Freerotation 2024
Here we go…
THE TREES
First things first, the biggest loss of the 13 years since I was last at Baskerville Hall must be the great Cedar of Lebanon standing in the corner of the formal garden, overlooking the campsite. As far back as 2006 this natural monument had already been the subject of an ode in a Japanese newspaper. When I reviewed 2009’s edition, I referred reverentially to both the cedar and its compatriot Wellingtonia, the famous ‘punch tree’ standing up the hill facing the building’s entrance. The influence of such auspicious arboreal personalities on the contours of a festival trip should not be underestimated, and indeed I was gratified this year to see that a visit to the venerable Wellingtonia remains one of the central features of any newbie’s Freero experience.
Not so, sadly, with the cedar, which was destroyed in a storm in December 2013. Tributes were offered the following year in the tracklisting for Freerotation 01 and the run-out groove of Apartment 08 (Apartment boss Kenny Hanlon is a Freero lifer). The Baskerville Hall gardener even wrote an elegy on facebook. But if you go to that facebook page you will see what remains of the tree. Not only was it shorn of its majestic spreading canopy, first by the storm and then, presumably, by a tree surgeon (not that Surgeon), it was then subjected to the further indignity of having two of its stumps remodelled into sculptures of a howling wolf and an eagle. The two artificial hounds standing watch over the front entrance of Baskerville Hall, in reference to the famous legend, are kind of cute. By contrast, the sculpted wolf and eagle, transforming a centuries-old natural wonder into a piece of garden furniture, are an aberration that made me wince every time I passed round that side of the house.
To quote that Apartment 08 run-out groove: “This one is for The Tree, Baskerville Hall. RIP.”
THE PROGRAMME
That diatribe about trees was really just me avoiding kicking off with a much more complex topic: the music programme. It would be easy for me to say that back in 2009-2011 the music at Freero wasn’t that great, and now it’s amazing. That’s my immediate subjective experience after last weekend. But the claim definitely warrants some unpicking.
If you read my 2009 review you’ll understand the kinds of things I was paying attention to on that year’s lineup: whatever artists I’d learnt about through Süd Electronic parties in London (Lakuti, Jitterbug, Efdemin, XDB); long-tail-mnml slash tech house (Mark-Henning, Dandy Jack, Sonja Moonear); half-hearted attempts to engage with the big names representing what was then, to my ears, ‘cool/edgy’ (Marcel Dettmann, Hessle Audio); and, shamefully, tepid classic house played by full-of-it white men (Sven Weisemann, Move D). Besides those sets, it seems I spent more time doing drugs in my tent than engaging with either the ample complement of (post-)dubstep producers (2562, Shackleton, A Made Up Sound, Peverelist etc) or any of the Freero staples (Tom & Joe Ellis, Leif, Earthdoctor, Duckett, Grimes Adhesif), or for that matter Steevio & Suzybee themselves. Back then I would tell anyone who would listen that Freero wasn’t really about the music, it was about the vibes.
Cut to 15 years later and most of my dancing energy this weekend was expended on precisely those artists my younger self would have passed over. On Friday: CCL followed by Peverelist. On Saturday: Kia, Nono Gigsta, Pearson Sound, Tristan Arp and rRoxymore. On Sunday, Joe Ellis, Steevio & Suzybee and Shackleton. The only artists I saw this year who I can really imagine also making an effort to see back in 2009 would be Gwenan and Jorg Kuning, which makes total sense given their certified liminality between the Three Clans of Dance Music©:
Then there’s the panoply of artists I’d have liked to see but missed: Batu (too tired), Duckett (he cancelled), Leah Floyeurs (clash with Shackleton), Objekt (clash with rRoxymore), Pariah (clash with Gwenan), re:ni (Pev Knee), XDB (dome saturation), Yussh (too slow off the mark). Not to mention the many greats — like Sterac, DJ Bone, Colin Dale etc — I passed over, or the names my friends were big into but I’d never heard of. In 2024, there was a surplus of good music.
