Esoteric Honeymoon
This would be the first addition to this travel blog I’ve written in 8 years. It’s not that we haven’t been travelling in that time, but nothing has quite captured my imagination and my heart in the way esoteric did and compelled me to get the experience down in writing (with added pictures and videos of course). I felt that a photo album wouldn’t really have done the memory justice.
So what is Esoteric festival? Much like Boom festival in Portugal, Esoteric is a Psytrance festival (If you want to know more about psytrance festivals, or Boom festival, then please read my earlier blog on Boom festival here: Boom Festival ). Although technically as we are now in Australia, this isn’t a festival at all, this is a “Bush Doof.” Because, no joke; its in the bush, and the music goes doof doof. They are very literal here in Australia.
Despite the difference in name, this is a very similar event to the likes of Boom festival; It is several hours drive into the hot, arid, wilderness in a beautiful location, there is a massive amount of very colourful art work and imaginatively dressed people, and yes there are several very loud sound systems that go doof, doof, doof for the best part of 5 days.
I’ll be comparing Eso to Boom quite a lot during this blog, as its the most similar thing I have experienced. Although I’ve been to a number of smaller Aussie bush doofs, the biggest I’ve been to is Earthcore. Earthcore was not much smaller than this, but its a world away in terms of the colour and vibrancy of this place. Even though Boom is around 4 times the size (in terms of people attending), Eso keeps up very well in terms of the art work, decor, and general vibe of Boomland. And although I’ve been to literally hundreds of raves/ festivals in the UK, it’s a bit of a different scene over there, they don’t really have the same kind of large scale Trance parties as continental Europe or Australia.
As mentioned in the title, this trip to Esoteric was a celebration for our honeymoon. We got married 3 weeks before this event, itself a very happy occasion. I feel like I need to give a little background however as to our general emotions going into Esoteric as life hasn’t all been weddings, sunshine and lollipops unfortunately. This next section might be a bit more sombre than you may have been expecting from a blog about a honeymoon at a Bush Doof, but I feel its an integral part of the story;
Events like weddings and honeymoons are planned months in advance, so we already had everything booked for both the honeymoon and the wedding a good six months before this event. Then roughly two months before the wedding Andrea was diagnosed with what looks like breast cancer. To say this was a bit of a blow would be an understatement. The timing was terrible; she was diagnosed two days before Christmas, with the doctor not saying much more than he was concerned with her scans and had booked her an appointment with a surgeon, whom he had asked to come back from holiday a day early to see her and a couple of other women. This brought back a very uncomfortable feeling of deja vu as my Dad was diagnosed with Cancer after experiencing nothing more than some dizzy spells and when he finally got all his results back he had 7 tumours in his brain, one in his kidney and one in his lung and had less than 6 months to live. Then all the medical centres shut for two weeks over Christmas so we couldn’t get any more information. So we spent most of the Christmas break fearing for the worst. It wasn’t a happy time.
When we finally met with the surgeon it seemed that the situation was not quite as bad we had feared. She didn’t have a distinct lump, it looked relatively minor but spread quite widely through her breast and upper chest, and she needed to do more tests. Life went on, the wedding got organised and happened, which was lovely, then just after the wedding she started exhibiting some symptoms which, according to our googling, were very consistent with “inflammatory breast cancer” (IBC). IBC is an absolute worst case scenario in terms of breast cancers, and doesn’t present as a lump and is spread throughout the breast, which was consistent with what she was experiencing and what the surgeon had told us. IBC has a median life expectancy of 20 months after diagnosis, so if she was diagnosed with this, chances are she could be dead within two years. We made an appointment with her doctor but he was very busy and couldn’t get us in for two weeks, so we spent the two weeks leading up to this festival thinking that she was possibly going to die within the next two years, and wondering how to break this news to the kids. Again, it wasn’t a happy time.
Then on the Tuesday before we left for Esoteric (we left Thursday morning) she had her appointment with the doctor and he ruled out the possibility of IBC. He said he was not as concerned as he previously was about it and it was likely very early stages, even if it was malignant at all, but that scans and her first biopsy were inconclusive and she needed a surgical biopsy. We saw this as a massive win in any case and it felt like a weight had been lifted off our shoulders, even if she likely still has some form of cancer. So it's fair to say that the last few months have been a real rollercoaster ride of emotion prior to this.
