We arrived to the castle at about 10:00pm… Kryal Castle is a purpose built medieval style theme park consisting of a main stadium type area, a maze and a lot of other rooms of various shapes and sizes and is the perfect venue for an outdoor party.

The main area was outdoors in the stadium area with 1 giant tent/stage at the front some nice bouncy flooring to dance on and a bar at the rear, and a little further behind was the Smile Police Airlock. To the left was concrete stadium style seating and further on from there the outdoor PHD vs Kandy stage, a small Psy Trance Room and the Electronic Highway room.

So after doing the obligatory tour to get our bearings we headed straight to the main stage to hear the sounds of Richard Bartz. The dance floor was now slowly but surely filling up as he played a mix of tech-house and tribal techno and was the perfect warm up for Jamie Bissmire.

Well what can I say, his style hasn’t changed that much since I last heard him as the 1 half of Space DJs many moons ago, which I’m not complaining about at all. He played an excellent set of driving, dark, bass-heavy and sometimes minimal techno. It was nice and hard and very pleasing to the ears as well as the dancing shoes!

Unfortunately I only got to hear the latter half of Zombie Nations set but what I heard was good. He played a quirky mix of electro, techno and breaks and finished his set to a packed dance floor with a breaks mix of his hit “Kernkraft”.

Finally!! At 1am the man I had been patiently waiting all night to see, Giuseppe Ottaviani was on! And he certainly didn’t disappoint with his signature style of euphoric melody driven trance. Playing through all his recent and old hits including last years “Through You’re Eyes”, there was no way anyone could move off the dance floor while he was playing classic after classic. This guy was definitely the highlight of the night for me and others, he was definitely up there with some other famous trance acts I’ve seen over the last year. Sadly his hour of Kryal fame eventually had come to an end, but boy did that hour fly by quickly.

Now it was time for the harder stuff with ASYS on next. Playing a set that built up to some hard-as-hell, acid infused hard trance, to a LOT of very adoring fans!

Melbourne’s unholiest DJ Hellraiser was up next and kept the main area pumping with his own brand of dark and hard acid, playing a some new stuff and a lot of older tracks and his very own “Acid Noir”. Don’t get me wrong, he played a great set, but I was left thinking maybe he needs to update his record collection a bit.

After Hellraiser the dance floor turned into a sea of bouncing PHD hoodies as the hardstyle legend Blutoniom Boy came on stage and whipped the crowd into a frenzy. His track selection could have been a little less on the cheesy side but it was still good fun to dance to and enough to keep the main arena packed to the brim.

Overall it was a fantastic night and I can’t wait for the next party at Kryal. Although some of the purists might disagree, I thought the variety was great. Going from Techno to Trance to Acid and finally to Hardstyle. I got to hear all the genres of music I like on a big sound system and mainstage to boot. Suffice to say I was one happy camper.

Most areas were full for the greater part of the night and the crowd was certainly enjoying themselves to the very end. The toilets were constantly being cleaned all through the night, well the castle ones anyway, the port-a-loo’s were pretty much a no go zone.

My only beef was that Guiseppe only played for an hour which was not nearly long enough compared to how much time was devoted to the acts that followed. And perhaps there could have been a bit more in the way of lighting, although the crown casino style flame throwers at the main stage were very cool to look at, and more than made up for the lack of lighting and lasers.

Three cheers for Hardware and Killrockstar for putting on yet another awesome event!