Waking Life 2023
It’s been a bit quiet round here for a few reasons. First, three weeks ago I spent a couple of days losing my mind surrounded by my extended family at a Golden Wedding celebration in East Lothian. Then, the week after, I spent almost a whole week losing my mind surrounded by an even more extended family at my third Waking Life festival near Crato. Then I moved to Berlin for the summer and spent this past weekend losing my mind surrounded by bananas at Panoramabar. Mercifully for all of you I’m only going to tell you about the second of these events.
Imagine you’re on your fifth day of a music festival, Sunday evening, your legs tired, digestion rigorously tested (and, for the most part, up to the task), mind not yet vacant but certainly getting there, a variety of substances embedded under your fingernails that probably won’t be coming out until you get home tomorrow. Since proceedings got underway on Wednesday night you’ve been treated to some of the most inspiring music and personal interactions you can remember at a festival, in fact the sheer abundance of both these things is almost too much to bear, so rich has the experience been up to this point. Your sleep total over the preceding two nights amounts to no more than six hours, the second portion of which wasn’t really a night since it took place at 1pm earlier this afternoon, when, nodding off on the Outro Lado decking while drinking a calimocho and listening to Jan Jelinek make some noises, you decided it might finally be time to hit the tipi.
The delay in your bedtime today can largely be attributed to the Floresta and Praia programming of the past 24 hours, which began when Luisa opened the Floresta on Saturday afternoon with 20:20 Vision’s ‘Future Remembrance’ remixed by Random Factor, perhaps a discreet nod to the electro legend scheduled to play a liveset not a few short hours later. You heard this tune floating through the forest from your vantage point on the chill-out area raised above the natural wine and medronho cocktail bars, pizza in hand, after you’d shown up to the Floresta a full hour too early, under the mistaken impression (due purely to your excitement) that the music would begin at 3pm. (This was the same vantage point from which, curry in hand, you’d heard Karine playing Gwenan’s ‘Control Change’ the evening before, and you and the others had encouraged G to run down as quickly as she could to catch the end of the tune close-up, though in the event she only made it to the front just as it was finishing. And it has to be noted that this particular moment happened a mere three or so hours after Gwenan’s extended experimental live set at the Cochilo stage with Eli Verveine under their Gin + Tonic moniker, which itself started precisely 24 hours after Eli Verveine had finished a four hour masterclass of her own, DJing from 8am to midday after DJ Fart In The Club had smashed it at the Floresta at daybreak on Thursday morning — a real treat of a schedule for everyone in attendance, but especially for those of us lucky enough to count both G and T as friends.) And indeed today the pleasure of watching the forest floor fill up as Luisa steadily increases the energy is similar to the day before when Telma, another cherished friend and DJ, gradually drew the crowd in with a deft mix of Very Well Made records, from vintage crafty Herbert to modern crowdpleasing Mr Ho + Mogwaa, all reproduced in warm detail by a d&b soundsystem that seemed almost to exhale through the space framed by the trees, until the central floor and raised wooden platforms were all busy with people grooving in the dappled afternoon light.
Back to Saturday, though, and when Luisa finishes at 6pm you are spoilt for choice: carry on in the four-four forest with Vlada or head over the wobbly bridge to Praia for ADAB, who you saw recently at Nowadays in NYC? And, rather than being disappointed by the clash, you revel in the luxury of pausing, identifying your mood and following it, knowing that whichever path you pick it will turn out to be a good one. Praia it is and, on arrival, you discover your tipi crew and extended friend group, paper fans in hand, group-posing in welcome and delight, not merely for the fact of your arrival but because they had somehow prophesied it to the minute (“We said you’d be here by ten past and here you are!”). Having never felt so prepared in your life, you ask them to hold that thought for just one second as, after some rummaging in your bum bag (itself gifted to you a couple of years ago by members of this very crew), you produce your own paper fan, carefully guarded at home since last year’s festival and, at this precise moment, the one object on Earth that could enhance an already perfect scenario.