(Edit: Since writing this, Andrea has in fact been given the all clear from her Cancer diagnosis. Yay!)
Just after Andi's initial diagnosis we went to a much more family friendly bush doof with the kids for new years eve, called Tanglewood. Great little festival in itself, I’d highly recommend it. Once we found out about the cancer we contacted the organisers to see if we could get a power hookup for our camper trailer. The reason being that these festivals out in the bush during the summer months have a blanket fire ban (bush fires at the bush doof would not equal a fun time), but this includes any kind of gas stoves or cooking equipment whatsoever. With her recent cancer diagnosis Andrea immediately went onto a very strict anti inflammatory/ anti cancer diet, which we figured would be next to impossible to stick to at a several day music festival with no cooking equipment and only food vendors to rely on. Tanglewood had a post on their website under the disability section saying that if anyone required electricity for medical reasons that they could contact the organisers and they would work something out. So this is what we did, I emailed them, explained the situation, and said that it would be great if we could get some power to run an electric hotplate and our fridge so we could cook some proper meals and adhere to her diet whilst we were there. They said this wouldn’t be an issue, that they had a disabled camping area which they could hook up with a generator so we could have power.
To be honest, the disabled camping area was fantastic, even without the power. We were pretty much the first vehicle you came to out of the festival site. We could literally watch our kids walk into the festival, go to the family/ kids area, and could actually see them playing inside the kids tent whilst sitting outside our own camper trailer. They had a reasonably large generator nearby which was powering all of the lighting heading down the tracks out into the campsites. An electrician came out and ran a couple of extension cables out to us and one other guy who had a mobility scooter which needed charging throughout the festival. We were the only people in the whole festival who had access to power.
Then on the first evening of Tanglewood there was a MASSIVE storm, torrential rain for a good half hour. It was so bad that all of the music went off on every single stage for 2 hours after it as all of the electrics everywhere had flooded and shorted. We didn’t really notice until the next morning, but the generator we were using had also shorted. We had to get the electrician to come back out, he fiddled about with it and got it going then went off again. This happened a good half a dozen times over the next day, it stayed on for a few minutes then went back off. I felt really bad calling him up as I'm sure he had much more important things to be dealing with, but each time he came back, tried something else, and then it stopped working again. Matey also needed his mobility scooter charging by this point so we kind of needed the power. Eventually the electrician admitted defeat and told us the generator was screwed and there wasn’t much more he could do with it. He said he might have a spare one somewhere, but it was really big, and off he went for about an hour. The one we were using wasn’t exactly small but when he came back, he was accompanied by a spotter in a hi-vis vest and was driving a large telehandler with the kind of generator on the forks that you might use if a small town had lost its powerline. This thing was taller than me, and about 2m wide. It must have easily been 50-100KVA. When I went behind the main stage later on to use the toilet I noticed it was significantly bigger than the one they were using to power the main sound system and stage. And we were using it to cook quinoa and charge a mobility scooter. Still, fair play to Tanglewood, they did everything they could to accomodate us.
At this point I might just add a couple of photos and videos of Tanglewood. This post isn’t about Tanglewood so its only going to be a few, but it really is a great festival. Particularly if you’ve got kids its well worth going to for New Years. Beats standing around in a mega crowded park in the city waiting for some fireworks anyway:
Anyway, the point of mentioning this experience at Tanglewood was that after they were able to help us out so well with our food situation we decided to approach Esoteric to see if they could provide a similar arrangement. I emailed the Facebook page and was put into contact with the managing director and co-founder of esoteric, Sam. He said that they didn’t have the same setup as Tanglewood with a disabled camping, and couldn’t really provide us with a power hookup, but he said he would look into the possibility of letting us use the crew kitchen whilst the festival was on. I should probably add at this point that as this was our honeymoon we had paid extra for a Glamping tent to save the hassle of towing our camper trailer up there and setting it up. He said that the crew kitchen was not far from the glamping area, but that they have never been allowed to have people cooking there whilst the festival was on. It was only there for the setup and the fire regulations would not allow for it whilst the festival was running, but he would approach the CFA (country fire authority) and see if he could sort something out for us.
