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 Photo credit: Alive Coverage For over a decade the BPM Music Festival has been a place for electronic music lovers to come together and enjoy live music from their favorite artists. This year’s festival was set to make a return to Tamarindo, Costa Rica, but has been postponed. BPM worked with the Costa Rican government to ensure a safe 2021 festival, but with a lack of clarity on COVID-19 restrictions they felt as if they couldn’t deliver the festival experience they strive to give. Originally scheduled for March 3rd-7th, the multi-day festival is now set to take place at the start of 2022 from January 12th-18th. Read _Flaunt_’s conversation with Phillip Pulitano, the founder of The BPM Festival, on the postponement and the festival’s past. * * * **How has The BPM Festival changed over the past fourteen years?**  BPM is fourteen years old now, in terms of how it changed from the first year to the second year, it shifted dramatically as we were originally calling it “The BPM Conference.” I think it was by the third day of the first year that we quickly realized that a ‘conference’ is not what we want to do. It was seven days in the first year, and then the second year we made the switch from it being a conference to a festival and, instead of doing seven days, we decided to add the second weekend making it ten days long. So, in the progression from year two to year ten, we were really focused on building what we had in Mexico. Our numbers were doubling, and I think in year three it actually tripled.  It grew very, very quickly and exponentially. Also, within that initial time of being in Mexico our concept was comparatively very different than the rest. I think what was happening then was completely different than anything that was happening at the time. Now, there are some other events that are somewhat similar in nature.  We would take the entire city, and we would use that as our, let's say, “festival ground.” And again, yes there's ADE and there's Sónar that have been around longer, but those are a little bit of a different thing. We're talking about little beach towns, where there’s a techno tourism type of vibe—I think we were at the forefront of techno tourism. As we grew, obviously in time things evolved and we started moving up to off-sites in the jungle instead of being in the city. We’d take these beautiful pieces of jungle that are really just in a natural habitat, where you would never think to do an event at the time.  Now our home is Costa Rica. It’s going to be our flagship event moving forward, which will happen every January except for this one due to COVID-19. Costa Rica is going to be our home base in 2022, and we're now doing seven days.  **Can you tell me what you were thinking in March, when we kind of realized how serious COVID was, were you thinking that there was a possibility that this year’s festival would get pushed back?**  To be honest, I didn't think that it would be something that lasted this long at the time. When it first started, I was quite, I don't want to say worried, but, I was like, “Wow! Okay, there's this deadly virus,” I had no idea what to expect. I did live through the swine flu thing as it happened in Toronto where I'm originally from, and we went through with our Mexican event that year with the ongoing swine flu, but it still didn't stop the event. So when this happened in March I thought, “Well, it's gonna definitely affect our Summer shows.” Then we had to cancel four multiple-day festivals for 2020. Along with, I think it was about seventeen pop-ups, the first one that canceled being the Miami Music Week event. That was the first show that we had to cancel in 2020. And there was, like I said, sixteen others to follow. So, I didn't think that we would be sitting here into 2021 still having this discussion. **How did you come to the decision to push The BPM Festival: Costa Rica to January 2022? And what are your feelings on the postponement?**  We've been working on the event since our 2020 edition wrapped up, so we're disappointed about the situation. What's most important to us, though, is delivering the best possible experience for our clients and, unfortunately, that isn't possible right now due to the state of the world and unclear guidance.  **Is there anything else you would like to say about the rescheduling of the festival?**  We'd like to think there is a silver lining in all of this. We've always planned to have the event return to its seven (or more) day format and this situation has accelerated that decision as we are offering ticket buyers that hold onto their tickets for January 2022, two additional days of the festival at no extra cost.   Photo credit: Alive Coverage **Jumping back a little bit into the past of BPM. Do you have a favorite memory or a favorite year the festival took place?**  I think one of the most memorable events would be the first time we brought Carl Cox down, which I believe was in 2015 during our five year anniversary. We brought Carl and had him play at our beach club Blue Parrot. The space holds around 5,000 to 5,500 people, and I think we had about 8,500 people. There were people dancing literally in the water. I mean, the fence was moved into the water at that point. So that event there, everything about it was quite amazing. And another one of my most memorable is a Paradise party that we did with Jamie Jones that actually was one of the first Paradise parties that we did with him. It was also the first Paradise party that was done outside of Ibiza, if memory serves me correctly, and we did it at this beach club called Blue Venado. It was such a busy event. From the main road of the highway, you go drive into the jungle to get to this beach club. I mean, you're talking about a ten to twelve-minute drive down this dirt road. So, it was very deep into the jungle and then you come into this oasis. Yeah, we did Paradise there. The event was incredible. Music was incredible. Jamie was great. And I mean, we had about 500 taxis waiting off the side of the highway which caused so much back traffic. Literally the army came at 11 a.m. and shut us down and actually closed off the entire area. I had about five of my sound and lighting technicians stuck there for two days. So that was a pretty memorable event.  **Sounds like it.**  Also, the first time we did Technos Tacos was very good as well. When we had Richie Hawtin and Dubfire do a pop up at a taco stand on one of the main roads, it literally blocked the main artery of the city. We had about 7,000 people in the middle of the streets while we had the owner of the taco place sending out tacos and the DJs were handing out tacos to people while playing music. That was quite incredible as well.