The 11th Season of Ola Sunburn Festival is now done & dusted. Surrounded by controversy with regards to the location, they hit the jackpot with Oxford Golf Resort in Pune which was undoubtedly much better compared to Kesnand last year. The locals gave the management a lot of hardships but the festival prevailed. The venue had a breathtaking view of the entire city on one side & the beautiful Golf course on another. The 4 stages were brilliantly designed & to have all of that arranged on a hilltop must have been a challenge which the organisers managed very well. The pyrotechnics were definitely good enough to match the standards of some of the best festivals in the world.
The reactions with regards to the lineup was a mixed bag since all of the headliners apart from DJ Snake had played the festival earlier. The supporting acts were the ones to look forward to. Artists like Coone, Kayze, Clean Bandit, Salvatore Ganacci, Mariana Bo etc were set to make their debut at the festival. All these acts exceeded expectations for sure, they were all brilliant and did their thing. The best part of these supporting acts was that they were all unique and added a new flavour. The headliners also did their part & swept the crowd off their feet. KSHMR brought out his live act at the festival for the first time which included musicians from all over the globe. Martin Garrix the numero uno DJ played a very different set compared to his last visit at the festival back in 2015. Garrix also played a warmup set during the evening of the New Years Eve with his other alias, YTRAM. Afrojack, Dimitri Vegss & Like Mike and DJ Snake also showed why they’re the very best at what they do. Indian acts like Nucleya, Sartek, Anish Sood, Ash roy etc proved to the crowd that India is on the rise & our homegrown artists are on course to matching the qualities of the foreign DJ’s. Among these, Nucleya in particular looks set to be a headliner in a couple of years at most. He entertained the crowd just as well as any other headliner.
Another controversy surrounding the festival was that one of the artists that took part in making the Sunburn anthem, Marnik dramatically withdrew themselves from playing the festival. They opted to back out a day before they were slotted to play. They went on to post on social media about the Sunburn management not treating them right. Our take on this:- We do not know what exactly went wrong so we cannot blame Sunburn or their management. All in all the Ola Sunburn Festival was a huge hit considering they were forced to move out of goa which was their comfort zone. Since then they also faced a lot of hardships from the locals in Pune. Overcoming all of that & still managing an event of this magnitude definitely deserves to be respected. The amount of crowd they managed to pull in on New Years Eve was also noteworthy. We would also like to give a shoutout to the principal sponsors Ola for the #PeekeMatChala campaign which we believe is an amazing initiative. Also for the free shuttle service from the Parking to the actual venue which was a 2km uphill journey.
We believe that season 12 of the Ola Sunburn Festival would be much better since they now have a venue where no locals will protest. This will give them more time to manage the event more efficiently.
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