Spunite has been doing a lot of big events in southern Taiwan over the past few years, and this weekend is no exception. Named for the Spanish word for factory, the Fabrica party takes place tomorrow at the Kaohsiung Ciaotou Sugar Refinery (高雄橋頭糖廠), a 110-year-old group of warehouses that are currently undergoing renovations to create a cultural and arts center.
“We are only using less than 10 percent of the whole factory premises and we are still squeezing in three dance stages,” said Brian Tsai (蔡家偉), head of Spunite. “In the future, we are hoping we can do four to 10 stages, including indoor warehouse and outdoor areas.”
The Assembly stage is for trance and house, the Generator stage is for the harder side of dance music including drum ’n’ bass, hardstyle and electro, and the Warehouse stage is for techno, tech house and minimal. There will be 24 DJs in total at Fabrica, and the headliners are trance vocalist Emma Hewitt, Australian trancemaster tyDi, Germany’s electro-party duo Dabruck & Klein and Japan’s Mayuri, a minimal techno maestro.
Hewitt, who performed in Taiwan earlier this year, started off as a rocker.
“I spent my early years singing in bands that played rock and blues music,” she said. “For me, it was a good way to learn and develop my own voice and style.”
Then she met Chris Lake, who introduced her to electronica.
“He asked me to visit Scotland and sing one of his tracks, which was great but my voice didn’t really work with it, so we decided to write a new track together, which was called Carry Me Away,” Hewitt said. “Chris released the song a little while after, and then I was lucky enough that the song was heard by quite a few people.
“I was still in a rock band at the time and didn’t think of making the move to dance music. Cosmic Gate contacted soon after and we wrote Not Enough Time together, then Dash Berlin sent a backing track to me in Australia that became Waiting. It was then that I decided I was enjoying the dance music far more than the rock band, so I made the switch and never looked back.”
Two of Fabrica’s other headliners go way back. Stefan Dabruck and Frank Klein met while on vacation more than a decade ago and have been doing shows and producing tracks together ever since.
“I met Stefan during a holiday trip to the Canary Islands,” Klein said in an e-mail interview. “He was working as a DJ for the resort where I spent my annual leave. During those two weeks, we found out that we shared the same enthusiasm for electronic music.”
They decided to form a duo and have been inseparable ever since.
“We exactly know our strengths and weaknesses, and that we only have the chance to be successful as a team,” Dabruck said. “We’ve seen so many talented teams come and go in the last 10 years. Most of them split because of selfishness or hubris. We don’t want to make the same mistakes.”
One of the reasons the duo stands out is because when they play live, they deejay back to back.
“In my opinion, it’s much easier playing back to back than playing alone,” Klein said. “We always have lots of fun doing that. We usually play track by track back and forth, which gives our set a very special vigor.”
Dabruck added: “As we share the same taste concerning music, sometimes we both have the same idea for the next track in the same second.”
As far as production is concerned, Dabruck and Klein go into the studio with a clean slate and see what happens.
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