FOSFOR is an electronic music festival held annually in Moldova since 2016.
In 2017, the festival broke the attendance record for events in the country – 24,000 guests danced, sang, rocked, and cheered at FOSFOR.
And here’s how it all started.
There’s a rule in our company: make decisions with your heart. It’s a simple rule that we often refer to. What is it about? That your heart will always tell you the right choice.
And now back to the story of the music festival, which gathered 10K guests in its very first edition.
Where does the festival come from?
So, we have a colleague named Liusya. She wears heels, short skirts, hairstyle, and makeup. And here’s the thing: we’re making SeaMile. And we really wanted to do an after-party, and we appointed Liusya to do it. What happened was the following: she was so excited about the event that we planned not just an after-party for the crew, but a festival. And all of a sudden Liusya said that she had been dreaming of organizing an electronic music festival all her life. So, let’s do it. Please, please, please! Electronic? Music? Festival? Are you serious?
And that’s where the rule came into play – her eyes glowed so brightly that we trusted her and let her do the job.
Next came a whole list of things to do, from coming up with a name to the number of toilets on the site. We were all looking for a thing that would make it stand out from the other festivals. And it so happened that the first thing that popped out was the name FOSFOR. We got to the point – fluorescent paints. Phosphorus! 🙂 Ouch, that burns!
And we are proud to say that we have broken all internal records to do the festival.
1.There were only three weeks for organizing the event, from coming up with the name to the day of the event, and that’s a heck of a lot less. For one advertising campaign, for example, you need more time. And here we have not yet settled things with the local administration.
2.The festival was to take place on the beach of the Ghidighici Reservoir immediately after the SeaMile swim. This means that the part of our team that has experience in organizing is busy with SeaMile, and they need at least to clone themselves in order to have time to help those who are preparing the festival.
3. We have only one team, so four brave members worked more than 24 hours without a break.
OPENING. FOSFOR at Ghidighici
Back then, before the first show, Liusya and I had a bet. I was sure that about a thousand to a thousand and a half spectators would come. She was sure that around three thousand would come. In fact, I promised her 5,000 lei if more than a thousand and a half people came.
By the way, when preparing the first edition, no one really thought about 10,000. The maximum that was considered was 3,000 people. We were counting on that figure for the infrastructure: bars, drinks, food, toilets. And we were a little freaked out when the barstools had queues for 20-30 minutes for beer and food. We couldn’t count the approximate number at the time. Only after the event, summing up the numbers, by the number of eaten and drunk, it was clear that the first festival brought ten thousand people.
Let’s take a look at the video:
If anyone had told me that Simpals would organize an electronic music festival, I would never have believed it. And here we not only organized, but also held 2 editions in 2016: July 17 on the beach of the Ghidighici Reservoir, and October 1 on Suvorov Square in Tiraspol.
FOSFOR in Transnistria
On October 1, 2016, we decided to hold the festival in Tiraspol. There was very little time difference between editions – two and a half months. Besides that, there was another hitch – Tiraspol is still in Transnistria, and that is:
a) more negotiations
b) even more shifting
c) an absolutely unreal amount of paperwork and documents.
Nevertheless, the festival in Tiraspol was very cool – managers brought on so many guards that we could not worry about any possible terrorist attacks.
By the way, a few days before the event, a young man posted in the media that there was a planned terrorist attack at the event. Someone was planning to blow up a bomb, he said. Of course, no one blew up anything and was not planning to do so. The boy was joking. Our guys came across this post and passed it on to the local KGB, so the boy had to tell his joke to the local KGB and Interior Ministry the very next day. And poor Liusya had to spend half the night before the festival, providing testimony.
Video proof:
THIRD EDITION – airfield in Horesti
In 2017, FOSFOR was held on July 1 at the airfield in Horesti, where an unreal 24,000 people gathered.
In fact, there was still an incredible amount of hard work to do 🙂
And there were difficulties, which had to be solved in a very urgent manner. Two days before the festival there was a heavy and continuous downpour. The whole field was washed away, it was impossible to build the site, it was impossible to set the stage. On the day of the event there was a gale-force wind which knocked down everything we had spent so much time and effort installing (bar counters, refrigerators), and the air temperature was a record for summer – 38 degrees Celsius. In the shade. And the field there is an open area 🙂
After midnight it was clear that we were in for a big thunderstorm. Basically, there was an incredible show in the sky – there so much lightning that I thought: the great flood is going to happen very soon. But in the end, there was FOSFOR. And there was music. And there was dancing.
At 4 a.m. We announced that the show was over. It was pouring all over the place. Except for the fact that it wasn’t snowing and hailing.
But the festival already was a success.
There were a lot of new things introduced (not only for the festival, but also for Moldova), there were a lot of curious details for visitors, and there was a lot of work for the team.
A bit of statistics to understand the scale of the event
At the third edition of the festival almost 13,000 burgers were eaten, almost 50 tons of beer, 40 tons of cocktails and another 5 tons of energy drinks were drunk.
Read on and learn what FOSFOR was like in 2018.
Click on the triangle to watch the video:
FOURTH EDITION – FOSFOR at Goodzone
In 2018, the question of finding a site came up. We began to drive around Chisinau, expanding our search radius to 40 km. In the end, we realized that what we were looking for was, as usual, right there. Good old Ghidighici, but on the other side. We found a suitable area there: asphalt, so it was comfortable for our feet to jump on, not to squash the mud.
As a result, a sort of looped Japanese composition turned out: we went back to where we started from. There is a beauty in it: FOSFOR has experienced water (Ghidighici), land (the central square inTiraspol), air (Horesti airfield), and FOSFOR itself – damn hot! So, we cleaned the site and named it Goodzone.
For this edition we decided to make it a paid event. We love people, but we wanted to see fans of electronic music at this festival, not dudes who have nothing to do in the evening. That’s why 150 lei became a filter to the world of like-minded people and fans of DJ sets.
This is gonna sound pathetic, but in 2018 it wasn’t us who ran after the DJs, but the DJs who wrote us asking for participation, including foreign ones. But we still had to run after some of them. It was a record-breaking year in terms of the amount of effort we put into it (but there’s more to come!). We got excited about installations, fireworks, stilt walkers, red-carpet, photo frames, mirror pyramids, dancers, and other entertainments. So that not only everyone could dance, but also the girls could have a place to pose for pictures.
And of course, by tradition, nothing could go smoothly, like the legs in girls’ commercials. Before the festival a series of rains began, and not just ordinary rains, but heavy downpours. This is where the arguments and doubts started.
But our team can’t be easily swept up and scared off by water. The guys were knee-deep in mud, day and night sucking water from puddles with a pump. This is an electronic music festival, not another swim, after all. Everything we were supposed to walk on was covered in gravel. The team worked like an ambulance, 24 hours a day. On the day of the event, it was raining. Many called us, asking to cancel/transfer. But we’re not at a psychoanalytic therapy session to deal with the transfer, are we? The festival has got to be, and it’s got to be on this damn day. Think of the rain as a gut check.
On the lusciously cute side of things: at the festival, in the midst of the fun, a guy proposed to some lucky girl he met at the first show. This was totally unexpected.
So, once again, I lose a bet, expecting that there are few fans of electronic moves in Moldova, that only a bunch of fans would come to FOSFOR, that we wouldn’t have time, we wouldn’t be able, we would be swept away by water or negative vibes of envious people. Fortunately, the lucky Simpals star burns brighter than ever and will continue to do so.
https://fosfor.md — watch this for details. In the meantime, check out FOSFOR 2018 after-movie.
