Club review: Luciano @ Ushuaïa Ibiza

For a number of years Luciano stood at the forefront of the techno house scene alongside other big names in the business such as Sven Vath, Ricardo Villalobos and Loco Dice. A regular at clubs in Ibiza such as Amnesia and DC10, one would regularly come across one of Luciano's performances at Cocoon on a Monday night (and if you were lucky enough he would be playing back to back with his many-times DJ partner Villalobos). At the same time, you could find Luciano showcasing his growing Cadenza imprint along with his label-mates at their highly acclaimed beach parties at Ushuaia in Playa d'en Bossa.

2010 saw the year of change for the Cadenza don as he established his own night, Cadenza Vagabundos, at one of Ibiza's biggest clubs, Pacha, and focused on developing his own Balaeric path. A year later, and the relocation and expansion of Ushuaïa saw the same for his Cadenza beach parties, as he took up a fortnightly residency at the new club hotel. And this year, well it's all been kicking off: Cadenza Vagabundos is looking stronger than ever, the now not-so-new Ushuaïa is looking as cool as ever, and Luciano is looking bigger than ever with his weekly residencies at Pacha and Ushuaïa! So we thought it would be rude not to check out one of his parties...

Throughout the season, Luciano has brought big guests along to Ushuaïa each week, ranging from Reboot and other members of the Cadenza crew, to DJ Sneak, Maya Jane Coles and Laurent Garnier. We chose to head down for Dandy Jack, Dennis Ferrer and Luciano.

Dandy Jack is somewhat of a Chilean legend (Chile being a country that Luciano lived in for many years and a country that he has drawn a lot of his musical influence from), so it was sure to be a special set. Unfortunately, we missed it! But we did manage to catch the end, and that was just enough time to see how connected Dandy is with the music and the party – he was dancing his head off on the huge stage before the crowd.

We danced between the stage and the pool that dominates the centre of the outdoor club, as Dennis Ferrer took up his position behind the decks. Similar to Dandy, Ferrer was well into it, building up the drops, bopping around the DJ booth and dancing around with towels on his head; he was in the spirit of things. He worked the crowd with belters like Marlon D's crazy percussive 'Jesus Creates Sound', Flashmob's huge hit 'Brick House' and Richy Ahmed's remix of Mathias Kaden's 'Jackathon' – plenty of house music to chew on!

At about 10pm, the main man Luciano joined the stage with a whole host of his compadres. He quickly took over, and began to pump his latin-infused tech house across the grounds of Ushuaïa. As he did, trapeze artists took up position either side of the stage on giant rings. Bursts of fire and confetti flew up in front of the stage alternately. The lighting was really good; lasers and powerful lights rippled across the crowd, and the visuals were amazing. I had seen them before when Luciano closed the Ibiza 123 festival, and they looked even more impressive here. They were like the most impressive kaleidoscope patterns I had ever seen spread across in pyramid shapes across ice crystals, with the odd eyeball staring you in the face.

Thumbs up for the top notch visuals, but I'm just not so sure about all the rest of the showy stuff at Ushuaïa. I thought that, especially with house and techno, we all went for the music, so why all the theatrics? To be fair to Luciano, he's not the only one doing it in the big clubs, but it is here where my attention was actually taken away from the music, when I hadn't really wanted it to be.

We took a trip to the other side of Ushuaïa where a number of people were dancing in smaller foot pools and enjoyed the tunes from over there, as a gang of costumed dancers took over the stage. Luciano was smashing out some of our favourites that he has treated us to when we've seen him over the years, including the dub mix of Lemos' 'Ypomoni', Analogue People In A Digital World's sexy vocal/sax driven 'Rose Rouge' and Luciano's own awesome remix of Inner City's classic 'Good Love'. Luciano quickly worked through the tunes, merging beats together and threading vocals over the top where it seemed fit; if only he would STOP playing Gotye's annoyingly ever popular 'Somebody You Used To Know'! Apart from that, his set was really good.

Ushuaïa, both club and hotel, is very VIP. After all, it is “the hotel that loves VIPS.” Its grounds are posh, expensive and very swanky! Luciano's night does work well there, the guests are always top quality and Luciano still plays loads of banging tunes. I think he's heading in a slightly different direction from the latin-tech God who would blow our minds in the clubs a few years back; he's now a little bit more commercial with more focus on the show and a little less focus on the music. Personally I'd rather go see him back at Cocoon with Villalobos, but you can't deny that at the moment Luciano's name in Ibiza has grown bigger than ever!

Words: Jack Law

Read more Ibiza news, reviews and features

Buy Ibiza 2012 club tickets