a party in the mountains
I started out this year with a goal to try to get in touch with family and friends more, to get out of my routine a little bit - work, home, cook dinner, watch TV, play computer game, go back to work, cycle around a bit on the weekend. It's not that i don't enjoy those things, but i dislike that because of the work i am so zonked i feel incapable of doing anything else.
So a month or so back i decided to go to a rave, and it was great, and as soon as i came back from that party i booked a ticket to another one recommended by a couple of people i met there. And then i promptly forgot about it. I was so wrapped up in work in the intervening weeks that the long weekend i had booked off snuck up on me. Now it's been a week since the event and it's out of my mind once more. But i need to write this stuff down so i don't forget what it means to me.
Friday morning i jammed a bunch of stuff in my backpack, swung through the small market near my house for snacks, then took the subway downtown where the shuttle buses were leaving from. The meeting point was much easier to find this time around, as a whole gaggle of ravers were standing about with backpacks and tattoos and dreadlocks and tie-dye. Shameless tourists gawked and snapped photos of the freaks.
Amusingly, also getting on one of the buses was a conservatively-dressed chap with a rolly suitcase and a Taiwan Railways bento box, which he patiently waited for the bus to depart before promptly opening to munch away. (Why do people do this!?) L was there too, and it was nice to see a familiar face.
The ride to the venue was unremarkable, several hours crawling through heavy traffic on the main north/south highway. I think it's the first time i've spent longer than an hour in an internal combustion vehicle in Taiwan, and it fucking sucked. Somewhere out back of Miaoli we turned left, into the mountains. Where we promptly hit an even bigger traffic jam trying to get to the party. The road was mostly one lane and very steep, and eventually L and i just decided to jump out and walk the rest of the way.
We were lucky to do it, because by the time we got in, there was virtually nowhere left to camp. Unlike the party down south over Chinese New Year, this one was bursting at the seams. We scoped out a few of the different camping sites, each a small leveled-out section cut into the steep mountainside, then squished our tents between a couple of others. There was no mobile signal. Mist hanging in the air. Up a mountain, down a holler, a real secret garden kind of vibe for a party.
The opening act was a full power hippie fest. A jaw harp extravaganza. You never heard so many twingy twangy rubber bands, i tell you what. Didgeridoo. Reverb out the wazoo. Frame drum. Rain stick. Wind chimes. Throat singing. Loop pedal. And just when you think it couldn't get any more hippie-ish, there is a half naked performer dancing around like an animal, complete with picking sticks and stones up off the ground in her mouth, writhing and arching her back and freaking out a couple of befuddled city ravers.
I was trying to figure out if it was an indigenous performance - they did all have the flax headbands common in the Pacific island cultures whose ancestors are Taiwanese aboriginals - but then i looked at the didg and the rain stick and nah. This was pure new age culturally appropriative global space tribe music, not ethnically anything but ethnically everything.
I do miss this sort of silly optimistic hippiedom, the attempt to recontextualize a big old druggy techno party as something magical, something more. (We used to bury crystals under the dancefloor, different crystals in different corners because, like, the energy maaan.) Up in the misty mountains, might as well embrace the woo, you know?
And the music started, immediately banging out psytrance at a tempo that outpaced even the hardest techno nights in Berlin. But it was so-called "progressive" psytrance, which has a bit more space in it, and this DJ played the kind of slightly wonky stuff with jazzy piano noodlings that if you squint a little bit almost could be house music, and so i was happy. I wrote in my phone "just play Loopus in Fabula forever", in reference to one of the few psytrance acts that i own a couple albums of. Their most famous track is a psychedelic take on Mana Mana, but that's 15 years old now, so here's Django.
Loopus In Fabula - Django
If only this was the kind of psychedelic music Taiwan hippies dug all night long. It is not. Because after Vice City finished her set we got a relentless machine-gunning of three note basslines that would continue for the rest of the weekend.
