At precisely thirty-six minutes into Chris Cruse’s ‘Moongazing’ mix (which I originally wrote about five years ago, here), the track he’s playing goes into a drum break, which he takes advantage of to mix into the new key and sleazy bassline of ‘Big Bubbles, No Troubles’ by Ellis, Beggs and Howard. The previous track is itself a standout in a mix of standouts, a very 90s UK chillout-room burner with a vocal that’s both seductive and mysterious. It goes:

Floating in the air
Floating in the sea
Take my hand
And come with me

I’ve been listening to Chris’s mix on and off for all of these five years and, as I often do, I’ve luxuriated in not knowing what many of the tracks are, preferring instead to associate them with the mix and its maker, and our friendship. Two weeks ago, as the car I was in finally drew into Four Quarters, Artemas MD, home to Honcho Campout, this same track came on the NTS show that Cara, director of the Artist Liaison team and today’s chauffeur, had put on for the last section of the drive. I had just enough time before we arrived and the ignition was cut to exclaim: “This is that song! ‘Floating in the air!’” And then we were diving into camp and, until this afternoon, I thought nothing more of it.

Just under a week later, at 12:30am on Sunday night/Monday morning, I’m standing on the stage in the Critters tent with my friend and teammate Sam, and George from Honcho, examining the interface of a Pioneer A9 mixer and a single CDJ, as about 50 people sit on the benches, chairs and risers arrayed around the space waiting (or not) for something to happen. A couple of hours earlier (the timeline, I admit, is rather blurry), Cara had taken me aside and asked if I had a USB on me. Did I want to help with the music at a semi-official staff afters in the Critters tent, a low-key function for the festival’s workers to decompress from what had been a particularly rollercoaster weekend? No, I didn’t have a USB, but in a moment of recklessness I offered to choose a mix to play off my phone. Reckless, because I hate being asked to choose what mix to listen to, be it in a car or at an afters or any other scenario. I always make the wrong decision. But I’d been making a habit of saying yes over the preceding week, so why stop now.

In typical fashion for festival work, this single, unassuming commitment quickly led domino-like into others. As the final hour or so of the Sunday evening programme unfurled, with Mike Servito and Nita Aviance bringing the Grove stage to its knees with their spectacular closing performances, I found myself making two (or is it three?) car rides to run various pieces of DJ equipment up to Critters for the post-festival function. The final one of these rides happens after the Grove closes and, for some unknown reason, the car’s interior overhead light won’t turn off, so eventually I have to set off in fully illuminated view of the 500 gays now trying to vacate the stage and return to their tents, all the while driving at 1mph so as not to run anyone over. At long last arriving at Critters, I park round the back of the tent and try to enter discreetly through the backstage door, but the table where the DJ equipment is being set up is horribly exposed. It starts to feel like a bad DJ anxiety dream.

I don’t have any kind of cable to connect my phone to the mixer, but apparently the A9 can link through bluetooth, so that is what me, Sam and George are trying to do, but none of us has any idea how to make bluetooth work with a DJ mixer. Why would we? It doesn’t occur to me to ask anyone else present if they know how to do it. This is my cross and I’m going to bear it. The CDJ sits there uselessly as Sam and I refresh bluetooth on our phones, only to be told that the pairing code doesn’t match. More people are filtering into the tent. Much later, I see a Whatsapp message from Aaron from Honcho describing the vibe as “awkward”. That’s putting it mildly.

Finally Sam sees it: the channel select has a bluetooth option, and as soon as we’ve switched to that my phone connects. I’m on 8% battery but for once I’ve got my charger with me, so I plug in and open Soundcloud. My first instinct is to choose something peppy, to maintain the wild energy of the evening so far, so I search for the recording of Mike and Jeffrey Sfire closing The Bunker in Detroit two years earlier. But as soon as I put it on it feels too pushy for the setting, even at low volume. I realise the impulse for something clubby is coming from the part of me that doesn’t want the festival to come to end, but it really is ending and we have to acknowledge that. Nevertheless, it’s important to me that the music be connected somehow to Campout. I’m panicking a bit, so I reach for something familiar and reassuring: Chris’s Moongazing mix. This is Critters Lounge after all, and this mix has a very particular lounge vibe, a celebration of queer morning music: sleazy, sexy, gorgeous and disreputable and loving, essentially what Critters and, by extension, Campout is all about.

