Sandbox is leading the charge for Egypt’s newly burgeoning dance music era

By day, the Sandbox site is a lush, open expanse stretching into the sea. On top of its daily beachside music programme, Sandbox offers a place to cool off under the burning desert sun with a span of activities nestled into the waterfront – yoga, breathwork, meditation, and other holistic classes are on the shelf to purge yesterday’s hangover. By night, Sandbox reels 5,000 visitors into a showy playground, with six stages primed and prepped for night-long takeovers. Of its 5,000 yearly visitors, 32% of the crowds travel in from abroad, a figure that Sandbox founder Tito El Kachab says is on the rise annually.

“We’re growing, especially regionally in terms of Arab countries, but we’re making headway in Europe too,” he explains. Tito quips that the line-up – which this year features the likes of DJ Tennis, TSHA, and Soichi Terada – doesn’t meet “Europe’s standard announcement time”, meaning less Europeans will be tempted to book a last-minute trip over to Egypt with the bill dropping just a month before showtime. But that’s okay, because Sandbox embraces its local crowds. “The hype is growing, but we’re not really growing in capacity. With more people, the festival changes character, so we want to keep it this size.”

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Take one look at the roster and you’ll see exactly why that hype is growing outside of Egypt each year. Plenty of major international stars are here to perform to boutique crowds, and they’re given the same length slots as local, emerging artists. “We’ve always had a 50/50 split of local and regional talent, it’s important to us that everyone gets billed equally across the whole line-up,” says Tito. “We’ve given local artists later slots, and it has proved successful as those stages are always packed late at night.”