I wandered up and down the mountain, quickly finding my happy place in the "side room". I know better now than to call it the "techno room" or the "chillout room". It's just the "slightly less psytrance than the main room room". Still very high tempo. A touch of house and techno. And... what's this? Booyaka booyaka! Shout out da junglist massive!
No fucking joke. I could not believe my ears. Here, at a psytrance party, in Taiwan, some DJ had the balls to pull out no hint of a wobble, not even a nod to dubstep, your mama and your papa's old school, Jamaican MC, Amen break jungle music. Like, we're talking murderer, machete, angry yoof, jump-up drum'n'bass, bruv. And i liked it!
Drum'n'bass is normally one of my more hated subgenres of electronic music, because the snare drum hurts my ears, the tempo is too fast, there's no acid lines, and it never really gives you a chance to relax into a groove. But mostly i hate it because the crowd is probably even more of a gigantic chin-stroking sausage fest than the techno crowd. And yet, looking around, everyone on the dancefloor was a girl. And then i started noticing the tracks weren't all accompanied by the usual vaguely homophobic and misogynistic patois, there were some girl MCs too, and they were rapping about "LGBTQ" and left-wing politics, and then one epic choon was dropped where the main lyrical hook was "i'm a drum'n'bass faggot" and i'm like... holy shit! The gays have reclaimed jungle!
And that turned out to be the most memorable set of the night.
The next morning i woke around 7am and took a walk over the mountain to the little temple near the front entrance (like the previous party this was held at a campsite). I used the hot water machine to make a cup of coffee than hiked back over the mountain to the main floor which - after a two hour pause - resumed with a DJ out of Thailand who spun fairly minimal psytrance, although with all of the standard "trippy" synthesizer noises, just spaced out a little more than the night time stuff. It was good enough.
I went back to the side floor as soon as it reopened. The opening set built up from a really nice slow start of dub, house and breaks into... well, you guessed it, psytrance. Second DJ to come on Saturday morning was one that i remember from the actually-techno side room of the previous party and he played solid, clean, well-mixed tech-house. A very middle-of-the-road forgettable Berlin-style set, but because that kind of a set is apparently so rare over here, i wrung every moment of enjoyment out of it. He brought his whole Taipei techno entourage, featuring several familiar faces including S, whose music i loved so much the last time. She gave me a big hug. I need to find out where these guys play when they're not doing side rooms at psytrance parties, because it'd probably be exactly my style of spot, if i could stay up late enough for a city gig.
Next up was banging Berghain techno, and that was as tedious as always, so i left to dodge butterflies and watch some ants walk up a water pipe.
When i wandered back over the mountain an hour or a lifetime later there was another surprise. A DJ called Fion started playing some breaks. She was like the ultimate DIY don't give a fuck DJ, even turning down the music at one point so she could hear her friend on the dancefloor say something to her, then she turned it back up, and that's the kind of down-to-Earth shit i like to go to bush parties for. Eventually she upped the tempo and then - suddenly - she was busting out full-blown drum'n'bass too! And it was just as awesome as the previous night. Except... maybe even better, because all the MCs were women. And the style was more modern too, featuring lots of dubstep wobble and chainsaw synthesizer noises and massive drops. EDM is such feel-good music when it's in small doses. Once again the dancefloor was almost all women dancing their hearts out. Even the bartender got up to boogie, and the mom and dad who had parked their tent full of three kids literally on the dancefloor because there was nowhere else to go. It was such a deep moment of raver spirit, PLUR all the way, it was great.
Later on i spoke to someone i had chatted to the night before after the jungle set, P. She said that Fion was the partner of the DJ the night before and she was looking forward to seeing her play. I had to be the bearer of bad news that she'd missed the set, and it almost brought her to tears she was so bummed. But we continued chatting a bit, about music and parties, and she said i had to meet her friend J from Taichung who was selling noodles in the market section.