But back in 2009, was the problem the music programme or was it me? I’d say a bit of both. Back then I wasn’t that open-minded about the programme and was even a little derisory about some elements of it. (Derision this year was limited to jibing at the late Saturday afternoon wedding music drifting down from the dome as we had a mini sesh at the campsite; friends who were up on the dancefloor, however, bloody loved it.) In 2009 I was pretty firmly in the ‘Electronic Str8s with strong Trommel outgroup leanings’ sector of the Three Clans©, so even if the 2009 programme had spanned the entire Venn diagram I doubt I’d have given it its due. But I think it’s also fair to say that the programme back then wasn’t all that varied compared to what it has grown into now, either musically or in terms of people and scenes. Which leads me on to…
THE PEOPLE
The people have changed and the people have stayed the same. There are of course plenty of Freero lifers who go back year after year, which gave me ample opportunity over the weekend for reminiscing about what it was like “back then”. Yet whereas in 2009 I was much less self-assured and barely engaged with the crowd at all, this time round I personally knew a lot more people, as well as being surrounded and held by a big group of my most loved friends.
It felt like there were other developments too. I noticed a strong US + Aussie contingent this year, represented on the lineup by CCL, Tristan ARP and Kia, and seemingly cognate to the scene built up over the past decade around Sustain-Release. That group was matched and even outnumbered by a corresponding feral/queer delegation from Manchester and Sheffield — the Dust Off, Bakk Heia, All Hands On Deck, Kiss Me Again, Bent, Gut Level massive — many of whom were on their first Freero. They brought an undeniable jouissance to proceedings, especially during the live set from the aforementioned amphibious Pied Piper, Jorg Kuning, early on Saturday afternoon.
Indeed one of the great pleasures of the crowd this year was witnessing the interface between this newer generation of Freero-ers and the oldies, not to mention the crusties, as they all got down together to Jorg or Nono Gigsta or good ol’ Shack. (It’s funny to think that the Hessle trio, or duo in Ben’s absence this year, have transitioned from fresh faces to oldies, or at least middle-ies, over the lifespan of this festival. It’s less funny to think that I have too.)
One other note about the crowd: happily, Freero’s enforcement of a 50/50 gender split continues to ward off the lads-on-the-beach-at-4pm-in-the-afternoon vibe of Dimensions. The lineup itself has also become significantly more gender diverse than it used to be, from only a handful of non-cis-male artists in 2009 to over 20 in 2024. This fact, plus the aforementioned feral Manc/US/Aussie contingent, served to make this feel like what a friend called the queerest Freero yet.
THE HOUSE
Intersecting with these questions about the programme and the people is the role of the house itself. A first-timer asked me if the festival had always felt like three distinct parties going on in one place. I declined to give the answer that, for me, the main party back in 2009 had been back at our tent with a mini-speaker. But it was certainly the case this year that each room had its own personality and crowd. Much as it was possible to flit at will between the rooms, and indeed this circulation was encouraged by the locations of the bars and toilets, each evening I found myself inexorably signed up to the vibe in one particular room, even at the expense of DJs I really wanted to see elsewhere.
Given how unbearably loud, hot and crowded I remembered finding Room 2 way back when, my commitment to this space on both Friday and Saturday night was striking. But two of the main improvements I’d call out regarding the festival this year contributed to this change: the air conditioning, which bordered on pleasantly chilly at times, and the sound and volume, which made it by far the most satisfying room to dance in. On Friday I stuck with Peverelist in there when I’d imagined going to see Resom in Room 3, and on Saturday it was Tristan Arp and rRoxymore that drew me in instead of Pearson Sound and Objekt in the hotter, louder Room 1.
I remember Room 1 being pretty straight-up punishing back in 2009-2011 and, at times, passing through it this year felt pretty much the same. But then on Sunday evening the sequence of Marylou, Joe Ellis, Steevio & Suzybee and Shackleton lent it some of the inviting weirdness I had been drawn to all weekend, and I found myself able to stay in there, at least until I hit my crowd saturation limit some time during Shackleton. Meanwhile I spent very little time in Room 3 except for Saturday night when Gwenan played. I heard great things about Jayson Wynters and Alex Downey in there, but for me it featured only as a conduit to the sauna, and the setting for a lairy bunch of us bringing the roof down every time G dropped another massive choon (see below for a more detailed description).
