03 — Music
I loved the music. Not one genre. A climate. Open-air, open-minded, and timed to the sun.
Balearic
José Padilla said it plainly: Balearic is a way of DJing. Alfredo Fiorito, an Argentine who washed up on the island and took the terrace at Amnesia, would play rock, disco, Latin, new wave, and early house in the same night if the night asked for it. The rule was feeling, not purity.
In the summer of 1987, four British DJs — Paul Oakenfold, Danny Rampling, Nicky Holloway, and Johnny Walker — heard Alfredo on that terrace, went home, and helped ignite acid house in the UK. The second summer of love has an Ibizan parent. The island did not invent dancing. It invented a permission: anything could sit next to anything, if it made the room lift.
Two priests of the island
Café del Mar · Sant Antoni
He moved to Ibiza in 1976, sold mixtapes in the markets, and from the early nineties put a soundtrack to the sun going down. The Café del Mar compilations, from 1994, carried that hush around the world. People called him the godfather of chillout. He died in 2020. The applause at sunset is still partly his.
Amnesia · Sant Rafel
The Balearic selector. Eclectic to the bone. Without Alfredo’s nights on the Amnesia terrace, the British conversion of 1987 — and the global idea of “the Ibiza sound” — is a different story. He played as if the island itself had a crate of records and no snobbery.
2000 · 2001
By then the island was already a capital. Progressive house and trance filled the big rooms. UK brands — Cream, Godskitchen, Ministry, Manumission — leased the temples for a night each week. Space had the after-hours and the daylight terrace. In 2001 Carl Cox began the residency, Music Is Revolution, that would last fifteen seasons.
Cocoon and Sven Väth had already claimed Amnesia for harder German nights. Circoloco was a new Monday at DC-10, a hangar by the runway, deliberately un-glossy. Pacha still dressed up. San Antonio had Eden and Es Paradis, foam and water and a different kind of heat.
What I remember is not a tracklist. It is the energy: strangers who were friends by dawn, a sound system that felt like weather, the walk from night into a white morning that did not care how famous the DJ had been.
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“He was the first person to put a soundtrack to a sunset.”Christian Len on José Padilla