Over the next hour or two (or three? who knows), we staff and artists mingle around Critters, drinking and sniffing whatever is available, revisiting the weekend’s trials and achievements, tentatively or unabashedly acknowledging each other and, as the night draws to a close, hugging it all out with increasing fervor and unspoken meaning. I have a conversation with a colleague about looking for love in your 40s, our stories unfolding in parallel in cities 4,000 miles apart, both of us deeply involved in a scene yet still somehow feeling stuck on the margins. “Still looking for love” sings Asha Puthli on ‘Space Talk’, and then: “Slow, time moves so slowly”. Well, Asha, it depends on the context.

On Friday night at 4am, during a classic Hemlock Nights witching hour set by DC artist Chelle, I am indeed able once again to bask in the sensation of time dilating, really slowing down to the tempo of Roxy Music’s ‘The Main Thing’ played on at least -4:

Look at my hand, there's a soul on fire
You can lead me even higher

There’s that hand again, reaching out and offering…what exactly? We’re getting silly on margaritas and ketamine, dancing on mud that feels like plasticine, and Chelle is playing the ultimate queer anthem, Gina X’s ‘No G.D.M.’ and also, for barely a minute or two, the dub of ‘Here To Go’, which has me racing round the side of the stage screaming like an idiot: “CABARET VOLTAIRE!” For god’s sake Joe, it’s just some drums. But around seven hours later, now Saturday morning proper, at the very same Hemlock, as I surface briefly from a chemically-induced coma in my tent 100 metres behind the stage, I hear those same drums and just about manage to register that T.Wan, my colleague and friend whose opening set I had intended to see but almost entirely missed thanks to the previous night’s excesses, is playing that same Cab Vol tune, potentially the vocal version this time, a realisation that has me smiling ear to ear before I slip gratefully back into unconsciousness.

Time then moves fast on Saturday. Being my pre-agreed day off (Cara would be taking Sunday off), I sleep in well past the end of Tiff’s set, go up to the Food Court to shower and get a late brunch and, before I know it, it’s 2.30pm and Nick Boyd is coming on at Hemlock and I’m hitting the dancefloor running. I sensibly do lines of various things and unsensibly do a couple of mushroom drops that of course end up being much stronger than I expected. Having been here before, I manage to deal with the onrush of visual overstimulation by going for a quiet naked swim further up the creek, followed by a shower that thankfully feels like a rebirth. Further reassurance is provided by a pair of Honcho Raybans offered to me by Sam that say “gay icon” on them, foraged from one of the gag team’s many mailboxes scattered across the site.

Then I turn around and it’s already the end of Nick’s set, so I stand in the fork of a tree trunk by the stage as the production team ready a set of risers for Serena Tea’s drag performance. I know from my pre-Camp work that this is due to involve water hoses. In fact I was at the stage at 6am when Ian from the production team arrived to install said hoses as Chelle brought proceedings to a close. What I don’t know but soon becomes clear from the activity behind the stage is that Serena, wearing an enormous wig, intends to begin her performance by emerging from a giant sparkling cerulean cocoon. This necessitates her fitting into the cocoon backstage and then being carried out, on top of a riser and through the crowd, by the production team, an operation that in no small part resembles a similar stage-related manoeuvre a bunch of us had executed on Thursday evening between the Honshowgirls’ opening infotainment performance and the QFF ball, and would be replicated yet again later on Saturday night when I help Sam move his and Oli’s tent approximately 15 metres to the right. But right now it’s an ambiguous feeling witnessing all this drag drama happening on my “day off”: out of some distorted sense of professional decorum I push down my natural instinct to help, telling myself that the people on shift have got it, and anyway I’m still rather shroomy and uncertain of myself. Serena’s water gag mostly comes off but I’ve reached my limit for crowds and retreat to my tent to regroup, something I don’t think I did once on the days I was actually on shift. It’s around this time that I lose my Pikachu water bottle for the second time in 48 hours.

