10 years on, AVA Festival is still flying the flag for Belfast’s party scene

By the evening, flocks of punters head to AVA’s main stage, a multi-level expanse that feels intimate by day and gargantuan by night, wrapped with enormous A/V LED screens. Nia Archives is first up of Friday night’s headliners, performing rapidfire tracks from her hit album ‘Silence Is Loud’ as she delivers velvety vocals down the mic. Belfast’s own BICEP follow with a live audiovisual set as part of their new CHROMA project, merging live visuals across multiple screens with their floor-filling club tracks.

The second and final day at AVA has even more energy than its first, and as festivalgoers flow into the site looking fresh-faced, they start filling out the Pumphouse as Kessler appears on stage in front of a modular setup, performing a live set of hardy breaks and 140. The Pumphouse proves a popular spot on the Saturday, with later sets from technical wizard Neffa-T with additional mic duties from Flowdan, and an electro-heavy performance from Effy into the early evening.

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“AVA has changed a lot over the years, when we started out it was across the road in an old shipping warehouse,” says AVA founder Sarah McBriar when we catch her on the final day of the festival. “It started as a one-day event with two stages and 1,000 people, and now we have 10,000 people every year across two days. We’ve taken it to London and cities all around the world, it’s been incredible to see it perform so well in other places. But Belfast is very much our home and our heartbeat.”

You’d be hard-pressed to find another festival like AVA in Europe. In 10 years, it’s grown from strength to strength, picking up a dedicated crowd that looks forward to their yearly return to Titanic Slipways. From breaking the careers of emerging artists to creating a hub for dance music fans in Belfast where there wasn’t one before, AVA has truly put the Irish dance music scene on the map for the wider world. “We put a lot of energy, time, design, and resources into creating the right environment, so a lot of artists see it as something special,” says Sarah. “The community here is like a family – it’s a really special time for people to come together.”

Gemma Ross is Mixmag’s Assistant Editor, follow her on Twitter