The Party V Report ..

by Sleeping Dog / The Natives

It was the year 1995, X-mas was just over, it was cold outside (hmm.. are friends electric ??) 4:00 am, december 27th I was still awake, quite logic since Unlce Bob's was to pick me up around that time. They were five minutes too late, but hey we were in time in Antwerp to pick up Purple Zebra, Emperor, Pointer/Digital House and Msk/Tragedy. From Antwerp we travelled to Breda where we were going to join the New Order bustrip to Fredericia. Fredericia is a place somewhere in Denmark you know, and in Denmark people have the habit to organise a party each year around the same time between X-mas and New Year.

Well, first we planned to join a Belgian bustrip, but since not enough dudes showed up to come along and pay the bus we had to find some other way of transportation and since Breda is just 45 minutes drive from Antwerp it was even better to join the dutch bustrip. Around 6:00 am the bus left in Breda. We had to pick up Nostalgia and Massive and some other fellows in Utrecht and then we could go straigt to the partyplace.

Jeez.. those bustrips take long.. but no problem. We had our friends, our movies (Speed, The Mask, Revolution Man, and some others) and our equipment. After a really long drive we finally arrived the party place.

When we enterred the party place the party was already busy for about 8 hours and we had missed the deadline for the 4 Channel Music competition which was a disappointment for some of the people that had joined the trip. One big hall , around the same size as Asm'94 , that is bigger than Asm'95 but smaller than Tp'94. It was quite good filled but there were 2 big problems, the first one were two big cabins that were almost right in front of the bigscreen. All the people on the right side had to move to see the big screen. The second one was that you coulnd't hear the music when you were in the back, e.g. it took me over half an hour to find out that the music competition was busy, and during the music compo we couldn't hear a thing because of the Rave concert going on in the Sleeping Hall. Can you imagine that .. the Rave concert .. lot's of noice, in a sleeping hall ?? Right.. it seemed like they originally had another hall for sleeping but there were some problems with the people they hired the building from. Acutally it was no problem for me since I din't plan on sleeping. Well.. as every year the food was available 24/24 but expensive. The Hamburgers were cold (and worse than last year)

Party time is meeting people, meeting people is getting new rumours and news. Like there is .. nah check out the front new section somewhere else in this diskmag ;-) Some people I certainly didn't expect to meet was the other part of Synergy Design, you never know where you're going to meet these guys next time. But this time they were a complete surprise, specially since we finally managed to release our music disk.

Well.. time for some demo compo's then.. the gfx compo was showed twice, which is good.. but the second time they showed more.. obiously some disk got lost and were found back.

The intro and demo competitions where way under level. Not one single intro could catch my attention. None of them was worth winning. Luckily there were about 3 good demos 'cause al the rest was also way too average .. what's happening to the scene.. are we getting tired, withouth inspiration ?? Are we at the top of our power ?? Damn guys be creative.. make something new, better.. I hope Mekka, The Gathering and X will give us some new demo's to talk about.

Ok.. about the compo's then .. the organisation screwed them up by 'loosing' some of the disks. It looked like they were ignoring everbody who was speaking dutch. Acme, Logic Design and Nostalgia's demo's where lost and disqualified ..same with the fast intro from The Kip Brigade.. did they lose them or did they confuse dutch with french while they had orders to ignore al French groups for the Chirac scandal

Now to The Party V and money earning ! I has been sayed that the party was too fucking commercial, even the organisers say so

/***** Quote mode on  *****/

From rvc@vision.auc.dkTue Jan  9 15:54:33 1996
Date: 8 JAN 1996 20:19:24 GMT
From: Rene Vinding Christensen 
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.demos
Subject: Re: Demo-parties (was Re: TP5)

S M Carless  wrote:


>: But Today I think that some Party Organisers are even worse: they make money
>: from the scene although they belong to it.
>
>Actually, I think the last thing in the WORLD I'd want to be at the
>moment is a party organiser. FAR more parties have ended up with
>everything fucked up and the organisers financially out of pocket than
>anything else.

>I could go on. I don't think the organisers of parties are in it for the
>money. I wouldn't be a party organiser in this day and age. :)

Imagine a main organizer receiving more than 40.000 dkr, do you think
that he did it for the money, or was the extra money just not worth
thinking of?

(Now imagine 3-4 main organizers, and 50 other organizers being paid
a minor amount for the work, still not for the money?)

I don't know about you guys, but when we start to pay people a real salery
for their work, I'm in doubt. When you pay the amount as above, then I'd
say it  was for the money. And thats speaking as a party organizer myself.

/***** Quote mode off *****/
Mc Donnalds commercials during the competitions ?? Jeez.. even the party T-Shirt had commercials on it.. Smarties, In the Suriprise competition you had to have some in your intro somewhere. Jeez this sucks.. I wonder why I'm telling you guys al this.. I'm probably the 5th who's writing the same in this issue.

Emf/Plant got 8000 DKK and a Pentium-75mhz, 1G HD, 4XCDROM,crappy soundcard,14 inch monitor, Keyboard, Mouse, ATI MACH 64 2MB gfx-card etc. at the party-place. That is way better than Assembly 95, from which nobody has received prizes. As you might have heard almost nobody got his money from Assembly'95 that's why the commercial shit had to be cancelled this year (or did they found enough money afterall ?? Ok they got their money.. but was it really worth al the Commercials ?? I think nope..

Some food stuff .. the hamburgers were way to cold, the pizza's to small the drinks to expensive, and they were almost always out of spaghetti. The city was to far from the party place to go and find some food if you wanted to (Herning was way better)

Oki.. I'm tired complaining about The Party.. just one final thing I'd like to mention. Almost none of the Dutch groups plan to go back next year. They even plan to do a new party at the same time : TakeOver'96 but that's not sure yet.. we'll see what the future brings. Back to non commercial and smaller parties.

cya around..

Sleeping Dog / The Natives