Time Warp

It all started in a Mannheim record shop, where Steffen Charles began running club nights in 1993 to promote it. In 1994 he teamed up with Michael Hock, whom he met at the shop, and the first Time Warp took place on 26 November 1994 at the Walzmühle in Ludwigshafen, in front of some 2,000 people, with Speedy J, Robert Armani and Laurent Garnier. The name stated the aim: a return to the underground of the early days.

The party first came to Mannheim's Maimarkthalle in May 1995, then moved around without a fixed home, to Berlin, Bremen, Speyer and Sinsheim, before settling in the Maimarkthalle every spring from 2000. The early 2000s were hard: large police operations in 2002 and 2003, and sales falling from 18,000 tickets in 2001 to 9,000 in 2003. Steffen Charles and Robin Ebinger founded cosmopop GmbH in 2003, which has run the festival since, and the Mannheim edition has sold out every year from 2008.

Time Warp has no single main stage: it is a set of floors spread across the halls, each with its own light design, renewed every edition since the festival took on a technical director in 2011. The official site lists fifteen of them since 2012, from Cave to Sinus and Optics in 2025. The booking keeps its regulars: Sven Väth, Richie Hawtin, Laurent Garnier, or Seebase, who has played since the first edition.

The brand has travelled since 2005, from Prague to the Netherlands, from Buenos Aires to New York and São Paulo, but Mannheim remains the original. After the 30th anniversary, celebrated over two days in April 2024, the organiser dropped the autumn edition: since 2026 Germany has a single Time Warp a year. The 21 March 2026 edition counted 5 floors, 19 hours and 47 DJs; the next one is announced for 3 April 2027.