It was around this time that we went on a camping trip in our camper and had a good think about our setup and what we could do as we didn’t exactly relish the idea of having to walk to the crew area every time we needed to cook anyway. We decided we could probably make it work with our trailer as we have a large fridge freezer and solar panels, so can keep stuff cold all festival. If we prepared a heap of different salads and loads of different juices she would have enough to last for the festival. Only issue we had was that we had a load of juice containers from a previous juice fast, but they were all made of glass, which again is a big no-no at bush doofs and will get taken off you at the gate. So I messaged Sam, explained the situation again and asked if we could have permission to bring these glass containers in our fridge as long as we didn’t bring them into the actual festival. He said this was fine, and he copied in Jenny to the email chain, who I gathered was his wife as they had the same surname. Jenny was the gate manager among other things and ran the gate during the first couple of days. She said to give her a call when we were in the queue for security and she would sort it out for us. So we sold our glamping ticket and loaded up the camper trailer with as much freshly pressed juice and salad as we could fit in it.
We paid for an early access ticket, which allows you to enter the festival a day early on the Thursday whilst they are still setting up and get a prime camping spot and chill out the day before the madness begins. Once we were in the queue for security we phoned Jenny and she said to put her on the phone to the security guard checking our vehicle, which we did. After a few words from Jenny we were promptly waved straight through. Jenny said on the phone to stop at the main gate hut and ask for her as she wanted to say hello. There was another queue for the gate hut as that was the point where tickets were being checked and wrist bands administered. When we asked to speak to Jenny the gate staff looked a little confused, but obliged and went to go and get her.
Up until this point my only real contact with Jenny and Sam had been via email and a very brief phone conversation, so I was a little surprised when Jenny came out that she was (its very hard to estimate these things) maybe in her early 60s? Jenny was lovely though, and we had a good 5 minute chat all about the founding of esoteric, our wedding/honeymoon, and Andi's cancer among other things, seemingly unconcerned about the long queue of vehicles behind us also waiting to get in. Jenny explained that herself and Sam were actually the land owners/ farmers and were approached by the other founder about the possibility of holding the festival on their land. Rather than simply renting out their land they went into full partnership together and they both play a major and pivotal roll in the organisation and running of Esoteric festival. I found it quite fascinating and unexpected that some of the founders and main organisers of Esoteric are actually 60 year old country Victorian farmers. She explained she isn't really into all this doof, doof, doof music, but she loves all the art and colours and all these happy, smiling people that come onto their land every year. It wasn’t what I was expecting anyway, but it was a charming and heart warming introduction to start the festival off with.
(Edit: after writing this and publishing it the first time I received a message from Jenny herself explaining that Sam is in fact her son, and not her Husband. Bit of an assumption there on my part. She said that it is Sam and his other mate are the main founders of Esoteric and she is just mum helping out wherever she can. This makes Sam and his partner most likely in their mid-late 30s, and not 60 year old farmers. Obviously this explanation makes way more sense. I thought it would be funnier to leave my mistake in here rather than take it out completely however)
Once we were in we began the task of finding a camp site. Our trailer is pretty large when fully extended with the awning on it so we needed a fair bit of space. Before the festival they released a site map which had where all the stages were, and also a pretty detailed layout of the camping spaces. Our plan was to try to get as close to the family camping as possible as we wanted to check it out to see the viability of bringing our kids here in the future, so that’s where we headed.
Even though we were in only an hour 15 mins after the gates first opened, pretty much everywhere around family camping was taken. We quickly realised that most of the immediate area was actually crew camping and had been set up for several days. But everything around that had simply been staked out. The camping set up is a complete free for all once you get in, and it was pretty frustrating to see entire fields with about four vehicles in them, but around 20 large tarpaulins spread out all over the place, as people were reserving these spots for their mates coming at a later time. It took us a good 15 minutes driving up and down to find somewhere close to the festival, and even then we had to really squeeze our trailer in next to another trailer and a large section of the field that had been staked off with ropes and tape, but had like two cars in there. I get it though, if you’re coming with 30 of your mates there’s no point in all of you taking the Thursday and Friday off work and paying the extra to get there a day early when two of you can bring a load of ground mats and reserve it for the others. It was a bit frustrating at the time however, but we got a great spot in the end so were pretty happy. Here is a picture of the map of Esoteric below, We ended up in camping section L13:
The spot we got was just at the back corner of the glamping field, where we would have been stationed had we kept our glamping ticket. Seeing the Glamping field made us a little more glad of our decision to sell the ticket to be honest. The tents looked fairly decent, they were medium sized bell tents which are pretty comfortable to sleep in during hot weather, but they were all in long lines or a large grid with a metal fence all the way around it. It kind of reminded us a little of a concentration camp. It didn’t look very inviting, certainly not like the colourful playfulness of the rest of the festival anyway. It seemed like it would be reasonably difficult to keep track of which one was yours as they were all identical and there were like 100 of them. I’m not sure what could be done to improve it, but I feel like the area needs a little work.
