From a ship’s air horn to Four Tet’s light show, Goldenvoice’s fifth Portola turned Pier 80 into a weekend of impossible choices, and almost no wrong answers.
Written by Eric Budianto Thornton
BWAAARRRRRRRRP.
That’s a ship’s air horn, and at Portola it’s how each day ends: one long, foghorn-deep blast rolling across the water to tell everyone the party is over, for now. It was the loudest thing about the festival last weekend. It was nowhere near the coolest.
On Saturday and Sunday, San Francisco’s Pier 80 hosted the fifth edition of the Goldenvoice festival, and I’ll say it plainly: it’s one of the best festivals I’ve ever been to. Over two days I didn’t see a single fight or a single person carried off by paramedics. I saw smiling faces, and that look of excitement you only get from people power-walking between stages with a set-time poster in their heads.
Cool how, you ask? Besides the literal coldness of the bay breeze (which we all sucked up), the weekend ran smoothly from start to finish. The lineup is always great, the laid-back San Francisco vibe is the real thing, the dock-and-crane aesthetic is hard to beat, and the layout feels homey even with tens of thousands of people in it. And then there are the hiding places: an all-vinyl dance room where the DJ is kept out of sight on purpose, and a speakeasy-style bar tucked behind a curtain. More on both below.
This was Frank151’s first time covering Portola (here’s our preview of eight artists you didn’t want to miss), and it’s safe to say it just became one of my personal favorites. So let’s dock in.
THE SETTING
Pier 80 does half the work for you. A gantry crane towers over the crowd, a cargo ship sits docked behind it, and the whole place feels like a working waterfront that happens to have a sound system. The festival runs on five stages: the Pier stage, the main one; the Crane stage, the open-air second stage; the Warehouse, an enclosed hall that is basically a giant container with underground veins; the Ship Tent; and Despacio, the festival’s all-vinyl dance room.
“Discovering someone new usually meant missing someone we already wanted to see.”
SATURDAY AND TOO MANY GOOD CHOICES
A classic festival problem: two artists you love playing at the same time. Portola seemed determined to raise the stakes. Here were three. Now four. A particularly cruel game from the people booking the festival. In a good way, of course.
Usually there’s an hour when nobody on your must-see list is playing. You wander, follow something unfamiliar, and sometimes leave with a new favorite (still one of the best things about music festivals). At Portola, those gaps barely seemed to exist. Discovering someone new usually meant missing someone we already wanted to see.
Saturday opened with Australian artist Airwolf Paradise on the Pier stage. We caught up with the Melbourne-raised artist for an exclusive interview (the full conversation is below), and the plan, they told us, was simple: “I just wanted to share the good fun vibes and warm people up for the day,” with “some of my favourite house records and some of my unreleased music” in the mix, and they were “super appreciative of people coming down early to see me.”
By mid-afternoon the paralysis set in. Norwegian up-and-comer Oskar Med K took the Pier stage while trip-hop pioneer Tricky played the Crane stage, and at the very same time Chloé Caillet took over the always mesmerizing Warehouse (more on that room in a minute).
The Warehouse deserves that capital W. A huge-ass industrial shed with room for a serious crowd, it carried the underground-party feeling straight into the afternoon. Going from the open sky into that room felt like starting the night early. For a festival with so much happening outdoors, we spent a lot of time wanting to be back inside.
Next in the Warehouse came one of the most successful duos the UK has produced, Groove Armada, who rode the wave Caillet started by working their own hits, “I See You Baby” and “Superstylin'” among them, into current dance-floor favorites as the drops. The Warehouse was already half full by 5:30 p.m., and the duo set the tone for the rest of the weekend. While they played, buzzy New York duo FCUKERS took the Pier stage and brought a dose of raw, sleazy, “blog house”-era NYC nightlife energy to the waterfront.
About ten minutes after FCUKERS finished, Tove Lo was up next. She arrived barely a week after releasing her new album, ESTRUS, with a show at LA’s Greek Theatre the very next night, and the set was electric, pumping set, hit after hit, including “Habits (Stay High),” with the crowd singing every word. Not bad for a late-afternoon slot, either, as the clouds started rolling in and the wind picked up.
By the time she finished, DJ Shadow was already 20 minutes into his Crane Stage performance, celebrating 30 years of Endtroducing….. We caught part of it, then faced the familiar problem again: KETTAMA was coming up in the Warehouse. We would have liked to stay longer.