He was asleep, although we spoke later, but something else that struck me was - walking through the market - i asked P what 眷村豆腐乳 meant. I knew the last four characters to mean "village fermented tofu" but i didn't recognize the first. She explained that 眷村 is not a specific village, it's a type of village, the type of village that they built "when the KMT came here after the war". In English they're called military dependents' villages, which are a type of public housing that was built for the soldiers and their families who fled China after the civil war. But i had never heard that time referred to as "when the KMT came here" - the KMT being the Chinese nationalist party. The majority of Taiwanese people are descended from migrants who arrived in the centuries prior to the civil war, so for them one way of looking at the arrival of the Chinese nationalists was less as a liberation from the Japanese and more as a transition from one bunch of foreign imperialists to another. But people in Taiwan - at least in my circles - don't speak very openly about history, so it was refreshing to hear someone reference it in a way that sounded unusually candid.
Or perhaps i am just reading too much into some idle chit-chat at a techno party.
We went back up the hill. P said she also preferred this smaller dancefloor to the main space - "it's more alternative!" Only at a psytrance party could you hear someone describe the greatest hits of Ibiza, DJ Mag Top 100, Panorama Bar approved corny vocal techno as alternative... But, you know, that stuff is a crowd-pleaser wherever it's played. Not for P, though, who went to bed. For me it was inoffensive enough to persevere.
It was only one set. The next DJ was a lot more serious with the banging techno. High tempo tick tack 909 Tresor minimal techno that's mildly less abrasive than the Berghain style, and at least it reminds me somewhat of the techno of my youth, but... eh. I was tired. I tried to snatch a disco nap, with my alarm set for S, who was playing in the most incredibly inconvenient timeslot of 3am.
I did get up for the DJ prior to her set, though. He's a French chap who was playing the previous party on the morning i went for my mountain hike. Apparently he's a bit of a local hero and a small entourage of the old psytrancers made the trek up the hill to hear him play his interesting mix of minimal house, disco and progressive psy. C, the South African, was there, and gave me a hug. He's such a people person that later in the evening i met at least 3 other people who introduced themselves to me as "oh, hey, i heard you know C..."
Finally S came on, and i remembered exactly why i loved her set so much at the party on new year's. This time she was playing a very different style, starting with chunky electro moving to ambient dub, then back to breaks and ending with more mainstream techno, but often with wandering, wavering K-hole breakdowns that just kept getting smaller and smaller and smaller and...
And nothing. Anticlimactic AF. It was awesome. And she played it all so effortlessly. Every transition flawless, switching genres so smoothly. Definitely my Taiwan fave, i'll go see her wherever she plays.
I only got a few hours sleep, waking up to the sound of EBM and coldwave/darkwave stuff, which is exactly what i would not have expected to hear at sunrise. One of the things that makes goa trance different to other forms of rave music is that in the early days it had more influence from the goth and industrial scene, although aside from the three note basslines you wouldn't much know it these days.
I actually met one of those industrial guys the night before. Dude in black approached me: "i'm a friend of C". He said he preferred the music up in the side room area because there was a bit more space in it. "My favorite artist is Download." I said the name was vaguely familiar to me, but i couldn't place it. "You know Skinny Puppy?" Ah, yes, right then.
I babbled to him about music, probably a little too much, but he was a muso and had the same observation i had that modern psytrance has kinda gotten itself stuck in an ironically predictable ghetto of Very Psychedelic Sounds, which aren't quite as psychedelic when they're the same in every track.
But that morning the rivet head was nowhere to be found. The EBM throwback DJ also played some nice slow techno and then it was back to psytrance, even in the side room. Ah well. Three note basslines smashing at a million miles an hour forever, no escape.
That's the downside of having parties in a mountain. The only way out is, like, out. It's a psytrance cul-de-sac. Probably the geography of Taiwan doesn't help, where you get steep, jungle-covered slopes that aren't really navigable except where the road is.
