An Interview with Groove Festival's Sam Barker

Photo: 2ManyDJs

This summer sees a festival début for Groove, a dance-centric spectacle that will grace Clune Farm on the banks of Loch Ness for an entire day of rave-worthy exploits.

The line up is looking suitably strong for Groove to mark its arrival on the festival circuit, with dance giants Groove Armada and 2ManyDJs heading proceedings. There's also a strong contingent of modern greats too, with Tensnake, B.Traits and Eli & Fur repping their respective avenues of dance music might.

With its inaugural edition a matter of weeks away, we caught up with Sam Barker, one of the guys behind Belladrum Tartan Heart and now Groove, to find out a bit more about what to expect from the festival.

So this will be the first Groove Festival, can you tell us a bit more about the team behind it, and how the festival came about?

Yes, the first but hopefully not the last! The festival came about after the demise of another well-known and much-loved festival on the site, which hasn’t taken place for the past few years.

The four founders of Groove all work in the music sector in the Highlands, and over a drink one cold, dark night in February when we got wind that the site was available, we decided to do it – but focusing purely on dance which is what the locals said they wanted.

What kind of vibe can we expect?

It's so difficult to communicate what you’re trying to do in year one with no photos or videos to help get the message across – just site plans and sketches which aren't exactly exciting.

Ultimately our aim is to make Groove an audio and visual festival, but by visuals we’re not talking just the view of the Loch! Because it’s dance music, and therefore DJs, we’re not having a conventional main stage. We’re designing a custom structure that will use lots of projection and lighting to bring the sets to life as the sun goes down.

All of the founders have worked on festivals before and want to do something completely different with Groove, starting from scratch to make use of the constant progress in technology these days that allows artistic expression across various forms. Hopefully by next year that will make better sense, when we’ve got some photos and videos!

What can you tell us about some of the headliners? Who are you most excited about?

For me personally, it's Harri & Domenic from Sub Club. 21 years in the game and Subculture is still bringing some of the most interesting electronic music on the planet to Scotland every Saturday night (watch them in action below).

But you know what? We’re really excited about them all! At first glance the line up might seem to be full of ‘classic’ artists but the reason we chose the line up we have is that while the bigger headliners are some of the greatest dances acts of the past 20 years, they’re still reinventing what they’re doing and not content to live off their back catalogue, which they could do.

Groove Armada are putting out their new record on Moda Black in the next few weeks, which has been remixed by an esoteric range of producers such as Pillow Talk, Kölsch, wAFF and Joris Voorn. Similarly, 2ManyDJs litter their sets with everything from Glaswegian duo 6th Borough Project to the likes of Maurice Fulton, and then they’ll go and round it all off by dropping their remix of Jungle. It’s a great mix.

Tensnake speaks for himself! B.Traits is quickly making a name for herself as the authority in underground music and Eli & Fur have just been called up to mix this year's Space Ibiza compilation alongside the legendary Carl Cox. It’s all pretty exciting!

Photo: Loch Ness

The location is pretty outstanding, how do you think that'll add to the festival experience?

On a good day, with the view and the natural amphitheatre, it’s got to be one of the best sites for a festival in the world. And on a bad day, I’d still have it in my top 10.

What advice would you give to anyone attending Groove Fest?

Book the Monday off work!

Head here for Groove tickets

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