ADAB is playing spacey, fathoms-deep breaks and Amapiano and there is room on the dancefloor for both posing and soaking up the ensuing three hours of body-, mind- and heart-moving music emanating through the perfectly pitched Loud sound system. They move from the depth of the opening section into more mids-driven turn-of-the-90s NY house and I clock a couple of Kenny Dope favs, ‘Jam The Mace’ and ‘Freestyle Bongo’. (Both tracks, incidentally, on a record I lost when a box of vinyl was stolen off my sister’s front steps in NYC four years ago, so that every time I hear one of these tunes I’m instantly reminded of the perils of transatlantic shipping and, while I’m here, in the general spiralling manner of associations this festival brought up, also Kosh, since, before it was nicked, I had combined ‘Freestyle Bongo’ with ‘Casablanca Vice’ in my Mix For Tracy, meaning that when ADAB plays it I simultaneously think of both the theft and Telma playing Kosh, I think ‘Benefit Of The Doubt’, in the forest the day before.) For the first time in four days I have nibbled on a bit of a pill, and whether those around me were sober or high it seems like everyone is floating a couple of millimetres above the sand. What feels so unique about this moment is its softness and quietness amid the noise: ADAB’s patience in the mix, the spaciousness of the music and the dancefloor as they shift between bumping stripped-down house and broken beat, and the feeling that those of us who are there — no more than about 40 people actually dancing, compared to the 400 or more who had packed this stage out the night before for Darwin and Mala, or would do so again on Sunday night during Palms Trax — are the lucky ones. And boy do we dance. In fact, of all the dancing I did at this festival — 35 hours or thereabouts, a proper working week — these three hours tasted the sweetest. And every time I revolved on the spot, I would see one friend shaking a hip here, another lifting an arm there, a third in front flipping that pancake like a star. ADAB plays a few tunes I heard them play in New York with vocals that appear to alternately plead for then proudly proclaim a better world, when a white dreadlocked dancer shouts out something like “Yes brother!”, and the jarring clash of sincerity and unwitting violence in this attempt to connect echoes, for me at least, through the following hours. At the end of the set we are all wrapped in deep feelings, a little dazed, human, smiling and grateful. Thank you, ADAB, for giving yourself and your music to us for this extended moment of dancefloor communion.
Where were we.
So Sunday evening is still a full day away and there’s plenty of work to be getting on with between now and then. Objekt is starting back in the Floresta and he’s the one DJ you’ve been telling people all week that you Absolutely Must See, given that your only interaction with him to date was not, shamefully, ever having seen him play, but rather, and unexpectedly, sharing an artist transfer out of Listen Festival in Brussels back in 2019 (not, I hasten to add, because you were an artist, but because you were Gwenan’s +1, as indeed you are Gwenan’s +1 at this festival too, and will be Gwenan’s +1 for the rest of your life, if she’ll deign to allow it). But before you can join Objekt, the evening has a chilly edge to it and your stomach is empty so you trek back to the tent for a change of clothes and footwear and then trek to the forest for a falafel wrap, hearing the developing mayhem of Objekt’s opening hour filtering through the trees once more. Falafel duly ingested you make the final trek back over to the stage to see what all the fuss is about. Objekt seems to be in full flow, though a more clued-up friend tells you that restraint is being exercised, and indeed there is actually a chuggy sub-130ness to proceedings, a sense that even with the left turns (and some full-on U-turns) certain limits have been placed on the route — or at least the pace — of our journey. Good, you decide, because, just as you thought to yourself when Steffi was tearing the forest apart with unfussy, invigorating techno on Thursday night (arms in the air, voice lost and mind blown already and it was only Thursday!), there’s nothing that beats seeing and hearing a sick DJ just do the thing well, no tricks, no frills. Slamming UKG and Brazilian funk, a surreptitious blast of the motif from ‘Love Story’, at least one melting rhythmless breakdown before the next explosive drop: watched from the side of the Floresta stage (your vantage point for much of the week), Objekt’s arms appear to remain suspended weightlessly over the CDJs or, just occasionally, wine glass in hand, a slight forward and back motion of the spine to show he’s into it, the idiosyncratic black flicks of hair round his ears a visual counterpart to the distinctiveness of his selection. The crowd is going wild and so are you, right to the bitter end, leaving Anthony Naples to pick up the pieces. He does his best, and he even plays the new Pangaea tune, but for once the system sounds a bit overdriven and it’s time for a decking sesh down by the water, deep-and-meaningfuls interspersed with misheard asides and copious consumption of one thing or another.
If there was going to be one all-nighter during this festival it was this one, Saturday night into Sunday, the crest of the endorphin wave (a gentle, sustainable one — you’re a seasoned professional) attained and ready to carry you through the next five hours in the forest till sunrise. After Anthony Naples it’s Walrus, who you’d seen close down Horst Festival in style six weeks earlier, and the way he comes on with a series of deep-as-fuck dubby techno records, played out in full and mixed as unobtrusively as you can imagine, is about as baller a move as you could imagine at this precise moment. He might as well have played all 13 minutes of ‘The Lonesome Dub’, though he didn’t. As he plays he looks up and out at the crowd, at what it’s not quite clear, and sure enough when you talk to him afterwards he expresses surprise that you were there at all. Looking but not seeing — a familiar DJ habit. Then it’s a Brussels one-two as Walrus is followed by Adi, whose recent move to the city is good news for those of us who want to see her play more often. She comes on at 5.30am and the light slowly begins to grow round the margins of the lake and forest. The early part of the set threatens to be a bit dark for your mood but as the sky brightens she sidesteps into funky 80s b-boy electro, which is of course exactly what you want to hear at this precise moment. Various people wander down to the side of the lake to photograph the emerging sun and, irked by this incursion of phone screens, you dance — innocently but intentionally — in front of several of them, alternating this activity with shots at the bar and occasional visits to the somehow-still-impeccable toilets. It’s now something like 8am and Kia and Koodoo have taken over from Adi, locking into a prog house groove that promises to continue long past the scheduled Floresta stop time. You last until the pull of the lake becomes too much and, after some breakfast, a trip back to the tipi and a quick dip, you find yourself back on that decking at Outro Lado, calimocho in hand, spent and finally ready for bed.