We slipped back into the Warehouse as the sun went down and night began, just in time for the last couple of minutes of Max Styler‘s set. To be honest, I knew his music but had never seen him live. That changed. The whole room seemed to have ridden his entire 75 minutes together, and we kicked ourselves for not arriving sooner.
We stayed for a stretch of Kettama‘s set, long enough to know we were leaving something good, before changing stages once again for the legendary Fatboy Slim.
As we reached the Crane stage, we were greeted by a bouncy remix of “Rockafeller Skank,” the 1998 classic. It was my second time seeing the English big-beat legend. The first was almost twenty years ago, at Coachella 2008, my first Coachella, so this felt like a reunion with an old friend. And the guy hasn’t changed one bit: shimmying and strutting (pun intended) from one side of the stage to the other, low arm-pump and all, working the crowd. His set was a blast.
DOG BLOOD THROUGH THE SMOKE
We left a few minutes before the end to catch the reunion of Dog Blood, the project of two of the most forward-thinking producers in dance music, Skrillex and Boys Noize, playing their first show under the moniker since 2019. That meant skipping what was probably a great back-to-back from Beltran and Ben Sterling in the Warehouse, and probably the only chance I’ll get to see a Spice Girl, in this case Sporty Spice, aka Melanie C, DJing in the Ship Tent. I think we made the right call.
Back at the Pier stage, a thick wall of smoke greeted us, and behind it one of the most impressive light, laser and pyro productions I’ve seen in recent years. We barely saw the two artists on stage through all of it, and the crowd didn’t seem to mind in the slightest as the duo hit us with bangers after bangers and fresh remixes. I don’t remember if they addressed the crowd even once. Not because they’re shy, but probably because the music was doing the talking, really loud.
The set ended with an edit of “Fine Day Anthem,” which rolled into an ID remix of an “Midnight City” by M83, just to ground everybody back to reality.
Dog Blood finished 45 minutes before the festival officially closed, which meant there was more to see, and the Warehouse sits right next to the Pier stage, so we capped Saturday off with UK duo Prospa. Their set leaned toward underground, after-hours territory, still plenty energetic, which made sense with the sold-out afterparties Portola had lined up around the city that night.
Then came the horn. Day one, done.
SUNDAY: ROUND TWO
If you thought Day One wasn’t hectic enough, Sunday’s lineup was ready to one-up it, and the decision paralysis arrived even earlier. By 3 p.m., Italian duo Mind Enterprises, whose Italo-disco-leaning grooves made for easy summer vibes, had the Pier stage, to be followed by Channel Tres. Meanwhile Chicago-based producer Azzecca commanded the early festival-goers at the Crane stage, and Silva Bumpa opened the Warehouse for a recent favorite of ours, Brunello.
While he played, another sought-after rising star, Slovak singer Adélá, took the Crane stage. We tried to catch her short set, but by the time we got there the next DJ, Zulan, was already on, partying up the crowd with what I’m guessing were hundreds of her friends packed in to dance along. We bounced back and forth between her set and Ben UFO‘s next door, which was surprisingly more energetic than usual.
Next, we had to head back to the Pier stage for one of the artists we were looking forward to most: Brazilian DJ Mochakk. We arrived just as he casually strolled onstage with a drink in his hand, the crowd greeting him with cheers.
It was my second time seeing him live. The first was at the first Hard Summer at SoFi, the year a lot of people complained about the noise. And I missed his massive block party on Hollywood Boulevard a while back, along with his surprise pop-up show in Venice Beach, which I was about to head to before realizing someone had taken both of my license plates. Calling the DMV and the police is about as far from an impromptu Mochakk set as an afternoon can get. So finally getting to see him again felt overdue.
A couple of minutes before it ended we started walking back to the Warehouse, where another legend was about to start: Tiësto. Seeing him in a huge warehouse with the best lights and an underground feel was a once-in-a-lifetime moment for a lot of people in that room. His set was about what you’d expect, in the best way: hard remixes of popular songs like “Stereo Love” alongside his own classics, and the trance-turned-house-turned-back-to-trance DJ never let the crowd stop dancing.
When “Traffic” and “Adagio for Strings” played back to back, under lights that grew more mesmerizing as the sun went down, it was a reminder that some songs are timeless. We wished we could’ve stayed for all 90 minutes, but there were too many other artists we wanted to check out.
DISCO DETOURS AND DESPACIO
On the way to horsegiirl, whose set I missed when she opened for Robyn at the Kia Forum a couple of days earlier, we walked past the Pier stage, where Zara Larsson was in full swing, her sunny, elaborate set decor making the whole thing feel like a show at that festival in Indio, as if Goldenvoice had shipped a Coachella stage north. We got lucky: she was playing “Lush Life” as we passed, which turned our walk into a skip. I didn’t see it, but Robyn, who had played the night before, also joined Zara Larsson onstage as a surprise guest during that set.
