Antwerp's Royal Museum of Fine Arts has hosted plenty over the past century, but never a rave. On September 5, Amelie Lens changed that: 14,000 people packed Leopold de Waelplaats, the museum's front square, for a three-hour open-air set marking the release of her debut album, AURA.
What's actually on AURA?
AURA is eleven tracks, self-released on Lens's own imprint EXHALE, out digitally and on a gatefold blue-and-white double vinyl built as a collector's object. The record opens on a slow ambient intro before it breaks into lead single "our frequency," then ranges from peak-time techno through acid-line experiments to slower, atmospheric passages, with tempos climbing as high as 150bpm. The one guest spot on the whole album goes to fellow Belgian Angèle, who features on the track "run."
Lens has been open that AURA was made across her pregnancy and a personal chapter of her life, not written as a straight club-peak record but as something closer to a full emotional arc, from the ambient opener to the harder cuts and back down.
Why take a debut album to her hometown's museum steps?
Rather than a club show or a festival slot, Lens debuted the full AURA live show outdoors, in front of the KMSKA, as part of the Chaos in the City series run with the City of Antwerp. It was the first event of this scale the square has ever hosted: 14,000 people on a plaza built for gallery openings, not a three-hour techno set running deep into the evening.
"14,000 of you dancing as one in front of the museum was something we could never have dreamt of."
A second Chaos in the City date is set for Brussels on September 26, with HAAi headlining. For Lens, a Belgian techno artist who has spent the last decade playing rooms like Awakenings and Tomorrowland's Core stage, doing the album's live debut in her own city, on a square that had never seen anything like it, was clearly the point.
