Lentekabinet

Lentekabinet is a house and techno festival in Amsterdam-Noord. The first edition was on 2 June 2012 in Noorderpark, by Buikslotermeerplein. Thomas Martojo and Casper Tielrooij organised it. The same founders later built Dekmantel Festival, the larger summer meeting. This text is about Lentekabinet, the smaller spring party with a capped ticket count. It is not the big August festival. It is a one-day — and later a weekend — of dance music in a park north of the IJ.

Before it went outdoors, the Kabinet name had already run twice at Studio/K. In 2012 the Dekmantel label turned five and took that first spring into Noorderpark. Hours ran from one in the afternoon to eleven at night. A ticket cost twenty-five euros. The announced cap was one thousand five hundred people. The new park sat a short hop from Centraal Station, but across the water: Amsterdam-Noord, not the bar centre. Anyone who crossed the IJ found a new park, not a permanent stage compound.

The 2012 bill sets the music without a flourish: Joy Orbison, Ben UFO, Kyle Hall, Space Dimension Controller, Norman Nodge, Vakula, Ryan Elliott, San Proper, Cinnaman, Dekmantel Soundsystem and Mark du Mosch. It is club house and techno, not a radio-hits poster. San Proper played live. Most of the rest DJed. Beside the music there was art and culture as part of the day, not as trim: shows from the Eddie the Eagle Museum, work by Raymond Lemstra, Wayne Horse and Steven de Peven, and Radio Romantiek interviewing visitors and guests. The programme fitted one day and a city park.

In 2013 the gathering moved to Het Twiske, a nature park in Oostzaan, north of Amsterdam, and stayed there. The Twiske is not a square. It is wet ground, with water, paths and trees, outside the city. The second edition was announced for 1 June, again to open the outdoor season. The move did not change the name or the founders. It changed the ground: from a newly opened neighbourhood park to a reserve where the crowd spreads between clearings and shore. Tickets stayed limited.

Later the format went from one day to a two-day weekender, often on the Pentecost weekend. Capacity did not open into a city-size crowd. The point was to keep numbers low so the park would not become a mass site. You leave Amsterdam heading north, leave the city, and enter a protected area. There is no after-party street at the gate. There is a park, a day or two of dancing, and a return to the train or the car when the programme ends.

The experience follows the format. In the afternoon you walk between outdoor stages, on grass that can be damp even without rain. At night you need another layer and less space between the speakers. Dutch June weather can be mild or a wind that cuts by the water. Anyone going to the Twiske does not find the compact Noorderpark site. They find more metres, more water, and the feel of being outside the city even though Amsterdam is close. The capped ticket shows in the queues and in the space between bodies.

This meeting is not Dekmantel Festival. Martojo and Tielrooij sit in both. The Dekmantel label sits in both. The calendar and the scale do not. Lentekabinet is the spring date, first one day and then a weekend, with a closed cap. Dekmantel Festival is the other event, the summer one, larger. Treating them as the same bill in another month is a name error. Here the park is the Twiske — or, in 2012, Noorderpark — and the music is floor house and techno, not an annex.

A crowd that fits in one thousand five hundred people, or in a still-held weekender, is not a stadium crowd. It is a crowd that comes to play records and to hear records, with room to look at a show between sets. Reports of the first spring stress that cap and the low price as conditions for an intimate party, not as a trophy. Telling that first spring with care is not apologising for scale. It is saying Amsterdam-Noord and, later, Oostzaan had a club day outdoors without copying a mass-festival site.

Lentekabinet is better read as Martojo and Tielrooij's spring party, not as a small version of their other festival. House and techno sit in that sentence. So do Noorderpark in 2012, the Twiske from 2013 and the ticket cap. The August field is another site and another month. Here the ground is a wet reserve or a neighbourhood park, and the clock is June or Pentecost. What remains is a gathering that learned to last two days without ceasing, altogether, to be a spring party with a short capacity.