It’s kind of amazing that in a festival of fewer than 1000 people you could have such distinct mini-parties going on at the same time, and that’s without even mentioning the dome or the ambient yurt. This must in significant part be down to the aforementioned diversity in the crowd and programming, but another big factor is the mad, bad and dangerous-to-know Baskerville Hall itself, its nooks and crannies, its bizarre anterooms and backrooms, its mythical swimming pool that seems to occupy negative interior space amid the Gordian knot of ground floor corridors, that actual sauna hidden away behind the dancefloor sauna of Room 3, its mysterious exterior windows packed with foam insulation and featuring large signs saying ‘NO ENTRY’, as if ravers would actually want to (re?)fenestrate themselves into a ramshackle office full of broken furniture, its haphazard ornamentation.
Second only to the loss of the cedar tree in the list of tragedies this year, then, was the 24/7 security at the bottom of the main staircase, keeping non-room-dwellers like ourselves from our customary photo ops in the armchairs on the landing. The canteen, also, was off-limits to campers, all-day veggie breakfasts being dispatched unceremoniously through a hatch next to the dome. (“All-day”, in this instance, meant between the precise hours of 12pm and 4pm, making it neither breakfast nor all-day.) As for the upstairs facilities, tales from room-dwellers of incongruous bathtubs, creepy mirrors and what basically sounded like glory holes did nothing to quash persistent rumours that the house was originally built for hosting orgies.
THE GROUNDS
If you canvassed the Freero lifers for their biggest complaints about this year compared to previous ones, number one on the list, above the mutilated cedar and the staircase security, would almost certainly be the main campsite being moved from the lower field (to the left of the house, watched over by the cedar and a range of other shade-conferring trees) to the much larger upper field that stretches back from the front entrance in parallel with the driveway. Of course this upper field has always been used by plenty of people for camping, but this year all non-artists had to camp up there, and it’s putting it mildly to say that some resentment was harboured by diehard lower field campers forced to cede their shaded territory to ‘artists only’. Thankfully it was a largely overcast and rainy weekend, so the lack of shade did not present too big a problem, but on a sunnier weekend it might well have.
One of my personal regrets of the weekend is that I did not go on another forest adventure like I did back in 2009, when I and my friend E rode the tail end of a candyflip all the way up the hill to the meadows above the woods. On discussing this in the campsite, someone mentioned that some previous year they’d stumbled across a pet cemetery secluded somewhere in those same woods, but in the end the furthest we made it in that direction ended up being the faithful Wellingtonia, for a Sunday morning sunrise sesh after Gwenan’s set.
Instead, this now-37-year-old’s substitute for a youthful psychedelic hike ended up being a sober excursion three of us made to a nearby bouldering centre on the Saturday afternoon, where we climbed, showered and stocked up at the Co-op on the way back to the site. A fantastical foray through nature this was not, but it was at minimum good exercise and gave us a bit of a breather from the general melee.
THE MUSIC
I guess I touched on it above when talking about the programme but if it’s not clear already I heard some incredible music this year, and danced my legs off. Quite literally, in fact, as by Friday 3am I was already suffering from an acute case of Peverelist’s Knee. Under-studied by mainstream medicine, this is nonetheless a common condition in those subjected to Pev’s unique frequencies, which cause involuntary jerking, intense knee joint pressure and a sudden taste for poppers. Unfortunately the poppers merely treat the symptoms and not the underlying cause (Pev himself), and at that only temporarily.
Pev’s tunes — his own, of which he played several, and whatever else he was playing — sounded incredible vibrating up through the Room 2 carpet, as I became fixated on his habit of checking his phone every three minutes (I’m not exaggerating), either to see what the time was or to take a morale-boosting look at the cute photo of his kids on the backdrop, or perhaps both. By the time the end of his set came around and the stage manager came over to tell him so, it must have been the most redundant 10-minute warning given to any DJ ever. Pev knew what the fucking time was, and he was going to make the most of every minute remaining. I wanted to stay for re:ni afterwards but was done in by my Pev Knee, so took myself off to my tent.
The next afternoon, Jorg’s live set in the dome was scheduled unexpectedly early, even before the day’s schedule had been posted up on the wall. This was actually a stroke of genius, programming-wise, as it got the entire feral/queer Northern crew out early and, given Jorg’s aforementioned liminal position between the Three Clans of Dance Music©, a fair few of the Electronic Str8s too. Within minutes of him starting the tits were out and the whole dome was popping to his froggy beat, myself included. (I’m hoping at some point someone cleverer than me writes an analysis of quite why Jorg’s relatively eccentric music has struck such a transversal chord at this moment in time. Besides it being fantastic, I mean.)