My evening plan is to go to The Grove for Pure Immanence opening, and if what they play grabs me I’ll stay, if it doesn’t I’ll jump back to Hemlock for Jeffrey Sfire. I know I’ll enjoy Jeffrey but I’m also up for something new, and I have a yearning for those foggy early evening Grove vibes. In the event, none of this happens. The universe (I’m calling it the universe but it’s also, significantly, personal design) delivers me the opportunity for a moment of intimacy I had left on the table in 2025 and, having actually grown a pair in the intervening year, I finally take it. This encounter coincides with the bizarre arrival in the sky of a cohort of motorised paragliders, who, from Main Camp at least, appear to be carrying out some kind of surveillance through the trees. Over at New Camp, however, as I later see from the videos, these airborne visitors divebomb the Great Meadow, dropping packages and generally causing bewilderment.

Was it part of the same gag team distributing the Gay Icon sunglasses? At this precise moment I am too busy to let this kind of question concern me. Time, as it tends to do when you’re having fun, is itself flying by. The first hour of Pure Immanence’s set has been and gone, Jeffrey has already started, and I emerge from my (non-contractual) liaison to the news that a huge storm has been forecast for 6am Sunday morning and people are being advised to move their tents from low-lying areas, if not leave the site entirely. Contingency planning is in full swing. This is when I panic about Sam and Oli’s tent and, as darkness falls, spend half an hour helping Sam move it to what looks like a safer location (it wasn’t). While we’re doing this it becomes patently obvious that, even if the dire warnings are not borne out by the amount of rain that eventually comes down, Cara will not get to take Sunday off as planned. It’s not hard to guess that she’s a little heartbroken at this turn of events and, being by now quite sober and satisfied, I realise that the least I can do in the circumstances is go back on shift and help out for the rest of Saturday night. We sit together for a moment on the back of one of our golf carts, revellers and staff whizzing past in all directions as we take stock and somewhat brokenly go over the night’s schedule. We walk over to catch the last moments of Jeffrey’s set at The Grove, which, as far as I can remember through the fragmentation of that evening, features a couple Sfire tracks and another song I’ve never identified from Chris’s Moongazing mix:

When I get a chance if I’m alone
I close my eyes and dance

Jeffrey is mixing like a magician on the rotary and the lights and decor at Hemlock in this moment are the definition of sumptuous. When he finishes, we allow ourselves an excursion to catch Jay Duncan at the Grove, during which Chachi from the backline team serves us the dirtiest martini any of us has ever tasted and Jay plays her remix of ‘B.L.U.’ that I put out recently on my label. It all makes sense. I have to make the journey back to Hemlock to give a lift to a vinyl DJ finishing her set, but as it turns out she wants to stay at the stage a little longer, so I dash back to The Grove to see Leeon take over from Jay. Had I not been back on shift, this would have been my moment to bite a chunk off a pill and hurl myself into the fray until my pre-planned Saturday night cut-off point of 4am. As it is I find solace in an even dirtier martini from Chachi, an Oreo offered by Juana, also on backline, and the knowledge that together we’re all getting the thing done. Without going into detail, the rest of my night is, frankly, a bit of a shitshow, but the principle architect of that shitshow is me, myself and my desire to please. In this light, Alexander O’Neal’s offer in ‘All True Man’ — “I'll be there to fulfill your every need” — takes on an ironic hue.

The first wave of the storm comes overnight but soon passes and my air mattress, generously donated by Cara, remains dry. I get three hours’ sleep on it before dealing with a conjunction of difficult tasks mostly of my own making the night before. I muddle through these and lie back down for another hour. Sunday has traditionally been my favourite day of the festival and I’m determined to enjoy it, so I get up again for brunch before catching Suze Ijó opening down at Hemlock. She plays a cover version of the Fingers Inc classic ‘Never More No Lonely’ (which I put at the end of my RA mix) and it has me taking my earpiece out to dance with my eyes closed at 2pm. The earpiece goes back in and I devote an hour or so to helping Suze’s friends Rodney and Eugene pack up their camp and head out of the festival. Between moving bags and boxes, Eugene gives me an account of how the two of them met 30 years earlier, a sweet, gentle story that gives me hope for who I might meet in similar circumstances one of these days, and who I might be dancing with in 30 years’ time.