It was pretty tho. I saw a guy flying an FPV drone, full setup with goggles and everything. I bet he was having a blast, flying over the mountains, looking down on the party, seeing what was going on in the next valley.
That Sunday morning was a bit of a haze. I stuck it out in the side space dancing to slower-ish psytrance in the sun till it shut down at noon. Then i broke up my tent and hiked back down to the main floor to close out the show.
One thing that i didn't write about yet is that there was a whole contingent of circuit gays at the gig. You remember that well-dressed ordinary-looking gentleman on the bus? Well there were scads of them, but after they checked into their glamping spots they changed into tiny pairs of shorts and took their shirts off and spent the rest of the weekend strutting and preening and posing and gurning and it was delightful.
The party was much busier and more psytrance-y than the previous one, which made it less enjoyable for me overall, but it was still so good to get out and have a dance in the sun. And this time the bus home was scheduled such so that i could stay right until the closing set, which was played by the promoter. When she played her last song, there was still a huge dancefloor there to cheer and clap and thank her for putting on a great party. She gave a small speech, thanking everyone for coming, then let another DJ play 15 minutes or so of encore while she went onto the dancefloor giving hugs and high-fives... and i realized i had seen her before, and that we might even have chatted a bit at the previous gig. And that's the best thing about going to "small" parties - there isn't a big split between promoters/performers and punters.
In my head this felt like a massive event, surely over a thousand people. But joining everyone for a group photo at the end, i realized it's a tight-knit community. If only the psytrancers rocked up, or only the gays rocked up, or only the techno fans rocked up, maybe there wouldn't be enough people to rent out a full campground, maybe there wouldn't be a party at all. So it takes all of us to put the show together, and even if it's not always our favorite subgenre, electronic music will always beat anything rock or pop or hip-hop. It's our little scene and being part of it again feels really good.
Now i just need to get back into that start-of-the-year brain where i had the mental space to enjoy and reflect on this a bit more. Work should not take up as big of a chunk of my emotional space as it does. And yet, it's Saturday night, and i'm still wiped from just 4 days in the office. Sigh.
So a month or so back i decided to go to a rave, and it was great, and as soon as i came back from that party i booked a ticket to another one recommended by a couple of people i met there. And then i promptly forgot about it. I was so wrapped up in work in the intervening weeks that the long weekend i had booked off snuck up on me. Now it's been a week since the event and it's out of my mind once more. But i need to write this stuff down so i don't forget what it means to me.
Friday morning i jammed a bunch of stuff in my backpack, swung through the small market near my house for snacks, then took the subway downtown where the shuttle buses were leaving from. The meeting point was much easier to find this time around, as a whole gaggle of ravers were standing about with backpacks and tattoos and dreadlocks and tie-dye. Shameless tourists gawked and snapped photos of the freaks.
Amusingly, also getting on one of the buses was a conservatively-dressed chap with a rolly suitcase and a Taiwan Railways bento box, which he patiently waited for the bus to depart before promptly opening to munch away. (Why do people do this!?) L was there too, and it was nice to see a familiar face.
The ride to the venue was unremarkable, several hours crawling through heavy traffic on the main north/south highway. I think it's the first time i've spent longer than an hour in an internal combustion vehicle in Taiwan, and it fucking sucked. Somewhere out back of Miaoli we turned left, into the mountains. Where we promptly hit an even bigger traffic jam trying to get to the party. The road was mostly one lane and very steep, and eventually L and i just decided to jump out and walk the rest of the way.
We were lucky to do it, because by the time we got in, there was virtually nowhere left to camp. Unlike the party down south over Chinese New Year, this one was bursting at the seams. We scoped out a few of the different camping sites, each a small leveled-out section cut into the steep mountainside, then squished our tents between a couple of others. There was no mobile signal. Mist hanging in the air. Up a mountain, down a holler, a real secret garden kind of vibe for a party.