Then there was Gwenan, whose ambient/experimental modular live set on Friday night helped us all set a good intention for the weekend, bewitching the unexpecting early Yurt crowd. I say unexpecting because several people came up to me afterwards to say that they had no idea Gwenan made that kind of music. We found out the day after that her entire performance was conducted with the monitors in mono, which would be crazy in itself, but is even crazier if you were there and heard all the amazing stereo stuff coming out of the speakers. (Incidentally, she was the only live performer I saw all weekend who didn’t use a laptop, though I’m sure there must have been others.)
On Saturday night G was due to shut down Room 3 and I wanted to bed into that room in advance to ensure a good spot, but it was way too hot compared to Room 2. There I’d been enjoying rRoxymore, but when she finished a huge influx of people arrived to see Forest Drive West, pushing me out and in search of somewhere else to spend the time before G started. Basically I dithered around for about 45 minutes, walking the corridors between the Room 1 bar, the yurt and the dome, repeatedly bumping into people who were apparently dithering just like me.
The time passed and finally it was G’s turn. She put her first tune on, the two CDJs divided by a comically tall box on which a shiny Bozak rotary was stationed. We spent some time guessing what she might be hiding in the box — perhaps a small machine elf who was actually in charge of the mixing from below, while G mimed for the audience above? We never found out. Interrupting our speculations was a sudden silence, cause unknown, that proceeded to last for a good few minutes while the CDJs were removed and replaced by other ones. Later we found out that it was a chronic emergency loop situation, and the next day in the sauna Pangaea would tell us that he had had the same issue the day before, leading to the theory that these poor malfunctioning CDJs were being shunted around from room to room every time they got stuck.
Never mind, this brief interlude had the happy side-effect of causing several people to vacate Room 3 in search of actual music, leaving more space for the rest of us. We made the most of it as G stuck the same tune back on again and continued to build her idiosyncratic sound world: sort of bouncy, scratchy, oddball housey-techno, tracks that sounded innocuous enough until something wonky happened, or that sounded wonky from the start but gradually brought you around. She dropped what was unmistakably one of her own tunes and the crowd went absolutely wild for it. There was a pretty heavy stretch that tried my energy levels somewhat, so I went to the bar and came back with fresh vigour aka another beer.
Then somehow, out of nowhere, and this is what Gwenan tends to do to you, I suddenly found myself down the front of the crowd yelling my lungs out as she dropped the sickest sequence of door-slamming-huge-bass-unexpected-vocals-breaks-silence-I-don’t-know-what bangers culminating in this tune and this tune and everyone had their tops off and was yelling too and she just smiled sort of coyly but also with obvious enjoyment and the energy and vibes were simply outrageous. She finished with the Manali Cream mix of ‘Stoned’ by The Groove Corporation meet Original Rockers, a tune I play often yet am pathologically incapable of IDing every time I hear it. Nick K couldn’t put his finger on it either, and we stood there for a moment, the name on the tip of our tongues, bathed in sweat, me singing along to that cute little descending melody until I finally remembered the centre label: MADE IN BIRMINGHAM! Just like me.
What else?
On the Friday, CCL’s set was predictably great but too many people in the room meant I couldn’t relax into it. On Saturday, Tristan Arp was fantastic fun bashing away on his drum pad but got so fast in the last 15 minutes that I had to have a breather. rRoxymore defied expectations by coming in straight after Tristan at pretty much the same tempo and maintaining that pace for the whole of her set. Refreshed after my breather, I got stuck in with her and stomped away at 160bpm, Pev Knee and all.
Earlier that evening, Kia had sensibly paid no attention to the wedding sets that had been on before her in the dome, coming in with a supremely classy set of sometimes drippy sometimes spiky grooves. This was the only time during the whole weekend I got a bit psychedelic and it meant the mossy vibe of her set married pleasingly with the mossy vibe of the dome. As she was finishing I was called inside by a friend to catch the end of Nono Gigsta’s set, one of two wacky end-of-sets I witnessed over the weekend (the other was Marylou’s). Apparently Gigsta had opened her set with jungle and rock (?) but by the time I got in there it was dubstep, then fractured dubstep, then almost entirely deconstructed dubstep-EDM-something-or-other that had everyone whooping and stomping their feet on the carpet. She finished with ‘Venus As A Boy’, a mossy-queer torch song if ever there was one.
