20 Dec Armin Van Buuren Live! In Milwaukee Review

On November 18, I was fortunate enough to go see Armin Van Buuren live at the Rave in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Holy shit. This was my first “rave” as people would call it, that I had ever been too. ASOT is a show I listen to religiously. ASOT stands for “A State Of Trance”, a weekly show that Armin releases playing the hottest trance, minimal, and progressive music out there. This is what I believe put him on the charts as the worlds number one DJ in past years.

If you’ve never been to the Rave in Milwaukee or have at least never seen pictures or videos of it, the main room at that venue is unbelievable. The structures and architecture are beyond amazing. Total capacity of the main room is around 4,000. The show was sold-out however it looked like there was room for at least 500 more people if it was wall to wall.

The crowd was so diverse there. I saw ravers, jocks, juice-heads, couples in their 50’s, young gay couples… you name it they had it. Everyone however was so nice and polite. I’m pretty sure the amount of drugs everyone was on had to have contributed to that. The show started around 8:30 with a couple of mediocre DJ’s that had no introduction so I can’t even tell you what the hell their names where. The music started off at a very low level and then around 9:30 gradually got louder until around 10:00 P.M. Once 10 o’clock hit the floor was packed. You could tell people were starting to get antsy, wanting Armin to come out. Than finally at 11PM, the music stopped. The DJ looked at the crowd, gave a suddle wave, unplugged his headphones and walked off stage. The crowd went absolutely nuts!

Armin Van Buuren had roughly a 2-3 minute intro and walked up to the decks on stage. Their was a back-panel LED setup behind him and in front of the table he was spinning at. Those both lit up to project a simultaneous jpeg image that played throughout his opening track. Everyone was dancing, jumping up and down, side to side, just moving everywhere. There was so much energy in the crowd and you could tell Armin was feeding off of it. He was up there on stage, going just as HAM as the rest of the crowd. You could tell he was really loving the moment.

A couple hours into his set, the venue slowly started to lose some fans. I remember at one point, at the beginning of his performance, I turned around and couldn’t see where the crowd ended behind me and there was no way I was going to be able to get out of the area I was in (had to piss so bad!). About 1:30 AM you could pretty much move wherever you wanted to even though Armin was still up there tearing the roof off the place. Finally about 2AM, the show ended and the crowd slowly poured out onto the streets of Milwaukee. My buddy Chris and I didn’t get back to the suburbs of Chicago around 430 AM. It was one hell of a night that I’ll never forget. If you ever get a chance, see him live!

Some videos I found on YouTube from that night :

AVB Live In Milwaukee #1      AVB Live In Milwaukee #2      AVB Live In Milwaukee #3