What Excess Actually Sounds Like

No second name, no stopping until sunrise.

Just club posters, from the airport all the way to the road that leads onto the island. That was the first sign of what I was in for. In Ibiza, from May to October, the real sightseeing is clubbing, a party that never really stops, it just changes rooms. I was there for my first time for one of the rarest nights of the season at Pacha: the one where Solomun plays alone, from open to close, no second name next to his. What follows is the account of twenty-four hours, a hotel, a restaurant, a dancefloor, in which I stopped being a tourist.

From the moment I landed at Ibiza airport, I immediately realised that this was not a conventional island. Airports around the world usually welcome you with signs and billboards pointing towards tourist attractions, the places any visitor is supposed to see during their stay: churches, museums, historic monuments, parks. Here, none of that signage. Not on the airport billboards, nor along the road connecting it to the rest of the island. What caught my eye instead were posters for clubs and summer parties. The real sightseeing here is clubbing. A never-ending party that runs all week, all month, from May to October. During those months, Ibiza stops being simply a destination and turns into one long, endless night. It was my first time on the island and I understood it immediately: here, I was not a tourist, I was a participant.

“Step into the spirit of Ibiza: freedom, music and celebration for over 50 years.” These were the words on the little card waiting for me in my room at the Pacha Hotel. The idea of brothers Ricardo and Piti Urgell, making me feel like a pasha, even if only for one night, could be felt in every detail: from the design to the hospitality, right down to the way every part of the experience seemed designed to make me forget the date of my return flight. I already knew I would get very little sleep. Whatever time I had for it would inevitably be swallowed up by the energy of the people I would meet and the connections made on the spot. But at least the journey, in the literal sense, would be a short one. The little Pacha universe also includes the club and the restaurant of the same name, both right across the street. In a few hours, I would experience both.

If I had to choose one word to describe Ibiza, it would be “excess.” I understood it from the way I was welcomed into the restaurant. A girl dressed as a Greek goddess, her skirt built into a kind of cage, a champagne flute set inside each cell for the guests waiting to get in. It was a first taste of what was to come: dinner here was not going to be an experience like any other. We had barely been shown to our table when the DJ in the background began gradually raising the temperature of the room, preparing the atmosphere for what was coming next. And then the food: one of the freshest fish dishes I have ever eaten. But what struck me most was how naturally, and how quickly, I could go straight from the restaurant into the club. A flight of stairs and, just like that, I was already in another dimension. Where the evening ended, the night began. And here, the night lasted until morning.

It is difficult for me to talk about Pacha without starting with its imagery: the two cherries, the red, the lights, the dancefloor, decades of Ibizan nights compressed into a single visual language. But once I was inside, I realised that all of this was only the surface. The real strength of the club, at least from my point of view, lies in the people it manages to bring together in the same room. That night, however, Pacha had only one name. Solomun. For years, his Sunday residency has become one of the most recognisable appointments of the island’s summer. Most Sundays here follow the +1 format, Solomun alongside a single guest, splitting the night between them. But a handful of dates each season are kept for something else: Solomun alone, in full control of the room, from open to close. This was one of them. What interested me was not simply the name on the lineup, but what happens when an artist decides to carry an entire night on his own shoulders, with no second name to lean on.

But when I walked into Pacha, I did not feel as though I was waiting for a show that was about to begin. I felt as though something had already started. HalfPint and NYRA were already behind the decks, easing the room in, long before Solomun would take over the booth. People were arriving, looking around, finding their place. Some were dressed to be seen, others seemed to have left home simply to dance until their bodies told them to stop. Different faces, different ages, different languages. Ibiza was already doing what Ibiza does best: bringing together people who, anywhere else in the world, would probably never have had a reason to end up in the same room.

Then the volume rose. When Solomun took control of the booth, my perception of time changed. There was no longer any real difference between one hour and the next. There was only the continuous movement of the dancefloor, the transition from one track to another, the feeling that every record was simply another chapter in the same story. That is what struck me about the long set: it did not accompany the night, it built it. I did not need to know every track or understand what was happening technically. At a certain point, I stopped listening to the music and simply started living it. I noticed the people around me, the ones I had just met, the ones I may have exchanged two words with five minutes earlier and was now finding again on the other side of the dancefloor. It was a very Ibizan kind of socialising: fast, instinctive, almost without explanations. And perhaps that was exactly the point. Solomun did not seem interested simply in filling a dancefloor. His music became the way that dancefloor started functioning like a single organism. It no longer mattered where I came from, what language I spoke, what my job was or what I would be doing the next day. For a few hours, everything else fell into the background.

The Pacha booth sat at the centre of that feeling. The distance between the person playing and the people listening seemed smaller, and what happened in front of the booth felt less like a performance to watch and more like something I was taking part in. The crowd was not simply in front of the DJ. I felt as though I was inside the same story. Meanwhile, midnight passed, then one, then two. My phone stayed in my pocket more and more often, because at a certain point taking pictures of what was happening felt almost less interesting than actually being there. And while the island outside continued living through its summer, inside Pacha time followed completely different rules. That was also the paradox of Ibiza: everything was built around excess, yet what I ended up remembering were often the simplest things. A song heard at exactly the right moment. A person I met by chance. A drink shared. A conversation that could have ended after five minutes but instead went on for an hour. A packed dancefloor while outside the first light of day slowly began to appear.

At some point, I realised I was no longer waiting for the best moment of the night. Because the best moment was simply the one I was in. When morning arrived, it did not really feel as though the night was over. It had simply changed form. And perhaps that was the trick of Ibiza: convincing me that I did not need to leave yet. I arrived on the island thinking I was going to experience a night out. In the end, I found myself inside something much bigger. A hotel, a restaurant, a club, a dancefloor, people who had travelled from all over the world, and music capable of holding everything together until the sun came back to remind me that, sooner or later, I would have to sleep. Just not that night.

And perhaps the most Ibizan thing of all was discovering that, while I was still trying to figure out when the night had actually ended, the next one was already waiting for me. The Solomun+1 residency continues every Sunday at Pacha through October 4, with different names joining Solomun throughout the season. Perhaps that is the best way for me to leave Ibiza: with the feeling that one night is never enough. And with a date already in my head.