As for Sunday, after Saturday night’s exertions I had pretty much reached saturation point, and although I heard some really great stuff (the start of Joe Ellis’s set, the middle of Steevio & Suzybee’s and then the start of Shackleton’s) I had too little physical and social energy to really commit to anything properly. Batu, someone who’s been on my list of DJs to see for a few years now, was on last in Room 1, and I just couldn’t make it. I headed back to my tent and slept like a log, ready to drive back home the next day.
THE AFTERMATH
I’ve written too much, I miss it too much already, it was really really good and now it’s gone. I know I’m not the only one inspired by this weekend, but feeling a little bereft. Time for some genuine franqueza, which might get a bit cringey since DJs don’t really say this stuff out loud, but I think it’s important.
This Freero weekend marked the end of an exhilarating, mind- and soul-expanding 3+ month stint of mostly non-stop music-based mayhem: 21 gigs played, 5 festivals attended (Equation, Horst, DEMF, Waking Life, Freero), 3 continents traversed, only two weeks out of fifteen spent in my own home. On the one hand that’s the DJ/party life I actively signed up to when I quit my job four years ago. It’s included a few of the best gigs I think I’ve played and some of the coolest parties I’ve been to. My experiences in Asia and Berlin especially have left me with the feeling that I’m a skilled, even somewhat gifted professional DJ, doing something more or less unique that I can probably keep up at a modestly successful level for many years yet.
On the other hand, though, I am still not able to live off my income from DJing, and since my other freelance work is highly unpredictable, there are months where I am clearly busy yet still not making ends meet. The centre of the TCoDM© is not an easy place to inhabit; in fact it’s a bit of a rollercoaster. This jam-packed spring was preceded by two very quiet months, and right now, while I see fellow DJs jetting off to Croatia or Canada or wherever, my July is entirely gig-free. The rest of my summer includes a handful of super interesting parties and the excitement of working at Honcho Campout again, yet it remains sparse compared to last year. The autumn, distant yet pressing, remains uncertain. If I felt more integrated with the scene, with some momentum building regarding interest from bigger clubs and festivals, I could see myself navigating this terrain for several more years, but today, deep in the lull, I feel my resolution wavering.
That the end of this period has been marked by Freerotation can’t help but exacerbate the feeling of inertia. When I attended back in 2009, we (G, me, the crew) were playing records at house parties but hadn’t yet started DJing out or throwing our own events. I am sure I felt on the outside of the scene then as I sat reading my book by the dome on the Sunday, but I also had only fledgling pretensions to be in it in the first place. Now it’s different: my pretensions have become my job, and gainful scenesterdom, the long worked-for prize, sits tantalisingly close yet still out of reach. Of course the longer I dwell on these things, the older I feel, which is not something I’m usually susceptible to. In one sense it’s easy to forget your age at Freero since the crowd is so age diverse; but I can tell you that the vertigo of returning after 13 years as you try to make it in music is a surefire way to remember you’re not in your early twenties anymore.
But then I stop that tricky voice in its tracks and look again. As a festival, Freero is the opposite of scenesterdom. Didn’t I say so just above, that one of the great pleasures of it is how everyone — the lifers, the crusties, the feral queers, the seshers, the cool new kids, the numerous frankly pretty ordinary people, myself included — all come together for one weekend to this bizarre house and grounds to appreciate a whole range of artists — those same lifers, crusties, feral queers, seshers, cool new kids, frankly pretty ordinary people who happen to make or play amazing music and visuals — with basically no pretensions whatsoever? It’s a glorious spectacle, and enough to make you throw transactional preoccupations about popularity or affluence out of the foam insulated window.
Steevio & Suzybee’s achievement here, established over two decades of craft and graft, commitment and a bit of craziness, clearly derives from the power and balance of their own characters, which was fully on show as they performed on the Sunday night: Suzybee resolute yet inventive on the visuals (another aspect of the festival that has improved over the years) as Steevio, fighting illness but committed to his modular, encouraged the music to unfurl. As they played, the entire Room 1 crowd grooved and popped and waved to this stunning sound that’s pretty much unique to them and stands for the Freero experience as a whole: warm, playful, familiar yet outlandish, at times a bit unhinged but always holding you fast, and deeply, deeply rewarding.
Fantastic detailed review, thanks for taking the time to share this. Never been, but I kinda feel like I was there, and now I definitely want to go.