And so we come back to Sunday evening. After dozing a bit in the tipi, you had spent a couple of reviving hours hanging out and eating a late lunch at the artist area, getting a glimpse into the great reserves of creativity, positivity and sheer determination it takes this team to pull off an event of this kind. An E&S mixer needs to be found somewhere, stat. The wifi has been going down all weekend but the cashless system has survived. Baba Sissoko and Jean-Philippe Rykiel arrive for check-in ahead of their Monday afternoon set at Cochilo. The golf buggy needs charging. The build-up for the festival this year was extra challenging due to the weather conditions, and things like a new bridge from Floresta to Praia had to be built thanks to the lake rising a metre or two. Yet even the biblical rain on Thursday afternoon had proven bearable, and such is the general feeling of goodwill on-site that even those worst affected (setting up tents just as the heavens opened) don’t seem to bear much of a grudge about it.
In fact it’s difficult to imagine anyone at this festival having a bad time. The food is varied, healthy, tasty and, at around 10€ for always generous portions, good value for money. Besides the three dance music stages there is Cochilo, the programme for which is so musically wide-ranging that it could serve as a festival all by itself. You are not a Cochilo devotee and yet it has provided some of the best moments of each edition (remember Jimi Tenor last year?), and this time you were already blown away on Wednesday night by CZN (the duo of Valentina Magaletti and Portuguese drummer João Pais Filipe). The mind boggles at the logistics involved in pulling off this stage alone. Then there’s Apuro, the tent for “confrontations with improvisation, trauma, fluids, body contact, upheaval, altered states, theatricality, queer ecologies, sensory deprivation, vulnerability and all the invisible borders waiting to be crossed” (Waking Life’s communications team, as ever, putting amateurs like me to shame). And there’s also the Casa Marmelada, home to secret one-off happenings and oddball DJ sets, and the cinema, showing AV installations and films all weekend. And massages, and blind tours, and a whole slew of other interactive artworks and performances that take you by surprise as you follow the trails meandering around the circumference of the lake. Is there another European festival offering this embarrassment of riches on such a budget? I’m all ears.
And so, after that digression (tl:dr COME TO WAKING LIFE NEXT YEAR), we return to Sunday evening, and this time it’s not some “you” any more, it’s me, Joe, and I’m there at the forest for the final moments of Eric Cloutier’s set before DMX Krew takes the reins, ready to relive that liveset I saw him do at Dimensions 2021, which I never actually got round to reviewing but has stuck in my memory ever since. I’ve soaked in so much incredible music by this point that when he comes on and instantly hits us with the best machine-funk-pop you can imagine — comparable to that fever-dream music I occasionally hear on the edge of sleep after a particularly good night out, music like that one time back in 2008 when Craig Richards actually floored us in fabric room 1 because every track he played seemed like a long-lost New Order dub — when DMX Krew hits us with this right from the off I actually almost burst into tears at how utterly spoilt I feel, marvelling at how this festival, after already giving so much, still has this further slice of unadulterated joy up its sleeve. And I didn’t even stay for the Monday daytime, which featured (deep breath): Petre Inspirescu, Vera, XDB, the aforementioned Baba + Jean-Philippe, Azymuth, Mark Ernestus + Ndagga Rhythm Force and, finally, Portuguese singer Lula Pena. Ed DMX himself flails his arms and bangs his head as he ramps up the energy even further through Detroit machine-funk, electro, industrial-y italo and, finally, overdriven techno. Adi and Walrus are there front and centre too and together we flail our arms and bang our heads along with Ed, in delight and abandon. It feels like a release, but really this entire five-day stretch has been one long release, from routine, mediocrity, isolation, competition.
No more than an hour later and I’m back at the campsite, cup of boxed red wine in hand, animatedly chatting with my tipi colleagues about what we’ve been up to in the 12 hours since we last saw each other. They’ve been raving to Ravel at the Casa Marmelada and plan to do one final circuit of the site before bed. I want to join them but my knees are saying no, so I wave them off and sink into my camping mattress, that fever-dream music now made real and ready to inspire me for the summer to come.