Last Year at ADE: A Church and a Crane

Last October I went to Amsterdam Dance Event (ADE). I experienced a lot, but the widest swing was hitting two completely opposite venues in the same city: a church and a crane.

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Raving in a Church

One of the venues was Westerkerk — the church where Rembrandt is buried, and where former Queen Beatrix once got married. During ADE 2025, "ZAMNA × SONA" took over the building as a sold-out showcase, doors from 5pm to midnight.

Churches have absurdly high ceilings, which means the reverb is absurd too. Music hanging in a decay you'd never get in a normal club — the room itself became an instrument.

Staying on the church theme: I also got to visit Don Diablo's house, a converted church he turned into a four-story home and studio, famous enough to get its own MTV Cribs episode. The fact that a top Dutch DJ lives somewhere like that tells you something about where music sits in this culture.

A Hotel Inside a Crane

The other venue was the Faralda Crane Hotel in NDSM, Amsterdam's old shipyard district in the north. A genuine 50-meter industrial crane, fully converted into suites, with the original steel structure of the ship-lifting mechanism still standing.

Sound inside steel hits completely differently — crisp, tight highs, the exact opposite of the church's massive reverb. And the music playing there felt tuned to that acoustic, which is when it clicked for me what "designing sound for the room" actually means.

Same city, same five days: Rembrandt's burial ground and a hotel built inside a crane. That range is what makes ADE what it is.

What I Felt About Being a DJ in the Netherlands

What struck me most in the Netherlands was how high the social status of DJs and musicians is. The kind of money it takes to convert a church into a home — and nobody there finds that strange. On the DJ Mag Top 100, Martin Garrix has been #1 five times, Tiësto three times, plus Armin van Buuren and Hardwell (two wins each) — seven of the top 20 are Dutch. It's a career young people actually aspire to.

What a DJ Actually Is

Worth pausing here to ask: what does a DJ actually do?

You could describe it technically — someone who blends existing tracks, someone who operates gear. But at the end of the day, a DJ's job comes down to making people dance. Track selection, mixing skill, gear — all of it is just a means to one end: how do you get everyone on this floor moving right now.

Afro House's log drums, techno's mechanical repetition, choosing a set that plays into a church's reverb — it's all reverse-engineered from that one goal. What makes a great DJ isn't mastering the gear, it's reading the room in real time and picking the next single note. That's still a place AI can't easily step into.

What ADE Actually Is

Amsterdam Dance Event started in 1996 as a business gathering for the Dutch music industry — modest daytime seminars in hotel conference rooms. It's since grown into one of the largest conference-plus-festival hybrids in the world: five days every October, nearly 300 venues across the city, over 1,200 events.

2025 was a record year: 600,000 attendees from 140+ countries, 11,000 industry professionals, 3,300–3,500 performing acts. It's less a festival than an entire year's worth of dealmaking and showcases compressed into five days. 2026 marks its 30th anniversary, running October 21–25.

A Fast Lap Through EDM History

The swing I felt between the church and the crane is, in a way, the history of EDM itself. Here's the quick version.

1970s: Disco — born out of New York's gay and minority club culture.

1980s: Chicago house / Detroit techno — Frankie Knuckles remixing disco and R&B at a Chicago club called The Warehouse is literally where the word "house" comes from. Around the same time in Detroit, the "Belleville Three" (Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson) pioneered techno. House's soulfulness and techno's mechanical futurism were opposites from day one.

1988–89: The UK's Second Summer of Love — Ibiza's party culture got reimported to the UK, acid house and rave culture exploded, and unlicensed warehouse and outdoor raves reshaped an entire generation.

2010s: EDM goes commercial — David Guetta, Calvin Harris, Avicii, Skrillex, and Swedish House Mafia took over pop charts. Tomorrowland, Ultra, and EDC became festivals of hundreds of thousands of people, and the EDM market was estimated at roughly $6.9 billion by 2015. The sound shifted toward scale and spectacle over groove — and this is also when the Dutch DJ wave really took off.

2020s: Non-Western genres take over — which is where Afro House, covered in an earlier post, enters the picture. A rhythmic vocabulary matured over decades in South African townships went viral via TikTok, and through artists like Black Coffee and Keinemusik became part of the mainstream language of global dance music.

It's Not Just Afro House

Digging into this over the past week, it's clear the pattern extends well beyond Afro House — genres born outside the West, discovered through social media, are rising across the board.

  • Amapiano (South Africa) — Spotify streams up 5,668% from 2018 to 2023. Up 1,404% in Kenya and 10,330% in Nigeria between 2021–2025. Even in Johannesburg, its home turf, it's re-accelerating at +203.9% year over year. 55% of its streams now come from outside Africa — that's the real story here.
  • Baile funk (Brazil) — Brazil's own take on Amapiano is absorbing funk rhythms, while the American version is cross-pollinating with trap hi-hats and R&B vocal phrasing.

The common thread: discovery no longer runs through radio or club charts — it runs through social virality. Genres are being born hyper-locally and going global directly, and that pattern has fully settled in over the last few years.

What Sits Between the Church and the Crane

Seeing both the church and the crane at ADE made me realize EDM can no longer be told as a one-way story of "European rave culture spreading to the world." A township in South Africa, a favela in Brazil, and a 600-year-old church in Amsterdam are now sitting in the same five-day event, on the same continuum.

The core of being a DJ — making people dance — hasn't changed. Only the stage and the vocabulary keep getting updated. That's the biggest thing I took away from ADE last year.

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