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Croatia’s Dimensions Festival has fast become world renowned as one of the most beautiful, intimate and eclectic events out there. Taking place in the seaside Fort Punta Christo, which was built in the 1800s, artists like Theo Parish have played and personally requested to return. And though it’s only coming up to its third year, the team behind the festival have plenty of experience, having started the larger, sister festival, Outlook, some years before – a sure sign that the team is a capable one.
Beauty and reputation aside, every festival has its inevitable challenges, and Dimensions is no exception. So we caught up with the festival’s creative director, Johnny Scratchley to get a better sense of what goes into running one of the summer’s most unique and anticipated events.
Dimensions is one of the most beautiful and unique festivals in the world - how does it feel to be responsible for such an entity? It’s very difficult to see it in perspective to be honest. We feel proud, and my only reference point for that really is watching Bonobo and Mount Kimbie in the Amphitheatre last year and talking to them afterwards about the venue, coupled with the audience and obviously the music selection and how it made people feel – artists and customers. It was different. Different to anything anyone had experienced before.
We’re now heading into the third year of Dimensions. What have been the biggest changes or challenges since the beginning? Well, we’re fairly well versed at working in Croatia now, which is good (laughs). The main issues are based on the fact that it’s a very long way away so that’s a challenge and still is. There’s always difficulties for managing from a long distance, and when you want to make improvements and step up your game and keep coming up with these ideas that are really hard to execute – which most of the time are fairly unnecessary but they satisfy our creative urges – so we certainly made problems for ourselves.
But then also you know one difficult element of putting on an event like Dimensions is that you have to promote to a fairly niche crowd spread across a large area, and you are asking quite a lot of them there to spend. So it is always hard to sell anything in this way because of those facts, and of course it adds to making it special at the same time. But it’s hard, there’s a lot of convincing going on.
I think that’s why it retains such a special feel – because people commit. They fully commit financially, and it isn’t that easy to get to, yet you still manage to get thousands of people there every time. So you’re obviously doing something right! We hope so.
As you know I love the branding. It’s sophisticated, modest and alluring. I've heard there's significance in the Dimensions logo itself – do tell…Well it was lovely to start a new festival for lots of reasons, after already running Outlook for 5 years. One positive about that was we could start again in regards to our branding and how we designed the thing. I had an amazing five hour conversation/sit down/meeting/blue sky with three or four people that I know very well – artists, graphic designers, videographers – who understood who we were, and I explained what we were trying to achieve and we sat around and we just came up with how we could build a visual vision based on that. And so we came up with the idea of a cube within a cube, which is called a hypercube. And so you connect the edges of a smaller cube within a bigger cube, which is an incredible geometric shape because it never looks the same from whatever angle you look at it and it actually gives the impression of movement, when it’s a static image.
We loved that visually, but it made sense because it was this idea of internal angles and so there’s an exterior to what you see which is – bang. It makes an impression. But then the moment you dig in a little further you can see the interior, and the way that those relationships are, and the way that they develop and that is just perfect. It goes hand in hand with our music policy. We liked the idea of internal dimensions and something having more than just one obvious side. And then it developed further when the hypercube came into it.
The programming spans so many edgy and exciting electronic realms. Who are you most excited about hosting this year? I’m really excited about the singers, actually. Omar – can’t wait to see him perform and how it comes through. The amphitheatre show with Nils Frahms is just gonna blow me away. Electronically, it’s for me about making sure I see Underground Resistance live, which is a spectacle I’ve been wanting to see for years. And Theo Parrish live and Rhythm & Sound – the way they fuse slow techno and dub music is something really close to my heart. It was almost a gateway for me to kind of understand more minimal techno. So I’m gonna be there from 5 minutes before to make sure I see that.
The Amphitheatre events look very special indeed. Can you give us insight into those parties? The Dimensions amphitheater show is one of the best lineups I’ve seen, let alone been involved with. Nils Frahm with Kwabs, Darkside and Caribou. Darkside is obviously a really exciting project off the back of Nicolas Jaar’s personal escapades of the areas of electronic music that he enjoys. This is his new project so I’m excited & confident that its gonna be a step up from where he was. I have seen Caribou live at Glasto 4 years ago and that was the best live electronic show I’ve ever seen. Really close, tight, so free…compared to listening to a DJ it takes it to a whole different level.
So yeah, to put those two headliners in that 200-year-old amphitheater setting and have them supported by two newer artists, Nils Frahm and Kwabs. I mean Kwabs’ voice is….I can’t even describe it, its so close to you when you hear it. And it think its close to anyone whether its live or on a record. Knowing how that’s gonna resonate with the venue and the people there is so exciting.
The location is unrivalled in my opinion. How did you first discover it, and for someone who has never been, how would you describe it? The fort we discovered in 2009, originally, and we brought Outlook there in 2010 through meeting the right people in Croatia and having them introduce us to it. We essentially take over a whole peninsula that shoots out into the Adriatic just north of Pula near the Italian border. We take over the peninsula with our main stage being in the woods, the beach being all the daytime activities, the harbor where the boat parties go and come back to, and the main sort of feature is this 200-year-old fortress that was used for wars for 120 years and really pretty horrible stuff – a bastion of Croatian attitude towards protecting their land.
It’s a really beautiful well-kept fortress but was covered in…since we arrived and the 10 years before they’ve slowly been digging it out and we’ve been a part of that. So you have the moat that goes all around the edge of the fort, two bigger style venues within the fort, Mungo’s Arena and Fort Arena 1, both around 800-1000 people. And then we’ve got some really exciting features coming up this year with how we’re using the fort and so people have the opportunity to come and spend the whole night in the fort so they don’t have to move anywhere else, so they can really feel the gravitas of this building properly.
It’s individual in a way that you need to experience it, ‘cause to rave next to a 4 metre high stone wall, it gives you a feeling, and that just resonates with the music perfectly.
Is it true that goats were used to gut out the moat? Yeah we sent a couple goats down. [Laughs]
Outlook and Dimensions came from humble beginnings. I remember the parties up in Leeds and ones down in Brighton, the parties using all the university venues in one night, the Subdub and Central Beatz nights. I remember when Midland was making drum & bass as Apt Pupil and you were MC Jila. If you could describe the journey since 2007 in three words, what would they be? Unpredictable and exciting.
We started in Leeds as a crew basically and we were running New Bohemia and Vagabondz as a group of directors and so we all just found ourselves deciding to put on an event in Croatia, and without knowing what was gonna happen, and only having a small amount of money to put in as that’s all we could do. I think that when you try and do something in the right way and for the good of music, rather than purely profit, in a sensible and thought out way, you’re not only going on a career path, you’re also going on a really enriching journey. And taking a lot of people along with you – and that really has been the process up until now. We have an inkling of what’s gonna come in the future but really no idea which I think is exciting.
How do you find the time to squeeze everything in? Um…at the moment, we don’t really. We wake up with our laptops and go to sleep with them again at night, and we will never ever finish our to do lists. But we only hope to prioritise in the most thought out way possible. [laughs]
Finally, what's been the proudest moment for you, spanning your career? I don’t know. I get to enjoy it a bit more than everyone else cause I get to perform at Outlook and that’s probably it you know, it’s brought me to tears to think of how…it’s a certain sort of feeling and its quite emotional ‘cause we’ve done it all very personally. We’ve made decisions ‘cause we’ve thought it’s right for us, and so to be able to stand up and perform to the people who have bought into that and are living it out is incredible. And it feels like there’s reason. There’s purpose in what we do.
Dimensions Festival takes place from Thursday 28th August through Monday 1st September 2014 at Fort Punta Christo in Croatia. For more info, click here.
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