As previously said, we got to the festival on the Thursday, a day before the main stages were finished. Having worked quite extensively in the festival/ rave scene back in the UK in my younger days I always really enjoyed the setup, and being there before all the people turn up and seeing it all come together. So it was nice being able to have a look around while the place was pretty empty and get a good look at the stages/ soundsystems. We brought a couple of bikes with us, which we tend to chuck on top whenever we take the camper trailer anywhere. Its not entirely necessary here at esoteric as the site is pretty compact, but it was great to be able to cruise around on the first day through the trees. To be honest it was great to have the bikes everyday, we rode them around the festival everywhere during the daytime. You can get all your water and snacks and stuff in the panniers and not have to carry a hot backpack around. Here are some pictures and descriptions of the various stages/ soundsystems we encountered during the setup:
The first one we encountered was the Moby dick stage. This one was a little unique as all the other stages are inside the wooded area of the main festival site, whilst the Moby dick stage was actually located in the campground, maybe only 60-70m from our camp.
I’m not sure of the make of these speakers, its not one I recognised, but it sounded excellent for a minor stage inside the campsite
The Moby dick stage was a fantastic place to chill out, it had a coffee bar, sandwich toasty van and another seperate venue called the lemon tree spread around the edges of the dance floor. The lemon tree was great, it consisted of various antique looking couches and comfy chairs spread around inside to chill out on, and a small stage at the back which hosted open mic nights and smaller acoustic bands once the main Moby dick stage was turned off, as this generally went off around 12-1AM to allow people in the campsite to sleep. The walls were constructed of a ramshackle mix of weird old window blinds, pallets, shutters and doors. It was a great spot to come and chill away from the chaos of the main festival site. You could sit on some of the comfy couches and just watch the soundsystem and dance floor. Plus they made an awesome coffee there. Although, pro tip for next time; as its the closest venue to all the campsites the queue for coffee in the morning is horrendous. If you just take the effort to walk the extra 200 metres back into the main festival site then you’ll get your morning flat white in like a third of the time.
I’ve realised there are several gaps in my photo catalogue now that I’m back home and looking through the photos. I got a couple of photos of there lemon tree during setup, but failed to take any more in there once it was fully constructed. You get the idea anyway:
The other thing that’s worth mentioning about the Moby dick stage is; The Grass! Not the kind you smoke, the thick, lush, springy carpet of green grass that you can lounge about on and dance on with your bare feet. I should probably mention more about the location of Esoteric at this point, especially for those of you in the UK who are used to having a lush carpet of green grass (or squishy ankle deep mud) at every festival site you go to.
Esoteric is located 15 minutes out of a small farming town called Donald, roughly 300km north west of Melbourne. So it is 300km inland from the nearest coast, and not too far from a place called “little desert national park”, which should give you a clue to the general topography of the area. For those of you who haven’t been to Australia and experienced the joy of a “Bindi”; dry, arid, inland places such as this in Australia have very coarse and pointy plant life, just waiting to stick into you at any available opportunity. The ground out here is rock hard, the natural grasses are extremely coarse, and you certainly wouldn’t want to dance on them. A Bindi is a hard seed pod which has jagged little points in every direction. Technically there are many different kinds of bindis which come from a variety of plants, but generally the drier the area, the harder and more pointy they become. Evolutionary wise, it has evolved to stick onto passing wildlife so that they disperse the seed pods to wider areas. The upshot of this is that these little fuckers litter the countryside and take great glee in stabbing you in the foot if you attempt to walk around with bare feet, its literally their whole twisted purpose in life. Just for reference, here is a picture of a Bindi I took from the web. You can sense the hostility emanating from it:
But at the Moby dick stage, there is a large area of beautifully preserved, lush, spongey green grass. This must get watered and maintained very regularly throughout the year to keep it looking like this out here, and it was a real joy to be able to go there and lay around and dance with bare feet on it. In some of my photos above you can see the edges of the nice green grass, where the sprinkler must reach to, and then the sharp contrast of the yellow, anaemic looking stuff that naturally exists out here.