I say my goodbyes to them and jump in the car to drive destiny over to The Grove for her soundcheck before the stage kicks off at 6pm, but the rainstorm is returning with a vengeance and everything gets delayed. I savour the barrage of sheet rain during which I am trapped in the car over by The Grove, listening to the festival’s Werk FM radio broadcast beaming the audio (but not the visual, and sadly no audio commentary) of the closing performance by Charlene, who at that very moment is thrashing around in the mud to Prince’s cover of ‘Every Day Is A Winding Road’. The rain subsides and destiny opens her set with an almost spiritual kind of dub, my teammate Kourtney and I swaying in the centre of The Grove as the fog, artificial and real, rolls in right on cue. Slowly the troops assemble and the unique energy of Campout’s closing evening begins to pulse. Before long we’re all letting loose, destiny hands over to Mike, the girls start scaling the barriers around the DJ table and the subplot I described up top begins, imperceptibly, to assert itself.

Two years ago I wrote about my ‘Solitary Flight’ at this festival. This year I had one hit of that feeling, and it was after putting on Chris’s mix at Critters. For a moment I was overcome by total uncertainty about whether I’d done the right thing, if I had the proper permission to do it in the first place, if the bluetooth and/or wifi was going to hold (appallingly it stuttered more than once in the first minute or two of the mix), if I’d somehow ruined my festival by placing myself in this position of apparent power and falling embarrassingly short. Physically I didn’t know what to do with myself: climbing down from the stage and joining the crowd seemed like a dereliction of responsibility, but equally there was no way I was going to stand next to this bluetooth-Frankenstein monstrosity of a DJ booth in full view of the whole staff. So what did I do? I receded carefully towards the back of the stage to where there was a chair half-concealed by this year’s elaborate proscenium arch, and sat in it. I must have sat there for a good while, long enough to witness Nita enter through the Green Room and go out onto the stage to collect her flowers for her performance (a sensational ‘Rhythm Nation’), long enough to see other staff members swing into action to secure enough alcohol for the bar, long enough to hear System Olympia’s ‘Falling In Love’ come in 19 minutes into the mix, long enough to wonder what the hell it all meant. I’m not sure who it was, probably Sam and Oli, that persuaded me to come down from my hiding place and join in the collective decompression. The ‘floating’ tune must have come round soon after that, but I don’t remember registering it: my outsider moment was over, the remainder of the improvised Critters crack-on a joyful immersion in chosen family.

I’m writing this a week later, still in NYC, still in the mindspace of Campout despite a 40th birthday party and a 14-hour Amtrak round-trip to Rochester in between, still wondering what the hell it all means. I wasn’t sure if I would write about it, but walking back to my sister’s house earlier this afternoon the urge finally struck me, after five years, to look up that song: “floating in the air, floating in the sea”. Of course I found it immediately, a Weatherall remix of The Grid. I put the song on youtube and, walking down a Brooklyn street on a stuffy Monday afternoon, all it took was the bittersweet affirmation of those opening piano chords to give me shivers all over my body. The song played on, that “take my hand” lyric speaking to some meaning deep within Campout, within me. The drum break hit and, miraculously, the key change into ‘Big Bubbles, No Trouble’ crashed in. But this wasn’t the mix, it was the original song. Unbeknownst to me, for all these years, that choral key change has always been in ‘Floatation’ and not ‘Big Bubbles, No Troubles’. It’s a brief and fanciful interlude that Weatherall probably amused himself with in the studio before returning to the tune proper. But in the Moongazing mix Chris grabs this interlude and key matches it with the Ellis, Beggs and Howard bassline. It’s the kind of trick I will often go to great lengths to pull off in my own mixes but with little expectation that anyone will ever notice. Well, in this case, it took me five years but I did finally notice. And it’s over a similar timeline that I’m finally noticing what is going on with Campout and me. The connections that I’ve been making over the years with others and with myself, unexpected as they are, have been reinforced to the point I can really trust them, they’re now more intuitive than intellectual, the result of a plan but ultimately something felt rather than analysed, and I can let them go at their own pace. So while the flight of Campout may still be completely and utterly ridiculous, it is certainly no longer solitary.

P-Nut’s adjectives on ‘Falling In Love’:

Mysterious
Ambiguous
Sensational
Ridiculous

That’s Campout, to a T.