22 countries and counting.

Festivals are a different kind of stage. The crowd is bigger, the sound is huge and the moment lasts only as long as your set, so every minute counts. Over the years I have been lucky to play and work in many of them, and this page collects the ones I keep closest.

It started at 22 years old, opening the SonarClub night at Sónar Barcelona in 2001, and it continued with Sónar in 2004 and the first Sónar Galicia in 2010, where I was Music Director in my home city. In 2011 I came back as main local production manager and also took the stage with the Lakeise Band.

Along the way there were Monegros Desert Festival in 2006 and 2007, Eólica Festival, MOVE Music & Sound in A Coruña, Jameos Festival inside a volcanic cave in Lanzarote and, most recently, Sun & Snow Weekend in the Sierra Nevada.

Some of these festivals I played, some I programmed and some I did both. Open each page to see the poster, the line up, the pictures and the videos that I have from those days.

A warm up is not filler. It is not the part of the night you survive while you wait for the headliner. It is the part where the room decides whether it is going to trust the night or not.

When the doors open, the floor is empty. People arrive in small groups, they are still ordering the first drink, still looking for their friends, still deciding where to stand. The music has to meet them there. Too much energy too early and you burn the room before it exists. Too little and nobody ever comes to the floor. The job is to build something, slowly and on purpose, so that when the headliner walks in, the room is already warm, curious and ready to go wherever they want to take it.

It is all in the selection

A good warm up starts days before the show. I think about who is playing after me, what their sound is like, what they will want to play and what they will not want to hear in the room before them. Then I choose every record with that in mind. Tempo, key, texture, how long a groove can breathe. Nothing flashy, nothing that steals the spotlight, and never the record the headliner is about to drop.

It takes restraint. It takes dedication. It takes hours of digging for the one track that opens the night the right way, and the humility to play it when nobody is paying attention yet.

Never look down on it

I have been lucky to play the warm up for artists who shaped the music I love, and I never took a single one of those nights lightly. Every time, the goal was the same: hand over a floor that is alive, not a floor that is tired. When the headliner smiles at the end of my set and picks up from where I left off, I know I did my job.

So please, never treat the warm up as the small slot. For a promoter, a booker or a headliner, it may be the most important part of the event.