I also have a video here taken at the Moby dick stage which show a little what the general vibe was like down there. The music was a more chilled, but still upbeat, mix of house, disco, and live bands. You can see the location inside the campground, the main body of the festival was inside the trees in the distance behind me:
The Moby dick stage isn’t actually the only venue inside the camp grounds either. Esoteric open up applications for anyone to set up a “theme camp”. Im not exactly sure of the ins and outs of it, but I guess that you and a load of mates can apply to esoteric to set up your own venue inside the campgrounds. I guess you probably go to them with an idea of what you want to do, if they like the idea they maybe give you a budget to do it (or maybe its voluntary, im not sure), and you get to set up your own public space that people can enjoy during the festival. Again this is a real gap in my photo taking abilities, but I failed to get any photos of these spaces, even though we spent some time going through the camp grounds looking for them. I guess loud soundsystems playing into the night are a bit of a no-no as this is still part of the campground, but reasonably near to us was a large area which was set up as a cabaret/ burlesque/ live band area. It looked pretty large but low key from the outside as it just looked like a load of scaffolding set up with some large tarps fastened all around it, but you entered through the back and walked along a long tunnel around two edges of the structure, having to climb over something in the middle, then it opened up into a space which had a large coach (a bus, not a couch) on the inside, the other side of which was one of the walled tunnels that you had to go around to get in. They had a stage and a load of bean bags in there with the coach at the back and a coffee bar with an old school popcorn maker like you would get at the cinema in there. It smelt amazing, and we spent a good 20 minutes in there on a giant two person bean bag watching a band who were pretty good, but we failed to go back for the cabaret or burlesque.
Other spaces were simply large marquees with lots of really colourful, psychedelic drapes and couches in there that you could relax in. Its quite a nice touch to allow people to set up their own venues within the camp grounds, I’d not really seen that before. It sounds a lot like what happens at burning man, although I haven’t been to experience that myself.
So, once we finally entered the festival site itself, the first venue we came to was the main stage, the Sun Temple. This was a large space inside the trees with an impressive looking backdrop which is the height of a 4 story building and some highly colourful shade sails spanning the whole roof over the dance floor. I’d seen photos of past esoteric festivals and really liked the whole animal motive they usually had going in the main stage. One year was a giant owl, another year a pheonix at the front of the stage, another some kind of giant Venus fly trap. I wouldn’t say I was disappointed seeing the stage for the first time as it was a very impressive structure, but certainly any sense of slight disappointment I may have felt at the lack of animal motivé more than dissipated once the projectors fired up at night time. Here’s a few photos of the area:
The speakers on this system are Martin audio: 12x 18” WSX bass bins and 4x W8L line array (on each side). Different people have different opinions on what makes a good sound system, but there’s no denying that Martin audio have been one of the best in the business for the past 40 years. Personally this was my favourite sounding rig, the clarity and tight, warm sound on Martin audio is hard to beat. It sounded fantastic when you were stood in the centre half way back, although for times when the place was absolutely rammed they probably could have done with another row of those WSX bass bins at the side. This dance floor could probably hold 2000 at capacity. All those people in front of it are pretty good at sucking up the bass. Overall a very good setup though. This system had a day/ night of hard trance on the first day and night, then played a variety of different styles of Psytrance for the next three days. It might come as a surprise to the uninitiated bush doofer, but there is actually quite a variety of different styles of psytrance. Boom festival plays almost exclusively Full-on psytrance, hard and punchy, but there was a few different styles and sounds coming through this throughout the weekend.
