Barcelona Outward: A Field Guide to the Open-Air Set

There is a version of electronic music you already know: the one that arrives a single track at a time, stripped of the room it was built for, the crowd it was tested on, the long arc of context that made it land. And then there is the other version — a DJ on a clifftop at golden hour, or under a sky full of balloons, doing the thing a recording can never quite hold.

Videojam is built in Barcelona, and this guide looks outward from there. Not at a roster of local names, but at a single format the catalog has quietly become very good at collecting: the open-air set. The performance staged and filmed somewhere extraordinary, made as much for the eye as the ear, and meant to be watched from beginning to end.

The format the feed throws away

All of this exists as video, and almost none of it reaches you that way. The feed gives you the track and throws away the room — the four-minute export, the algorithmic thumbnail grid, the autoplay that cuts to something else before the build even resolves.

That is fine for passive scrolling. It is useless if you actually want to watch something — and the open-air set is the strongest argument that watching is the point. A producer alone on a salt flat or a rooftop, building rather than mixing, is closer to a concert than a playlist. Strip it to a single track and you have thrown away the only thing that made it matter.

How to read this

Everyone here is an artist whose sets reward sitting with, not sampling. Where you see a ▶, that is your cue to stop reading and press play — each one points to a complete set already in the Videojam catalog, not a teaser.

The open-air set

The clearest way into this sound is Korolova. The Ukrainian DJ has made the scenic, single-camera open-air mix her signature — melodic techno easing into widescreen progressive house, performed somewhere with a horizon. The catalog holds a run of them, and the locations are half the appeal: a decommissioned solar power plant back home in Ukraine, a clifftop in Sharm El Sheikh, a balcony over Ibiza, a hillside in Portugal.

▶ Watch — Korolova, live from Sintra, Portugal. When you want another view, she is also live from Ibiza, on a Ukrainian solar plant, and on a clifftop in Egypt.

Filmed somewhere extraordinary

Somewhere along the way the open-air set filmed in an impossible place became an art form of its own, and the series that defined it is Cercle — electronic artists performing in locations no club could fake, shot as long-form cinema. Two of its best sit in the catalog.

Ben Böhmer plays melodic, emotional electronic music as a live performance, building tracks rather than dropping them. His set from Cappadocia — fairy chimneys below, hot-air balloons drifting across the valley behind him — is the format at its purest.

▶ Watch — Ben Böhmer in Cappadocia.

Monolink does something adjacent, half live act and half DJ, singing and playing guitar over his own productions. His Cercle set from a sandbar off Gaatafushi Island in the Maldives is the catalog's most literal "set with a view"; his Mayan Warrior set from Burning Man is the same instinct turned nocturnal and strange.

▶ Watch — Monolink, live in the Maldives, or from the Mayan Warrior at Burning Man.

And Solomun — the man who turned a Sunday residency into a pilgrimage — took the Cercle treatment to the Château de Chambord in France, playing the gardens of a Renaissance castle at dusk.

▶ Watch — Solomun at Chambord.

Back-to-back, and after dark

Not every set needs a cliff. Miss Monique built an audience in the millions on the strength of her mixing alone — long, immaculately sequenced melodic-progressive sessions, the occasional one staged somewhere beautiful. Her set live from Tulum, Mexico is the scenic version; her studio podcasts are the proof that the location was always a bonus, never the substance.

▶ Watch — Miss Monique, live from Tulum, or her birthday podcast set when you just want the music.

The other thing video gives you that a track never can is the back-to-back — two artists trading control in real time, audible in their faces as much as the mix. Anyma, the audiovisual project at the loud end of the melodic-techno world, going b2b with Solomun at Tomorrowland is exactly that: a negotiation you can watch happen.

▶ Watch — Anyma b2b Solomun at Tomorrowland.

Going deeper

Everything above is one corner of a larger catalog. If you want the version with a view, keep pulling on these threads:

• Melodic & Progressive — the home of this exact sound: melodic house, progressive house, the long emotional build.
• House — the broad church, from soulful and daylit to peak-time.
• Deep House — underground, late-night, label-driven.
• Afro House — the rhythm-first current running through everything right now.

Or press play on a channel at Play and let it run like a music-video radio station with the room left in.

How to watch this

Here is the thing this guide is really arguing. All of it — the salt-flat sunsets, the castle gardens, the live performances that turn a producer into a band — exists as video, and almost none of it reaches you that way. The feed gives you the track and throws away the room.

Videojam exists to give the room back. Everything mentioned here is a set you can sit down and watch, in full, the way it was meant to be experienced — and everything not mentioned is one curated click away on the genre pages.

Press play. The scene is better than your feed has been letting on.

— S.B.