A photographic walk through Rainbow Disco Club's hillside

Every April, a hillside in Shizuoka's Higashi-Izu turns into one of dance music's most quietly influential gatherings.

Rainbow Disco Club (RDC) has been running for seventeen years now, and this year's edition might have been its biggest step yet. Imagine experiencing Four Tet, Floating Points, Daphni and Ben UFO all on the same bill, and not only that but doing B2Bs. Definitely something everyone was talking about, way before event day.

Add DJ Nobu, Gonno, Wata Igarashi, Helena Hauff, Mala, HAAi and Antal B2B Hunee, and you get a line-up that intersects perfectly between genres.

The main stage sits inside a natural amphitheatre, the Izu hills folding around it like a green amphitheatre wall, and the sun does the job a lighting rig usually handles.

The crowd shots from early afternoon read more like a hillside picnic than a rave; sunglasses catching the light, bodies loosened across the grass instead of pressed into a barrier.

By evening the same stage sheds its daytime skin; the scaffolding rig lights up in blue and pink, a now-more-prominent disco ball swings loose at the top, and once dark properly sets in, the smoke cannons and haze take over like the site is exhaling.

Away from the stages, we see the in-between moments that usually get cropped out of festival coverage; a morning run threading through an underpass, a yoga session folding quietly into the middle of the campsite, meeting furry friends backstage.

Seventeen years in, sold out again, and still exporting its format to Amsterdam, Berlin, Bali and beyond, Rainbow Disco Club keeps proving Asia doesn't need to import someone else's blueprint for what a world-class festival looks like.

Beyond space and time, indeed.

[Images via Kazuki Miyamae, Ken Kawamura, Masanori Naruse, So Hasegawa, Suguru Saito & Yosuke Asama

Amira Waworuntu is Mixmag Asia’s Managing Editor, follow her on Instagram.

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