style line up to London again with a concept as brilliant as SideXSide, then this is one you will want to sell your limbs for to attend!