Love Family Park Sat on These Villalobos and Kraviz Tapes for a Decade. Now the Vault Is Open.

What exactly did Love Family Park release?

Ahead of its 30th-anniversary edition, Love Family Park has started digging through its own archive. The Frankfurt festival, founded in 1996, launched a series it calls "Lost Tapes": previously unheard DJ sets from its history, published for the first time on its official SoundCloud and YouTube channels. The opener is a vinyl set from Ricardo Villalobos, recorded live at Love Family Park in 2016.

A second tape followed almost immediately: a set from Nina Kraviz, recorded at the festival in 2013, back when she was still becoming the name that would go on to define a decade of techno. Both are framed by the festival as tapes that sat in its own vault until now, not the shaky audience recordings that have circulated on YouTube for years.

Why do a 2016 set and a 2013 set matter, together?

Because they land the archive on both sides of Love Family Park's most turbulent stretch. The festival started on the Main meadows of Hanau in 1996 (as "Love Park," renamed the following year after a naming dispute), stayed there through 2013, then moved to the Mainz-Hechtsheim fairgrounds for nature-conservation reasons from 2014 to 2016, the era that produced the Villalobos tape. A landlord dispute cancelled the 2017 edition outright, the festival resettled in Rüsselsheim for 2018 and 2019, then COVID shut it down for three years straight. It only returned in 2023, and only found its current home at Frankfurt's Rebstockpark from then on. Two tapes, from two different addresses a decade apart, are the festival telling its own history instead of leaving that job to whoever happened to be filming from the crowd.

A festival that has moved four times in thirty years just decided its own recordings, not the ones ripped from someone's phone, are the version worth keeping.

What comes next?

Love Family Park says more sets from its archive will follow "in the coming weeks," without naming names yet. The anniversary weekend itself, 25 and 26 July 2026 at Rebstockpark, closes the loop: Villalobos is booked to play live, alongside Sven Väth, Charlotte de Witte, Solomun, Chris Liebing and a still-undisclosed surprise guest. For a festival built on picnic blankets and an unusually loyal crowd, that is the real bet behind Lost Tapes, that thirty years of tape-trading nostalgia turns into thirty more years of people showing up.