The opening act was a full power hippie fest. A jaw harp extravaganza. You never heard so many twingy twangy rubber bands, i tell you what. Didgeridoo. Reverb out the wazoo. Frame drum. Rain stick. Wind chimes. Throat singing. Loop pedal. And just when you think it couldn't get any more hippie-ish, there is a half naked performer dancing around like an animal, complete with picking sticks and stones up off the ground in her mouth, writhing and arching her back and freaking out a couple of befuddled city ravers.
I was trying to figure out if it was an indigenous performance - they did all have the flax headbands common in the Pacific island cultures whose ancestors are Taiwanese aboriginals - but then i looked at the didg and the rain stick and nah. This was pure new age culturally appropriative global space tribe music, not ethnically anything but ethnically everything.
I do miss this sort of silly optimistic hippiedom, the attempt to recontextualize a big old druggy techno party as something magical, something more. (We used to bury crystals under the dancefloor, different crystals in different corners because, like, the energy maaan.) Up in the misty mountains, might as well embrace the woo, you know?
And the music started, immediately banging out psytrance at a tempo that outpaced even the hardest techno nights in Berlin. But it was so-called "progressive" psytrance, which has a bit more space in it, and this DJ played the kind of slightly wonky stuff with jazzy piano noodlings that if you squint a little bit almost could be house music, and so i was happy. I wrote in my phone "just play Loopus in Fabula forever", in reference to one of the few psytrance acts that i own a couple albums of. Their most famous track is a psychedelic take on Mana Mana, but that's 15 years old now, so here's Django.
Click to viewLoopus In Fabula - Django
If only this was the kind of psychedelic music Taiwan hippies dug all night long. It is not. Because after Vice City finished her set we got a relentless machine-gunning of three note basslines that would continue for the rest of the weekend.
I wandered up and down the mountain, quickly finding my happy place in the "side room". I know better now than to call it the "techno room" or the "chillout room". It's just the "slightly less psytrance than the main room room". Still very high tempo. A touch of house and techno. And... what's this? Booyaka booyaka! Shout out da junglist massive!
No fucking joke. I could not believe my ears. Here, at a psytrance party, in Taiwan, some DJ had the balls to pull out no hint of a wobble, not even a nod to dubstep, your mama and your papa's old school, Jamaican MC, Amen break jungle music. Like, we're talking murderer, machete, angry yoof, jump-up drum'n'bass, bruv. And i liked it!
Drum'n'bass is normally one of my more hated subgenres of electronic music, because the snare drum hurts my ears, the tempo is too fast, there's no acid lines, and it never really gives you a chance to relax into a groove. But mostly i hate it because the crowd is probably even more of a gigantic chin-stroking sausage fest than the techno crowd. And yet, looking around, everyone on the dancefloor was a girl. And then i started noticing the tracks weren't all accompanied by the usual vaguely homophobic and misogynistic patois, there were some girl MCs too, and they were rapping about "LGBTQ" and left-wing politics, and then one epic choon was dropped where the main lyrical hook was "i'm a drum'n'bass faggot" and i'm like... holy shit! The gays have reclaimed jungle!
And that turned out to be the most memorable set of the night.
The next morning i woke around 7am and took a walk over the mountain to the little temple near the front entrance (like the previous party this was held at a campsite). I used the hot water machine to make a cup of coffee than hiked back over the mountain to the main floor which - after a two hour pause - resumed with a DJ out of Thailand who spun fairly minimal psytrance, although with all of the standard "trippy" synthesizer noises, just spaced out a little more than the night time stuff. It was good enough.
