Skepta, the London rapper and producer known first for grime, has spent the summer running a house music night on Ibiza. Mas Tiempo, his residency at the Club Room inside Hi Ibiza, continues through October 3, and it sits at the more intimate end of an island where the other headline party this season, elrow's night at UNVRS, fills six separate themed rooms with house and techno at a much bigger scale.
The gap between those two nights says something about what Ibiza's summer actually looks like once you get past the postcard version. UNVRS and its six environments are built for a crowd that wants scale and spectacle. Skepta's night, by his own choice of name and room, is built for something closer to a set played to people who came specifically for that sound, in a genre he did not build his career on.
The island's daytime and evening calendar has kept pace. Paradiso, part of the 24 hour Arty People cultural program, is showing work by the Mexican photographer Paul Fuentes, images that place wildlife inside architecture too polished to belong to it. On the food side, Es Fumeral on the beachfront has chef Alberto Pacheco reworking Mediterranean dishes around whatever is in season, Casa Jondal in Cala Jondal is running chef Rafa Zafra's elevated seafood menu, and El Bigotes, a family restaurant at Cala Mastella run by Ana and Monica Ferrer, is still serving its wood fired bullit de peix and arroz a banda the way it always has.
Even the smaller nights carry a season's worth of range. CULTO, a party at Playa Soleil, mixes techno, hardgroove and Latin club sounds across sets from Peter Blue, Thanila and Loren, and Hotel Mongibello has been running a cinema strand called Movieland, which screened Paolo Sorrentino's Parthenope, the story of a woman's life from 1950s Naples to the present, as one of its evening slots.
None of it adds up to a single idea of what Ibiza is this year, and that is closer to the point than any one of the nights on its own. A grime artist running a house residency two months deep, a Mexican photographer's images inside a 24 hour art program, a family run fish restaurant that has not changed its menu in years, and a nightclub with six rooms built to be six different parties at once. The island is still doing all of it in the same season, which is roughly what it has always done.