Indira Paganotto leads Artcore’s first Egypt show at Starlight Festival
Artcore plays its first Egyptian show on 9 October, with Indira Paganotto, Charlie Sparks, BIIA, Paolo Ferrara, Valentino, Reblok and Juno on the No Sleep Giza Stage at Starlight Festival.
Artcore will play its first show in Egypt on Friday 9 October, when founder Indira Paganotto brings the psy-techno collective to the No Sleep Giza Stage at Starlight Festival. She heads a showcase that also features Charlie Sparks, BIIA, Paolo Ferrara, Valentinø, Reblok and Juno.
The booking follows sold-out Artcore nights at Hï Ibiza and [UNVRS], and it lands at a festival with a first of its own. Starlight runs its main nights on 9 and 10 October at the Great Pyramids of Giza, with welcome and farewell parties in Cairo on 8 and 11 October. Produced by EXIT Festival and P+US, it is the first multi-stage electronic music festival ever staged at the site.
The showcase
Paganotto founded Artcore and holds a residency at Hï Ibiza, where she programmes guest DJs from across the label roster. She placed No. 36 in DJ Mag’s 2025 Top 100 DJs poll, and her sets pull techno and psytrance into the same room.
Charlie Sparks, born in London, has built his following on a sound he calls “hard and happy”, drawing on acid, industrial techno, EDM and psytrance. BIIA is one of Portugal’s leading techno exports, known for high-energy peak-time sets across the major European festivals. Paolo Ferrara, the Italian producer behind HEX, works metal influences and industrial intensity into hard techno, and has long been drawn to Egyptian culture.
Valentinø, Artcore’s Italian resident, plays dark, hypnotic industrial techno. Reblok has reached the Beatport Hard Techno Top 10 several times and released on Artcore, Filth On Acid and Verknipt, picking up support from Reinier Zonneveld, Kobosil and I Hate Models along the way. Juno is the youngest name on the bill. She came up through Belgrade’s underground, played the Artcore takeover at No Sleep Festival, made her Tomorrowland debut and became the youngest DJ ever to perform at the Artcore residency at Hï Ibiza.
The wider bill
Artcore joins a lineup that already carries Adriatique, Charlotte de Witte, Michael Bibi, Enrico Sangiuliano, Pete Tong, Vintage Culture, WhoMadeWho, Awen, Deer Jade, Fiona Kraft, Layla Benitez and Lanna. Starlight is produced by EXIT Festival with P+US, the electronic music platform of Venture Lifestyle, in partnership with Visa.
The Giza date is not the first time Artcore and the EXIT camp have shared a stage. Paganotto’s Artcore takeover at No Sleep Festival in Belgrade, the event the Giza stage is named after, gives a fair idea of what the collective travels with.
Why it matters
Psy-techno has spent the past three years moving from a niche within hard techno to a booking that festivals build stages around, and Artcore has been the vehicle for most of that. Taking it to Giza is a bigger step than another Ibiza residency date. Heritage sites of this scale rarely open to electronic music at all, and when they do it is usually for a single headline set rather than a full multi-stage festival with a psy-techno showcase inside it. If Starlight works, the argument for putting a sound system in front of a monument gets easier to make everywhere else.
More Indira Paganotto coverage, plus the rest of our techno festival reporting.