I went back to the side floor as soon as it reopened. The opening set built up from a really nice slow start of dub, house and breaks into... well, you guessed it, psytrance. Second DJ to come on Saturday morning was one that i remember from the actually-techno side room of the previous party and he played solid, clean, well-mixed tech-house. A very middle-of-the-road forgettable Berlin-style set, but because that kind of a set is apparently so rare over here, i wrung every moment of enjoyment out of it. He brought his whole Taipei techno entourage, featuring several familiar faces including S, whose music i loved so much the last time. She gave me a big hug. I need to find out where these guys play when they're not doing side rooms at psytrance parties, because it'd probably be exactly my style of spot, if i could stay up late enough for a city gig.
Next up was banging Berghain techno, and that was as tedious as always, so i left to dodge butterflies and watch some ants walk up a water pipe.
When i wandered back over the mountain an hour or a lifetime later there was another surprise. A DJ called Fion started playing some breaks. She was like the ultimate DIY don't give a fuck DJ, even turning down the music at one point so she could hear her friend on the dancefloor say something to her, then she turned it back up, and that's the kind of down-to-Earth shit i like to go to bush parties for. Eventually she upped the tempo and then - suddenly - she was busting out full-blown drum'n'bass too! And it was just as awesome as the previous night. Except... maybe even better, because all the MCs were women. And the style was more modern too, featuring lots of dubstep wobble and chainsaw synthesizer noises and massive drops. EDM is such feel-good music when it's in small doses. Once again the dancefloor was almost all women dancing their hearts out. Even the bartender got up to boogie, and the mom and dad who had parked their tent full of three kids literally on the dancefloor because there was nowhere else to go. It was such a deep moment of raver spirit, PLUR all the way, it was great.
Later on i spoke to someone i had chatted to the night before after the jungle set, P. She said that Fion was the partner of the DJ the night before and she was looking forward to seeing her play. I had to be the bearer of bad news that she'd missed the set, and it almost brought her to tears she was so bummed. But we continued chatting a bit, about music and parties, and she said i had to meet her friend J from Taichung who was selling noodles in the market section.
He was asleep, although we spoke later, but something else that struck me was - walking through the market - i asked P what 眷村豆腐乳 meant. I knew the last four characters to mean "village fermented tofu" but i didn't recognize the first. She explained that 眷村 is not a specific village, it's a type of village, the type of village that they built "when the KMT came here after the war". In English they're called military dependents' villages, which are a type of public housing that was built for the soldiers and their families who fled China after the civil war. But i had never heard that time referred to as "when the KMT came here" - the KMT being the Chinese nationalist party. The majority of Taiwanese people are descended from migrants who arrived in the centuries prior to the civil war, so for them one way of looking at the arrival of the Chinese nationalists was less as a liberation from the Japanese and more as a transition from one bunch of foreign imperialists to another. But people in Taiwan - at least in my circles - don't speak very openly about history, so it was refreshing to hear someone reference it in a way that sounded unusually candid.
Or perhaps i am just reading too much into some idle chit-chat at a techno party.
We went back up the hill. P said she also preferred this smaller dancefloor to the main space - "it's more alternative!" Only at a psytrance party could you hear someone describe the greatest hits of Ibiza, DJ Mag Top 100, Panorama Bar approved corny vocal techno as alternative... But, you know, that stuff is a crowd-pleaser wherever it's played. Not for P, though, who went to bed. For me it was inoffensive enough to persevere.
It was only one set. The next DJ was a lot more serious with the banging techno. High tempo tick tack 909 Tresor minimal techno that's mildly less abrasive than the Berghain style, and at least it reminds me somewhat of the techno of my youth, but... eh. I was tired. I tried to snatch a disco nap, with my alarm set for S, who was playing in the most incredibly inconvenient timeslot of 3am.
I did get up for the DJ prior to her set, though. He's a French chap who was playing the previous party on the morning i went for my mountain hike. Apparently he's a bit of a local hero and a small entourage of the old psytrancers made the trek up the hill to hear him play his interesting mix of minimal house, disco and progressive psy. C, the South African, was there, and gave me a hug. He's such a people person that later in the evening i met at least 3 other people who introduced themselves to me as "oh, hey, i heard you know C..."
