Infest and country dancing

[void150]

Today is my first day back at the office, following almost a week off. This is primarily because of my trip to Bradford for Infest during the Bank Holiday weekend, but I chose to bookend the trip with additional days off work, enabling me to catch up on many errands and projects (but not, as it turned out, sleep).

Highlights included:

• Installing some red LEDs inside a battered old pair of goggles to make them glow. This earned me some compliments at the festival, where glowing things were very much the order of the day!
  
• Cyberandy offered to play a Non-Bio track during one of his DJ slots between the live bands. On the night before the festival, I stayed up until 2, trying to throw together a suitable bit of music and eventually triumphed (well sort of - see comment below). You can hear this track being played at about 01:15 into the video clip below.
  
• Discovering on my way to the festival that, in addition to wanderlustzero, Karl, Marna and Cyberandy, we were also to be joined there by maxrael and beardy_ted, neither of whom I’d seen for ages.
  
• Pledging to “go easy” on the first night there, then getting over-excited and going “full retard”
  
• Seeing Tactical Sekt, Xotox, Hocico, Mind in a Box and VNV Nation, all of whom were excellent.
  
• Making the additional new discoveries of Shiv-R and Sci-Fi Mafia, who were awesome.
  
• Having a competition with maxrael to see who could roll down a hill faster. He won.
  
• Being asked by Sci-Fi Mafia to create some video backdrops for their future shows.

Anyway, on with the movie:

Click to view

Lowlights:

• Shockingly bad traffic on the M1 which slowed us down a lot on the way up to Bradford.
  
• Hearing my track on the big speakers and it sounding nothing like I’d actually intended, due to the EQs all being wrong (my only comfort being I was probably the only person there who actually knew that). Still, at least 1,500 people must have heard my work… It was too early in the evening for anyone to have started dancing, although I saw one guy pumping his fist in the air in time to the beats. That’ll do.
  
• Finding a pair of pink fluffy bunny rabbit ears on the dancefloor and deciding it would be fun to wear them for at least an hour, during which time I probably got photographed quite a bit.
  
• Losing the key to my room on the last day, and being given a stern lecture by security about how I might have to pay for the whole lock to be replaced - I’m still waiting to learn the final outcome of that episode, but I can probably kiss my deposit goodbye.
  
• My brain deciding at around 2:30 on the final night ”That’s it Howard, no serotonin left, now stop being a dick and GO TO BED.” I couldn’t go to bed due to the abovementioned key problem, as I needed someone else to let me into the block, so I had to curl up in a corner and look decidedly unwell until the partying around me finally wound down. No doubt some pithy comment about my age fits in here.

Regardless of those bits though, a great festival overall (and my first of this year, and the only one where I’m without my family). Thanks to everyone there who made it such a memorable party for the right reasons and I hope to see most of you again at Whitby in November :)