BLOC 2016 organisers confirm their latest weekender festival will be their last

The team behind the electronic festival have outlined future plans

BLOC Festival have announced that the latest edition of their weekender will be their last.

BLOC – which has been running since 2006 – will be hanging up their weekender-festival hat as they reveal their future plans. The festival will be celebrating their tenth and final edition this year.

Speaking to Resident Advisor, co-organiser Alex Benson said: “Weekenders are strange, beautiful things,” Bloc co-founder Alex Benson told Resident Advisor. “Bloc itself has had some very widely publicised ups and downs. For us, in the middle of it, it has been a roller-coaster. Of course, everyone will have been on roller-coasters—they’re quite a trip, and leave you euphoric, shaken and with a new-found zest for life. Eventually, you get off having had a thoroughly great time. And that’s where we are.”

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Asked why the popular annual event will be ending, Benson said: “First up, it is the last ever Bloc weekender” he said. “This is it. It’s the final one and we won’t be doing any curtain calls, encores, reunion tours or one-last-jobs. If you ever want to see the titans of techno (and related musics) face down with 6,000 ravers in a Butlins holiday park, this is your very last opportunity to do so. We think that this line up and the show we have planned is a fitting, powerful crescendo to Bloc’s ten-year story.”

“We were so proud to have brought it back to where it is now, and genuinely touched very deeply at the way people responded to a reformed Bloc weekender” Benson stated, referring to the blighted 2012 edition in London at the now defunct London Pleasure Gardens.

The ill fated 2012 event was called off in the early hours by police after organisers declared that the festival’s site of London Pleasure Gardens had become unsafe for public use, which was then followed by an investigation into the event.

The Metropolitan Police had previously said that the bad weather on the Friday had led to the site’s safety being compromised, despite reports from attendees that the event was over-capacity and poorly organised.

After a relaunch, the festival returned for a successful run at it’s original home of Minehead Butlins in 2015, which sold out and had no reported problems or issues.

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Speaking on the company’s future plans, Benson also confirmed: “We’re going to build a super club. As many of you will know, we started a venue in an ex-industrial building in London, then renovated the surrounding warehouses into music studios and workspace. A community sprung up around it and it has been one of the most rewarding things we have ever been involved in. We want to develop this community and the venue at the heart of it. It will, like the current venue, be called Bloc. And it will be surrounded by music studios which won’t cost the earth to rent and aren’t about to be sold, knocked down or redeveloped.”

“We will work more on our Bloc label—we have a mind-blowing album by JoeFarr about to drop, and plenty more lined up” Benson continued. “We are working with LEME (London Electronic Music Event) to produce a full-scale electronic music conference in London next summer. We are also celebrating Bloc’s 10th birthday this year with 10 parties in spots across the world, including Montreal, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Malta, Paris and Dublin.”

Among those set to perform at the festival’s final bow are Thom Yorke, Jeff Mills, Moritz Von Oswald and more.

The final BLOC weekender will be held at Minehead Butlins from March 11-13 2016.

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