Finally S came on, and i remembered exactly why i loved her set so much at the party on new year's. This time she was playing a very different style, starting with chunky electro moving to ambient dub, then back to breaks and ending with more mainstream techno, but often with wandering, wavering K-hole breakdowns that just kept getting smaller and smaller and smaller and...
And nothing. Anticlimactic AF. It was awesome. And she played it all so effortlessly. Every transition flawless, switching genres so smoothly. Definitely my Taiwan fave, i'll go see her wherever she plays.
I only got a few hours sleep, waking up to the sound of EBM and coldwave/darkwave stuff, which is exactly what i would not have expected to hear at sunrise. One of the things that makes goa trance different to other forms of rave music is that in the early days it had more influence from the goth and industrial scene, although aside from the three note basslines you wouldn't much know it these days.
I actually met one of those industrial guys the night before. Dude in black approached me: "i'm a friend of C". He said he preferred the music up in the side room area because there was a bit more space in it. "My favorite artist is Download." I said the name was vaguely familiar to me, but i couldn't place it. "You know Skinny Puppy?" Ah, yes, right then.
I babbled to him about music, probably a little too much, but he was a muso and had the same observation i had that modern psytrance has kinda gotten itself stuck in an ironically predictable ghetto of Very Psychedelic Sounds, which aren't quite as psychedelic when they're the same in every track.
But that morning the rivet head was nowhere to be found. The EBM throwback DJ also played some nice slow techno and then it was back to psytrance, even in the side room. Ah well. Three note basslines smashing at a million miles an hour forever, no escape.
That's the downside of having parties in a mountain. The only way out is, like, out. It's a psytrance cul-de-sac. Probably the geography of Taiwan doesn't help, where you get steep, jungle-covered slopes that aren't really navigable except where the road is.
It was pretty tho. I saw a guy flying an FPV drone, full setup with goggles and everything. I bet he was having a blast, flying over the mountains, looking down on the party, seeing what was going on in the next valley.
That Sunday morning was a bit of a haze. I stuck it out in the side space dancing to slower-ish psytrance in the sun till it shut down at noon. Then i broke up my tent and hiked back down to the main floor to close out the show.
One thing that i didn't write about yet is that there was a whole contingent of circuit gays at the gig. You remember that well-dressed ordinary-looking gentleman on the bus? Well there were scads of them, but after they checked into their glamping spots they changed into tiny pairs of shorts and took their shirts off and spent the rest of the weekend strutting and preening and posing and gurning and it was delightful.
The party was much busier and more psytrance-y than the previous one, which made it less enjoyable for me overall, but it was still so good to get out and have a dance in the sun. And this time the bus home was scheduled such so that i could stay right until the closing set, which was played by the promoter. When she played her last song, there was still a huge dancefloor there to cheer and clap and thank her for putting on a great party. She gave a small speech, thanking everyone for coming, then let another DJ play 15 minutes or so of encore while she went onto the dancefloor giving hugs and high-fives... and i realized i had seen her before, and that we might even have chatted a bit at the previous gig. And that's the best thing about going to "small" parties - there isn't a big split between promoters/performers and punters.
In my head this felt like a massive event, surely over a thousand people. But joining everyone for a group photo at the end, i realized it's a tight-knit community. If only the psytrancers rocked up, or only the gays rocked up, or only the techno fans rocked up, maybe there wouldn't be enough people to rent out a full campground, maybe there wouldn't be a party at all. So it takes all of us to put the show together, and even if it's not always our favorite subgenre, electronic music will always beat anything rock or pop or hip-hop. It's our little scene and being part of it again feels really good.
Now i just need to get back into that start-of-the-year brain where i had the mental space to enjoy and reflect on this a bit more. Work should not take up as big of a chunk of my emotional space as it does. And yet, it's Saturday night, and i'm still wiped from just 4 days in the office. Sigh.