Midweek Mixes: Honcho Campout (07/12/23)
A run-down of some of the mixes and radio shows that have been soundtracking my existence – from the box-fresh to the tried-and-tested – all guaranteed to brighten up your week.
More Honcho Campout memories on Midweek Mixes this week, but this time neither of the sets featured are ones I caught at the time. Both of them are recordings of opening slots, the first setting the scene for the entire festival on the Thursday morning and the second opening Saturday’s proceedings.
The selections in both share a spirit of history, borderless cultural exchange and deep emotion from across the spectrum. I’m sad I missed hearing them in person, but I’m grateful to the artists and the Honcho team for making all these pristine recordings available to listen back.
Will Automagic — Live @ Honcho Campout 2023
On Thursday morning at Campout I was doing my first shift as Artist Liaison, which happened to also be my only Front Gate shift. That meant getting up around 8am, taking a quick shower, grabbing some snacks and walking up out of the main site ravine and up to the entrance. Rather than take the main access road, I elected to explore a little and go the long way round via the Grove stage and meadow. This way I got my bearings for the Grove action later that night and had probably my last truly solitary moment of the long weekend, walking alongside the stream to where the dirt road crosses it, stepping barefoot through the cool clear water and then climbing up the other bank towards the gate.
Keen bean as I was, I got to my station rather early and found only a few lost-looking early birds waiting on the other side of the barrier. My job for the morning was to welcome arriving staff and I had my own little gazebo, table and chair set up in front of the welcome lodge. For three hours I worked with the main gate team to check artists, performers and speakers in, give them their welcome packs and point them in the right direction for their stay. I chatted with Pam from the lodge and read the festival programme in detail. It was a relatively quiet morning since most of the guests had arrived the day before, but that meant I had more time to talk to both Neema Avashia, a queer Asian American teacher and writer from West Virginia who was to present a talk on her book Another Appalachia, and Cindy Milstein, an anarchist writer, speaker and community organiser who was going to lead a session on rebellious mourning the next day. We discussed their work and my work, and the slightly surreal circumstances in which we were meeting, far from home but somehow feeling at home. The sun was out and I really felt a warm sense of being in exactly the right place.
My gate shift was coinciding with the opening set of the festival down at Hemlock Hole. I was a bit sad to miss this early Campout inflection point, but listening back to the recording this week I’ve realised that the action down at the Hole was on the same wavelength as my morning up at the gate. The whole festival was already in tune. The honour of opening Campout had been assigned to Will Automagic of NYC’s queer institution The Carry Nation, which he has run with Nita Aviance for over a decade. Will’s solo trajectory stretches back much further than that, including performing live at David Mancuso’s Loft, and there’s more than a little Loft-ness in the air as he opens with the softly-spoken voice of celebrity TV painter Bob Ross:
Let’s make some happy little clouds in our world… All we do is sort of have an idea in mind, and then just sort of let it happen… You know without question that we don’t make mistakes here. We just have happy accidents. But you learn to use anything that happens. Friends are so important… Here, I can do anything that I wanna do. In your world, you can do anything that you want. Tell you what, let’s get crazy.
These words became a mantra reinforcing everyone’s feeling of connection to each other and to the environment. The talk of ‘happy little clouds’ of course also recalls The Orb’s seminal ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’ — and Pal Joey’s remix of it. Will’s resampling of Bob Ross’s voice resurfaces from time to time throughout the set, acting as a kind of ongoing live reconstruction of that other track, instantly recognisable and laden with history. Combined with the late Angelo Badalamenti’s ‘Theme From Twin Peaks’ it must have been a trippy and almost pedagogical experience for the dancefloor, picking up where the equally educational pre-show had left off the night before (example drag routine: how to administer naloxone).
In fact, the whole opening hour — featuring soul and funk greats singing odes to friends new and old, group perseverance, sunshine — is lightly instructional, coaxing campers into the most propitious set and setting for the next four days. Like the Midland warm-up I wrote about a year ago, this is DJing that has intention, wisdom and sensitivity behind it. There is also an archival feeling to the sequence of Amapiano edits and Latin club music in the second hour, capturing these contemporary waves while always referring back to the foundations: in the former, to the neo soul and R&B of Maxwell and Keyshia Cole; in the latter, to rave and tribal house classics by Nomad and Masters At Work. Will then executes a beautiful progression into mid-80s dubs, early Italian house and a superb extended dub/cover of the Chaz Jankel standard ‘Glad To Know You’. (The true bite of this song comes cleverly disguised, but that’s what makes it so great.)
Will finished his set with Artwork’s anguished edit of ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’ (the Thelma Houston version), Laurie Anderson and Charlie — an important and moving reminder of and tribute to people lost over the years. As Laurie’s mournful vocoder and birdsong fades out after Thelma’s cried “I need your love right now”, we hear the crowd explode into cheers and a heartfelt “I love you Will!” This is his cue for an encore, for which he plays his own edit of Tracie’s ‘This House’:
Where do we go from here?
What must we do to make that change?
It's time to understand, understand one anotherThis house is our house
Let's do it for the people
This house is their house
Let's give it back to the people
The people of the world today
And with that, Campout was officially underway.
A Space For Sound & DJ Lady Lane — Live @ Honcho Campout 2023
Saturday morning opened again at Hemlock Hole, with Rena Anakwe aka DJ Lady Lane and her sound healing practice A Space For Sound. Once more I wasn’t present, this time thanks to my exertions the night before (I was sleeping my adventures off in my tent). My accomplice for the festival, Sam PV, was Rena’s artist liaison and so he was up and out at the Hole at 10am to witness her sound bath and DJ set. Performed using metal bowls and voice passed through effects and loops, the magical ambient activation of her sound bath makes up the opening stretch of this recording before she transitions into the DJing portion with Alewya’s anthemic ‘Play’:
Don’t mind if I play
Just something I want to feel with you
An hour or so of amapiano and gqom gives way to vocal house, funky and baile funk — always a funny moment for me when lyrics about love or whatever get momentarily sidelined in favour of someone screaming “FODENDO! FODENDO!” — before things go fully down the rabbit hole in the final half hour. My tent was pitched about 30 metres behind Hemlock Hole yet I have no recollection of hearing any of this raw and cathartic jungle-breaks-hardcore madness. I guess the post-birthday stupor was real.
Rena finished her set with a brief clip of someone speaking about the Campout experience:
A place to get away. You don’t have to worry about the city scene. It was a really woodsy like place where you could get out and you didn’t have to worry about being harassed.
It sounds so simple, but it’s really not, and that’s why it means so much to people.