Solitary Flight (Campout '24)
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This is the track — and track title — I keep coming back to in the days, now weeks, following Honcho Campout 2024. Bobby ‘nohup’, Seattle-based DJ and developer of the Bandcamp Tempo Adjust plugin (Chrome/Firefox), played it at around 5am on Saturday morning, a moment so unexpected, so subtle and so perfect that it almost made me cry. “It can’t be, right?” I said out loud as a friend grabbed my shoulders and I raised my arms to match those Blade Runner strings crescendoing sweetly into the misty forest air. Up to this point ‘nohup’ had been playing the kind of slo-mo-trips-punctuated-by-singalong-bangers vibe now indelibly associated with Hemlock Nights, with slow-jammed Gladstone Deluxe and Nelly’s ‘Hot In Herre’ both getting us screaming. In my opinion, their set actually matched the range and audacity, if not the relentless club energy, of the one immediately before them, laconically delivered by the other Bobby on the lineup, Bobby Beethoven fka Total Freedom, who in the back half of his set had matter-of-factly torn the Hemlock dancefloor in two with what felt like 45 minutes of straight-up jungle. And if the shift in vibe between Bobby #1 and Bobby #2 was sudden, it was nevertheless fully in keeping with the earlier shift between James K and Bobby #1, when Jamie finished an immaculate set of her own in the same patient, spacious, drippy style with which she’d started it two and a half hours earlier and Bobby #1 took over with ten minutes or so of creeping ambience, frantically (it seemed to me) searching through his CDJ playlists before playing a quick vocal clip about (if I recall correctly) jumping off a cliff, and dropping in the first of many, many explosive beats. This was now an entirely different Hemlock Nights to the usual, the energy in fact so relentless during the set that my official role of Artist Care transitioned abruptly into unofficial Crowd Control, as one queen after another attempted to scale the verticals either side of the stage, all the better to shake their asses from. “The girls have got the Spirit!” explained the queen I recruited to help talk her friends down from the rigging. Luckily I had plenty of time for these safety negotiations, since Bobby #1’s only Artist Care requirements were cartons of still water and occasional updates on how much time was left for his set. (Just before he went on he had asked me how long he was scheduled to play and pulled a shocked face when I told him. I found this amusing and revealing: on the one hand, the 2.5 hour set time seemed genuinely to take him by surprise, hence, I guess, the frantic USB scrolling; on the other, I figured he must rarely play for longer than 90 minutes, it being so exhausting to keep up that intensity of DJing for longer than that, so full props for seeing it through.) I’d never heard of Bobby Beethoven or Total Freedom so I had no idea what to expect from him, but when I debriefed with others who know him better, it turned out this Hemlock set — relatively accessible and un-deconstructed — was far from what anyone expected. Yet if it ruffled any feathers among the Hemlock Nights purists, this was more than compensated for by the sight of the predominantly BIPOC crowd progressively losing their shit to the aforementioned sequence of hardcore jungle deep in the Pennsylvanian woods. When else does that happen? It felt like a moment that those who were there will be talking about for years to come. I know I will be.