“As incredible as these shows are, it’s only when you stand at the back, you realise something is missing,” Lens adds. That observation has shaped the next phase of EXHALE. Instead of continuing to scale up, the team is increasingly balancing high-capacity events with more intimate gatherings, weighing scale against the feeling they want each event to create. It’s not a rejection of growth, Lens explains, but a recalibration of what matters most to EXHALE. “We’d rather have 4,000 fans who feel really involved, than a much bigger crowd where that feeling gets lost,” she says. “Bigger is not always better, you know, and maintaining that community feel is so important to us. How can members of our community even find each other when there are 15,000 people on the dancefloor?”

“With me individually as Amelie Lens, and with my AURA shows, things are growing so much. The shows are getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger. So with EXHALE, we’re actually taking a step back and focusing more again on warehouses and more clubby underground spaces, to just be able to really connect with the crowd.”

So far, the response has been great. “Especially from those really close ravers who are always there with us,” Tassi says. “A few of them flew all the way to Berlin for an event at RSO recently and they absolutely loved it, because they said, ‘We finally had a situation where we were so close to each other’.” That connection goes both ways. Lens recalls spending “hours on the dancefloor dancing with everyone” at RSO.BERLIN last summer, something she says just “wouldn’t be possible or safe [for her] in a crowd of 15,000 people.”

“I mean, she still does it, which is always a bit tricky for the team,” Tassi quips, laughing. “I think it’s just a very different vibe and way of enjoying the night when the artist and the crowd are more close.”