Together with a balanced combination of art, music and lighting, Uner and its new endeavour better known as UMAMII offer us an introspective journey within a new clubbing experience.
Strange characters disguised in the middle of vegetation, along with a fine selection of artists. This is only a small aspect of what this party can offer.
In view of the forthcoming UMAMII event next Sunday at the Pacha, we had the pleasure to have a chat with Uner and Alejandro Montoya in order to know a little bit more about this new party concept.
Enjoy!
Hola Uner, hola Alejandro! For the few that still don’t know about the amazing event that you are organizing, can you give us an introduction about the UMAMII and the history behind it?
Hello and thanks for the interview. For a long time, we were thinking to develop a new brand for events.
Nowadays, you have several handicaps as a promoter: you depend on the availability of big artists, on your budget and there are also some artists’ exclusivities that you must take into account when organizing an event.
We are big fans of neuromarketing and neuroscience, so we decided to conceptualize a brand around the 5 senses and partner up with Pacha Barcelona and your team to build up this concept and make it real. The initial idea was a kind of simple reunion in Barcelona, but after our first event we received lots of emails from different promoters interested on our brand. In that moment, we realized that we couldn’t stop throwing these kind of parties. And here we are today, already working on 4 events for this upcoming 2018.
With an ever-increasing number of festivals, parties and events that are emerging every year, how do you differentiate yourself from your competitors?
We are just doing few exclusive events every year where our main goal is to make the people having fun and make them feeling something different. Every week we have different meetings to see what else we could bring on our events. For instance, this time, we are taking people into a blinded dinner. Pretty cool isn’t it?
Since you arrive to the venue, you can feel that everything looks different. For example, we have our own aroma for the event, so you don’t feel that the venue stinks. The majority of the club is covered with grass and it is fully decorated. There are 10 actors interacting with the crowd, you could see neon quotes around the walls and on the toilette mirrors, lights changing, candy bars, a roulette, a real gipsy tarot card reader, hostess giving away scratch cards…In a nutshell, anything can happen during this event.
During our first edition, we have seen people crying for the happiness, strangers hugging each others. Everybody was extremely satisfied so much so that we have received a lot of messages from people giving us an amazing feedback.
Considering that UMAMII is an itinerant experience that will travel through Spain, how do you decide which is the ideal venue or place for this kind of experience?
The main concept is to change the whole place. We decided to start with Pacha Barcelona, where Uner had already been playing for 2 years. After our first event, we worked with Local 29 in Malaga, one of the best promoters in the South of Spain and now we are keeping in touch with Fabrik in Madrid. We need space and of course reliable promoters who understand our vision and who want to partner up with us. At the moment, for each event there are at least 20 peoople involved.
We imagine that the artistic direction is the result of the continuous interaction between the two of you. Do you always agree? When choosing an artist for your events, what are the criteria? Do you follow a precise objective in the construction of the line-up of each event?
Of course, this is a fundamental part when it comes the time to organize an event. We put together a wish list and then we select. At the beginning, we organized events with the support of some really good friends of us: Andrea Oliva and Andhim. Our main goal is always the one to book good artists with who build a good human relationship.
Among the names that we had for our events we can cite, for example, Dennis Ferrer, Francisco Allendes and Yousef…
It is important to know that considering the fact that we partner up with the venues, we always check together with the them if the specific act is a good fit for them.
What’s your opinion about Barcelona’s current clubbing scenario? What do you think about the overall offer? Do you think that Barcelona can be considered on a par with the cities of Berlin or Amsterdam in terms of electronic events?
Barcelona has a great clubbing scene, you can go out almost every night and find a good event. Its one of the best cities for the electronic music for sure. You have artists playing every weekend, festivals such as Sonar, great music business schools… but we are far in terms of licenses, support from brands and from the politicians.
More in general, what do you think about the club ecosystem in Spain?
We feel that the clubbing scene here is growing again. Probably you don’t find too many events on Friday as it used to be, but there are still great events and promoters in Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, Bilbao, Coruña, Gijón, Malaga, Granada… nowadays, there are many acts that are touring only in Spain.
Nevertheless, we have the impression that there are always the usual names being around in the various venues. That was the main reason that triggered us in creating something new, something different, something fresh for the Spanish clubbing panorama.
Finally, what are your expectations for the future? How do you see UMAMII in the next years?
Our plan is to continue making people having fun, increase our offer with longer events that can include art, dinners, streaming.
Above all, we want to spread the brand abroad.
