Last Saturday was my 33rd birthday. It was also a super beautiful day here in Helsinki and the date for the annual Pacifique electronic music fiesta in Serena waterpark in Espoo. We celebrated the birthday with some 20 close friends travelling, eating, drinking, dancing, laughing and swimming together all day and night long.

Unity isn’t officially producing the event anymore as such but I’m still the “music director” of Pacifque. So planning the line-up and schedules is on my responsibility. Feel free to give suggestions for future events;) I think this year’s program seemed to be one of the most solid ones so far. Maybe it’s also that DJs and artists know the event too but it felt that everybody were part of a bigger story flowing smoothly from the chilled out beginning to the hedonistic ending. There’s been long discussion whether there should be some “harder” music in the main arena, but personally I think house music fits the surroundings perfectly. In Finland there are also so rarely “big” events with house in the main room that I think we’ll continue building on that tradition.

I didn’t catch all the artists and didn’t hear a bad word from anyone, but Käpä & Anselmi with their summery house, Unity Collective with their balearic nu-disco sound and Uke in sauna playing KLF’s sublime ‘Chill Out’ album in it’s 45 minute entity (if it ain’t broke why fix it?!) all definitely hit the right notes. The headliner - legendary Danny Rampling - took the crowd and was as rock solid as you can expect from someone who has DJed over 25 years and written a book on how to do it.

I played the last 90 minutes together with Mr.A and Heikki L as “Pacifique Allstars”. The last moments at main pool are always special with perhaps one of the most special DJ booth views I’ve experienced. This year’s set was eclectic selection of various forms of house music. Hessu and Ana are true masters of the genre so it’s always a pleasure to play with them. Some personal highlights from the set included Heikki’s new (yet unfinished) version of Klatsch’s classic ‘God Save The Queer’, Afrojack’s dirty-as-hell-yet-summery-in-some-weird-way ‘Pacha On Acid’ and Axwell & Dirty South’s remix of Temper Trap’s ‘Sweet Disposition’ which is already a modern classic. My alltime favorite summer track Planet Funk’s ‘Chase The Sun’ seemed to summarize the sunshine filled vibes nicely in the end.

This year it was also nice to see the production taking (once again) steps into even more solid direction. Huge thanks to all the tens and hundreds of people who were working the during the weekend. Conditions don’t get much more extreme than that so big respect to all technical/security/bar/decoration/medical/production making it all possible! Only clearly negative change I noticed was the increased amount of chlorine in the water which made my eyes hurt and all red in matter of minutes in pool area. I understood that the intention is to make the water more clear but we know where the shit goes from the water with chlorine: the to the air. And if I could choose between someone peeing on my arm or into my eye… well it’s not a tough choice!

Sooo… once again we had a magical event with some 1500+ enthusiastic music lovers. This will help us finns to make it to the summer months with more good memories and stories to be told. To keep them fresh we can always go to SESSIONS2 website and relive the moments once more. Thank you and see you again in 2011!

Hola!

It’s seven years now since I met with Joonas and Haba from Labyrinth possé to discuss some new and wild event ideas to do together. We wanted to do something that needed our (Unity & Labyrinth) combined efforts, something that hasn’t been done before. We came up with three ideas: 1) party in a waterpark (Pacifique), 2) party is cruise ship (Oceanic) and 3) XXX something that is still waiting to be done… Unity is not involved as such in production of the event but it’s nice to see how the Pacifique has a super professional team (Lauri, Joonas, Markus, Jenni, Jarkko…) working on all aspects of the event and making the production truly world class.

It’s been amazing to see how Pacifique has grown not only in terms of production but also in popularity and become a bit of institution in annual finnish clubbing calendar. Everybody was positively surprised how quickly (two months prior the event) the tickets were sold out this year. Recently we’ve also introduced foreign headliners who are some true legends of house music. Last year the spiritual father of european house sound Alfredo took us through 20 years of balearic classics while this year the “Godfather of British House Music” Danny Rampling will show why he is called “Legend of House”. Supported by the creme de la creme of finnish electronic music DJs. Old school (Jay Mellin, Käpä, Proteus…) next to the best of nu skool (Anselmi Kuusisto, Anton Sonin, Lauri Soini…)

I am playing the last set on the main arena with the traditional “Pacifique Allstars” collective formed by myself, Mr.A and Heikki L. It will be housey, summery, feel good, pumping sounds to finish off what will surely be another night to remember. Sessions guys and girls will be documenting the event with photos uploaded quite soon to the Pacifique website. Let’s make the summer sun shine in middle of a cold winter!

I’ve decided to try out Twitter to see if my daily routine can fit one more social media tool. The microblogging phenomena is here to stay anyway and I think it might be a useful tool for a trainspotter, DJ, artist and label owner alike. You can also find me in YouTube, LinkedIn, Last.fm, MySpace, Soundcloud, IRC-Galleria, Discogs, Flickr, del.icio.us, Facebook group, Wikipedia, Beatport, iLike and some others too:) So feel free to follow, discuss, comment and re-tweet at: http://twitter.com/DJOrkidea. Let’s see which category of average tweets (diagram below) my posts will fit into;)

After two episodes of prog and trance classics (themed around my 23 hour set on NYE) I head back to more fresh material with Radio Unity. That being said - there are couple remixes of all time classics in there too and couple which are from the last three months which I really wanted to include even they are not fresh from the trance oven.

We’ll start with more proggy stuff, will have some more atmospheric material to dive through and we’ll end with some super-duper-uplifting ones. Maybe I’m experience a happy period in my life but I’m definitely into occasional uplifting stuff again. Very much into the proggy stuff too haha;)

Nu skool producers are represented by the likes of Guy J, Ashley Wallbridge and Jochen Miller while the old school flags are carried by BT, Faithless and Solarstone to name a few.

Feel free to join the live discussion on Afterhours.fm message board at 21-22 CET time (22-23 FIN time). This set will also be broadcasted on Finnish Radio NRJ this Saturday at 23:00-00:00 and be available as podcast this weekend.

It was a happy surprise to hear that David West vs Orkidea track God’s Garden (featured on Metaverse) is included on the latest Buddha Bar compilation. Actually it’s the closing track of the two disk compilation which makes it even nicer. I’ve been fan of the compilation series for a long time and DJ Ravin has an amazing taste especially in the global chill out sound but also with the etno influenced more clubby sound found on the second disks. You can order the CD (and hear the clips) at least at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Buddha-Bar-XI/dp/B002B2VE3M.