Ibiza

An island in the Mediterranean Sea, belonging to Spain. Ibiza is noted as one of the birthplaces of electronica and DJ'ing of electronic dance music. Many top performers in the electronica genres have either resided in Ibiza, worked there as house DJs, or used Ibiza to premiere new tracks.

Ibiza's roots as a venue for electronic music go back to the late 1960s, when American and European hippies used the island as a vacation spot. After-hours house parties featured psychedelic music played from vinyl, 1960s-style discotheque lighting, dancing, and of course drugs and casual (and often public) sex. As the 1970s evolved into the 1980s, some of the parties got too large and intrusive to be held in homes or beach cottages, and so they moved into bars and become commercial enterprises.

Electronic dance music began to appear in the mid-1980s, and with it, the club's DJs evolved from merely being record-spinners and become performers in their own right, taking after some of what was being done in the rap and hip-hop worlds. Clubs became larger and stayed open later, as the island's reputation grew with people seeking dancing and nightlife. The club Space set a marker in the late 1980s; as island law prohibited the clubs from staying open 24 hours, Space closed at 6 AM each morning, taking an hour to clean up and then re-opening at 7 AM for daytime partying and dancing. Other clubs followed, and the scene grew large enough to attract top DJs, spinning tracks from top producers. Club patrons developed a rather unique sleep cycle, involving periods of sleep and chill-out during the day, and staying up all night. A cafe called Cafe del Mar latched onto this trend, holding daily sunset chill-out sessions featuring ambient music. Cafe del Mar became influential enough in the ambient style that it began commissioning and releasing its own compilation albums of ambient tracks.

As the scene has grown, the usual problems associated with large crowds of tourists have appeared, rankling the residents. Over the past decade, the government has undertaken various measures to try to price accommodations on the island out of reach of most of the young adults who patronize the clubs. So far, though, these measures have had little effect.