What keeps people coming back to Reworks?

Wednesday, 09/18 – Evening

It was the first day of Reworks, just after 7:00 PM, at Palataki. Most people around me were dressed like boutique owners and mingled in small groups, networking. For a moment, I thought I had mistakenly ended up at a corporate party. I asked Dimitris, a guy in his 20s working at the bar if it would be like this every day. He replied, “You’ll see what it’s like tomorrow when the big names arrive.” I was taken aback. There’s no way he considers Cerrone a “small name.”

Some people actually seemed to. “If you’re really a journalist, write that even his mother doesn’t know who he is,” Vangelis said after asking me to take a picture of him with his friend Thanasis. Both were in their late 20s (a couple of years older than me), from Thessaloniki, and mainly there for the warm house music of Anané & Louie Vega, who were set to play later.

I passionately defended the great disco daddy, even when Vangelis dismissed my arguments with a simple, ‘Girl, you’re stuck in the ’80s.’ But I wasn’t alone. Many of the people I had initially judged were now jumping around to Cerrone’s set, just as I would have been if I didn’t feel so out of place in that crowd. That’s when I began to change my approach. After all, I wouldn’t learn much about the crowd if I kept looking down on them.

I asked Vangelis if he had been to Reworks before. He said, “I’ll sound old, but we’ve built this place. What about you?” It was my first time at Reworks. I had four nights to learn how an electronic festival has stayed alive for 20 years through its audience.

Thursday, 09/19 – Evening

“Techno parties are the only place where you really have a good time—everyone dances however they want, and no one cares,’” Nefeli replied with innocent enthusiasm when I asked her why she keeps returning to Reworks. She had come to Palataki with her friend Revekka. They both grew up and studied in the city. “‘And parties like this aren’t that common in Thessaloniki,’” she added.

The elusive promise of a ‘party like this’ had attracted a much broader crowd than the previous day—the festival audience in its true form. Art students with mullets, hipsters in windbreakers, PRs from local clubs in sleeveless Moncler jackets, girls who in Athens would only listen to generic radio stations, girls in tracksuit bottoms and acrylic nails, gearheads, and veterans of electronic music—everyone was there to hear ARTBAT.

Their impressions varied greatly. One group was hoping for more rain so they could brag about experiencing such an intense set in a downpour. Another group preferred INELLEA because ARTBAT ended up feeling too commercial for them. A third group was disappointed by what seemed like a smaller crowd this year—usually, you can’t even get a drink—but they decided to wait and see how things would be tomorrow.

Friday, 09/20 – Evening

When I saw the crowd gathered outside the fences surrounding Palataki, I started to understand what they meant by “let’s see tomorrow.” Inside the fences, Solomun and, earlier, Mano Le Tough seemed to have the crowd in the palm of their hand. And what they wanted to do with it was make it dance.

After mingling with the crowd, I took a photo of Katerina, a mid-20s pharmacist, sitting on a friend’s shoulders. Once she got down, she told me she’d been coming to Reworks for years ‘to escape.’ She also mentioned that there aren’t many opportunities to listen to electronic music in Thessaloniki, except for the 3-4 places everyone I asked about the scene had mentioned.

A few minutes later, the fate of Katerina’s photo and all the others I had taken slipped out of my hands when my analog camera ended up at the bottom of the toilet. Was I really that careless? No. I had placed it in a safe spot, but the bass was so strong that each beat made the portable toilet shake, inching the camera closer to whatever else had ended up at the bottom throughout the afternoon.

I plunged my hand in to retrieve it, splashing my right eye with waste from who knows how many people. I started crying and dropped one of my contact lenses on the floor. Half-blind and defeated, I returned to the dancefloor, having learned a valuable lesson: never again call house parties “lame.”

Friday, 09/20 – Night

As I entered Mamounia Live, I thought my camera might have fled for another reason. Inside, Fjaak, whom I had wanted to see for years, was playing serious techno, which was set to get even more intense as the night turned into the morning with Richie Hawtin, Nina Kraviz, and Pinelopi with Indi Skullmors. Since people dance according to this type of techno, it’s not polite to disturb anyone by shoving your intrusive camera in their face, no matter how good the shot might be.

At Mamounia, like in every other venue, there were plenty of people not from Thessaloniki who had come from other cities in northern Greece (I heard Kastoria, Katerini, Larissa, Kavala). These people were understandably in a much worse position regarding opportunities to forget their names while dancing.

One of the groups that regularly travels to Reworks from another city consists of students from Xanthi. Tasos, one of them, told me that if you want to hear electronic music in Xanthi, there’s only one place to go. There are no options in Ptolemaida, where he grew up, except for a festival “which isn’t much to be fair” So music was one of the main reasons he comes to Thessaloniki. “And maybe for a football match, too.”

Saturday, 09/21 – Afternoon

No more Palataki or Kalamaria; the next venue was the Old Slaughterhouses. There, the atmosphere was completely different, with two packed stages playing various types of music. At the first stage, while Röyksopp was performing, I met Eleni, a cardiologist who had come to the festival for the first time to see them live. She told me she wasn’t good at answering questions but was having a great time at the festival and loved house music. She was genuinely dedicated to the beats per minute.

At the second stage, as I tried to get closer to Ben Klock’s techno, I apologized in every direction, pushing past bodies that didn’t seem to care. Out of nowhere, a girl stopped me and said, “You never have to apologize here; another girl told me that, and I wanted to share it.” Then she asked if she could give me a big hug. She was also having a great time, and her name was also Eleni.

It is a good sign for the festival to make two such different Elenis enjoy themselves simultaneously.

Saturday, 09/21 – Night

The club hosting the extra event (the last one for me) was next to the Slaughterhouses. The crowd there was a mix of hardcore festival fans and random attendees, like a group of three Finns in their 30s. They came to Reworks for the first time because they listened to techno, and Thessaloniki is the second largest city in Greece. “So why not?” as Niklas put it.

The big name here, the only one I recognized, was ISON, the creator of the entire festival, who was playing b2b with Jonathan Kaspar just hours before my flight to Athens. George, also around 35, told me he has been following Reworks since ISON’s first parties “before they were even called Reworks.” He returns to the festival because it has “gotten much better musically over the years,” even as the electronic music scene in the city had diminished since a “golden age” that ended around 2010 when many venues closed during the recession.

I heard something similar from Aris during one of the few moments he wasn’t working at the festival entrance. He told me that during his years studying in Thessaloniki, he felt that electronic music was being played less and less. Why? He believes the scene has never truly recovered since the pandemic, making it fragile even in light of complaints from tourist accommodations about the noise levels of local venues. And what role does Reworks play in this? “It’s the only thing keeping electronic music alive in the city.

My four nights in Thessaloniki were not enough for me to confidently confirm his view, which seemed increasingly disheartening as time went on. The complaint that everyone I spoke to expressed, to varying degrees, had to be true, and the options for those who listen to such a popular genre must indeed be limited in the city.

Did this mean that people went to Reworks only because there weren’t many other options? I found nothing to support that belief. I scanned the crowd inside W, and as on every other night, I saw people smiling, dancing, stumbling, and kissing. Everyone was enjoying a really great party. And we all want to come back to a really great party.