Last month the organizers of Boom, Belgium festival Tomorrowland announced This Was Tomorrow – a documentary on perhaps the world’s largest electronic music fest – and they’ve just followed it up with an official trailer. Clocking in at just over two minutes, the footage features many of the hallmarks of festival aftermovies, but an Armin Van Buuren quote near the end is what grabbed my attention the most.
In addition to crowd shots set to Steve Angello’s “Children of the Wild,” brief appearances from the likes of Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike set a celebratory tone to the trailer. However, after footage from Armin Van Buuren’s set, the worldwide trance icon makes something of a lofty prediction:
I strongly believe that what we are experiencing right now is more than hype. It’s a revolution, and I think only retrospectively the historians will look back on it and say, ‘Oh, that was a moment in time where music really united everybody.’
Don’t get me wrong, I’d like nothing more than to see music unite everyone as a global community. Hell, I’d like to see it somehow solve world hunger and cure all disease as we know it – but when it’s all said and done, I think that’s only something that happens in Bill and Ted movies. It’s easy to let music industry tunnel vision shield you from the harsh realities of the world, but it’s a bit too far of a stretch to suggest that the current musical movement has contributed much more than job creation and cultural significance to communities across the globe.
Armin Van Buuren‘s still the man, though; I don’t have to agree with everything he says to like his music. The premiere of This Was Tomorrow will take place in Antwerp, Belgium on November 26th, but the trailer reveals that it’s slated for global release on January 12th, 2016.