At the Despacio entrance we realized we hadn’t made it inside yet, since the line had been huge the night before, and this time it was way shorter. We got in line, then got pulled away by the energetic sound drifting over from the Crane stage: Ninajirachi, another rising artist we’d been meaning to check out. Her sound blends 2010s rave nostalgia with hyperpop, trance, complextro, UK garage and glitchy club sounds, and we caught her last two tracks before heading back to Despacio, where in under ten minutes the line had grown longer. We stuck it out. After a surprisingly short 10-to-15-minute wait, we were in.
Despacio is the all-vinyl dance room designed by LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy and Soulwax‘s David and Stephen Dewaele (2manydjs), with sound engineer John Klett. Inside, the lights sync perfectly to the songs, the crowd dances to disco-style tracks, and the stage is nowhere to be seen. It was an experience (to keep it real, it was alright). I was curious where the DJ was and asked a girl nearby, who tried to show me repeatedly, pointing at the “DJ” playing the music, while I just nodded and said “ohh.” As far as I can tell, that’s the point: the DJs are kept out of sight on purpose. I still can’t tell you who was playing while we were in there, and I don’t mind, because the vibe was great.
Coming out of Despacio, we went to check out horsegiirl, who played a blend of genres, showed off her style, and even sang on a couple of her songs. No one-trick pony here. It’s not every day you see a horse singing or DJing.
Around 8:30 we moved back to the Pier stage to catch the supergroup Swedish House Mafia, who served up hit after hit between the three Swedes. Their light production wasn’t as mind-blowing as Dog Blood’s the night before, but nobody seemed to care. People sang along to “Antidote,” “Don’t You Worry Child” and “Save the World,” and turned the place into 2012, which I’d argue was the golden age of EDM, when it went mainstream.
A little after 9 p.m., we walked back toward the Crane stage and the Ship Tent for Australian band Parcels and for Baby J, the rising Perth DJ with Indonesian roots, who was closing out a stage on a festival of this size, which tells you something about her rise.
Being half Indonesian myself, it was a proud moment to see a fellow Indonesian artist billed exactly where she belongs. The tent was having a great time as Baby J mixed song after song, banger remix after banger remix.
As Baby J started to heat up, we sadly (okay, not really) had to return to the Warehouse to close the weekend with the DJ and producer who is, in my book, the best substitute on call ever: Four Tet.
On the way to the Warehouse we noticed an area covered by a curtain, with people coming and going. We peeked in, and it turned out to be one of the festival’s hidden speakeasy-style bar-and-dance spots, the kind of secret Coachella regulars know well. About 10 to 15 people were dancing on illuminated, disco-style floors. We stayed briefly. Mission: Four Tet.
FOUR TET AND THE LIGHT SHOW
When we arrived, the Warehouse was almost completely full, and something about it was different this time around. The difference was the lights, a show that spanned the middle of the crowd from the stage, beams moving up and down and making patterns overhead. It’s some of the most arresting stage lighting I’ve ever seen. Ever.
The only time I’d seen lasers like that, lasers 3.0, was on YouTube, at Solomun‘s back-to-back with Dom Dolla at Melbourne’s Wool Store. Solomun, as it happens, is who Airwolf Paradise named as the Sunday-night closer of their dream three-night festival: “he just makes a set feel so smooth and exciting and special.”
It’s some of the most arresting stage lighting I’ve ever seen. Ever.
The lights were the real star of the set, and Four Tet himself was nowhere to be seen, typical of an artist who tends to play from a desk lamp instead of a spotlight. Every so often, as a bright beam swept past, you could just make out that fading lamp.
As one of the great chameleons of DJing, a guy who can play any room, Four Tet played more banging than usual that night. Well, of course. He was closing the festival and the Warehouse. And he knows a thing or two about stepping up on short notice: at Coachella 2023, he, Skrillex and Fred again.. closed Sunday night in place of Frank Ocean. Throughout his set, people were simply mesmerized by the lights. At the end he came down gently, “Two Thousand and Seventeen” into “Mama Teaches Sanskrit,” chill tracks I never thought I’d hear played live.
As we walked out of the festival, the ship’s air horn sounded one last time, answered by a cheering crowd heading for Ubers and cars. The party was over. Back to reality.
