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Untold Festival has earned a reputation as one of Europe’s most lively dance music festivals. Since launching in 2015, the annual event held in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, has attracted big-name performers from Armin van Buuren to Tiësto, and earned accolades that include being named the Best Major Festival by the European Festival Awards 2015.
Last month, it launched an offshoot in the United Arab Emirates, a four-day event that featured global stars including Ellie Goulding and Bebe Rexha. CNN was there to speak with co-founder Edy Chereji.
The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
CNN: Tell us a little bit about Untold Festival and what it’s like for you to be in Dubai.
Edy Chereji: It’s our first time in Dubai … and we created Dubai’s first mega festival. It’s an honor for us to be present here after 10 years in Europe, where we created the first Untold festival in Romania, which became one of the biggest festivals worldwide.
All the big artists were present there [over] the years, starting with Armin van Buuren, David Guetta, Martin Garrix, Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike, Steve Aoki and Imagine Dragons. So a lot of big artists were there and … we thought, we should find a second place or a new place for our festival. The festival in Romania stays over there and now we add a new place here in the Middle East, and we are so thrilled that we can do this year in Dubai … a place where people from around the world travel … and now we can offer them a new reason to come.
CNN: Could you tell me a little bit about the artists that performed over the weekend?
Edy Chereji: We try to put on four stages the relevant artists of all the generations. We try to have the artists that are on the commercial side, like electro, dance music, DJs, live acts. For example, we had Armin van Buuren, we had Hardwell, who’s really loved here in Dubai.
We [also] try to have artists for all the communities that are here in Dubai. For example, on Friday, for the Indian and Pakistani community, we had Badshah. He was mashing the stage for more than an hour. We have an artist really, really loved for Asian communities, PSY. All around the world, people know him for his legendary “Gangnam Style.” So we try to have all the genres here in the festival because Dubai’s a place where more than 150 nationalities are living together.
CNN: Are you going to come back in the future?
Edy Chereji: For sure … Dubai created during the last 20 years some of the worldwide icons. There are the hotels, with Burj Al Arab, which became like a statement for hospitality, then Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. And our pledge is that we want to do something like this for the long-term and create a new icon of Dubai.