TILL THE NEXT HORN
I’m glad we finally experienced Portola for ourselves. The lineup was the reason to go, but the setting made so much of it stick: Tiësto’s classics inside the Warehouse, DOG BLOOD disappearing into the smoke, Four Tet beneath those lights. My main complaint is still how much we had to miss. I’d happily come back for a sixth edition and have that same problem all over again.
Decision paralysis can wait a year. Till the next horn.
THE INTERVIEW: AIRWOLF PARADISE
Airwolf Paradise opened the Pier stage on Saturday. We caught up with the artist by email, through their management. Answers are lightly edited for spelling and punctuation.
1. Let’s start with the FRANK151 tradition: if you could curate a three-night festival with one headliner each night, dead or alive, who closes Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and why?
Haha damn, these types of questions are always so hard to answer haha…
Friday night, Brothers Johnson. I’m a huge disco fan, so I think warming into the festival would be crazy fun like that.
Saturday night, Daft Punk, for obvious reasons.
And Sunday would have to be Solomun. I really do love his DJ sets, he just makes a set feel so smooth and exciting and special. It’s really a truly magical thing to be on the dance floor in front of a Solomun set.
2. For plenty of people at Pier 80, Portola was their first time hearing an Airwolf Paradise set in person. What did you want that San Francisco crowd to walk away with, and was there a moment in the set where you felt it click?
I started as the festival opened its doors for the first day, so I just wanted to share the good fun vibes and warm people up for the day. Just wanted to share some of my favourite house records and some of my unreleased music I’ve been working on. I was super appreciative of people coming down early to see me, and it was so fun to have a dance with them!
3. Airwolf Paradise is definitely a name that sticks with you. What’s the story behind it, and how does it connect to the sound and world you’re creating?
Bit of a weird story, I used to work at a video rental store and came across an old VHS tv show called ‘Airwolf’, I thought it was cool and without much thought, went with it. I also used to be a photographer, focusing on the Australian music scene and I had a website called “Airwolf Paradise”, meant to be Airwolf’s Paradise / my paradise. It just felt natural when music became my priority to add the paradise to the name as I stopped taking photos.
4. “Don’t Hurt Me Baby” on Patrick Topping’s Trick was the record that broke the project open in 2022. What changed for you once it took off?
Kind of cliche to say… but Don’t Hurt Me Baby changed my life. It allowed me to tour all around to festivals, clubs and cities I never thought I’d get to go! It’s allowed me to become close friends with artists I really look up to and am constantly inspired by. Patrick Topping signing Don’t Hurt Me Baby really did change my life (as cliche as that sounds haha)!
5. “Only Man” brings Paul Johnson’s vocals from “So Much” into your own production. What drew you to that record, and how did you build something around his voice that felt like Airwolf Paradise?
The vocal from ‘So Much’ is a super iconic and important part of house music history. I wrote the instrumental and thought, this would be a crazy idea to add the ‘So Much’ vocal on the track. It worked so well together. I sent it to Solomun and he started playing it in his sets and signed it to his label Diynamic. I was so lucky and appreciative enough for Paul Johnson’s family to allow me to use the vocal and keep Paul Johnson’s name living on in house music history, especially for a new generation.
6. Between your remix of Tony De Vit’s “Get Loose” and your take on “Din Da Da” with WOLTERS, Kevin Aviance, and DJ Gomi, there’s a real connection to dance music’s past. What draws you to that era, and how do you put your own spin on a track while keeping what made the original special?
It’s a mix between appreciation and also acknowledging the past. It’s so important and being in the industry for over 20+ years in one way or another, I see how important it is to make sure that history isn’t getting missed. So being able to add a little 2026 energy but still being respectful of history is a fine line to play with. I really try my best to not disrespect artists’ work, but I just love putting my own spin on things.
7. And finally, what’s next for Airwolf Paradise? Is there a sound you’re excited to explore, a dream collaboration, or a venue you’re still itching to play?
I’m actually about to start my own record label, West Gate Records, an homage to the place I grew up in the west of Melbourne. I genuinely haven’t been this excited in a really long time. It feels like the right time for me to take on a new challenge and be able to be in control of the music I’m sharing. Whilst I love the flexibility and freedom of releasing on lots of different and amazing labels, it can sometimes be challenging not having a place to call my own. Stay tuned here, I’m putting my heart and soul into it!
Connect With Portola:
portolamusicfestival.com | Instagram | Goldenvoice
More Portola on Frank151:
Portola Week Takes Over San Francisco, and DESPACIO Opens a Night Early | Portola 2026: 8 Artists You Don’t Want to Miss