Here is a video of the typical sun temple vibe during the daytime. I took all of these videos with a mobile phone and I’ve got to say I’m pretty impressed with how well the microphones on modern mobiles hold up in this kind of environment. I remember the mobile phone footage of 10 years or so ago, where as soon as any kind of baseline came over the speakers the footage just descended into a horrible mash of indistinguishable distortion. You couldn't even make out what genre was playing, let alone listen to it comfortably. But these new phones seem to handle it incredibly well. Even on the second video I’ve posted below where I am no more than 4 or 5 metres from one of those stacks of WSX bass bins the tune is perfectly clear. If you can listen to these videos through a decent set of headphones or speakers then it actually sounds satisfactory considering its phone footage:
The second video here I wouldn’t say is typical sun temple footage as the tune has a much higher tempo than 99% of what was getting played throughout the weekend, but its a pretty good show of the crowd and general vibe. Its worth mentioning that this was taken at 7pm on Sunday evening, so this stage had already been going for 3 full days and 2 nights by this point:
The next place we came to on our tour around the festival site was the Bush techno stage. Kind of at the far end of the site, its significantly more chilled than the three other main stages, nice location nestled in amongst the trees. It had quite a few benches and nice chill out areas to sit down on, and two balconies overlooking it. I quite liked the look of the stage, like some forgotten church or temple lying in ruins in the bush waiting to be inhabited again. Which is kind of what it felt like walking down there:
This sound system was a mixture of turbosound and function one:
2x TSW121 (1x21”) turbosound bass bins at the bottom
2x function one F218 double 18” bass bins in the middle
1x function one MB212 minibass
Some kind of turbosound tops, not exactly sure of the model.
This sounded great also. To be honest all the sound systems at esoteric sounded fantastic. This was playing slower techno/ tech house. Not really my cup of tea music wise, but it was a nice setup and location. If we were after something a bit slower and more chilled but still dancey we tended to head back to the Moby dick stage. This is a brief video of the type of music being played here:
The next stage we came across was pretty hard to miss, the massive Alien/ Egpytian backdrop and what kind of looked like an alien temple/ spaceship gave it away. This was called the Ascension stage, This one was a bit more out in the open, but with a shade sail over the whole area. Great sunsets across the plains at this place, and plenty of room around it no matter how busy it got:
Interesting sound system on this one, I’d never seen anything quite like it. Upon further investigation, it seems the bass bins are double 21” 6th order bandpass designs, which means there are 32x 21” bass bins in this setup! To only 4 mid/high speakers. I thought it would be way too unbalanced and bass heavy when I first saw it, but it sounded great, especially with the weird, squelchy alien trance they were playing through it. This stage played dark Psy. I’d not heard much dark psy played out before, but this actually became our favourite stages over the weekend. Andi was previously into dark psy and was highly excited about this one, but I failed to see the fascination before we got here. Significantly faster and harder and less trancey than the stuff being played in sun temple, plus you always knew what you were going to get there; fast, pounding music that sounded as if the aliens were trying to communicate with you. Certainly at various points during the weekend I wasn’t in the mood for this place, but if we ever felt like going for a good dance, this is generally where we came. Short video of some dark Psy being played in the day. Sounded good through those 32x 21inch drivers:
And a Picture of the sunset at Ascension stage:
The last of the main stages was the snake pit. I had high hopes for this one. Normally bush doofs in Australia (and similar psytrance festivals in Europe) are very 4-beat heavy places. Almost exclusively house, techno and psytrance, but this was a stage that played breakbeats all weekend: Dub/ dubstep/ trip hop/ Jungle/ drum and bass. I really liked the idea of this, especially being from the UK, the home of broken beats. I’m a bit sorry to say that we spent virtually zero time at this stage however. I guess my drum and bass tastes are a bit softer than what was on offer in the evenings here. I know a lot of people from the UK who would have got considerably more out of this stage, but I’m not the biggest fan of drum and bass. I was always more a fan of breakbeat, or UK breakbeat hardcore, either of which would be great to hear here. Although I think the chances of hearing UK breakbeat hardcore anywhere in Australia is pretty much non-existent. But I quite like the bouncy cheerfulness of ragga drum and bass, and the soulful melodic sounds of liquid drum and bass, and even a bit of the vocal, uplifting and more commercial drum and bass, but it always seemed to be closer to jump up or techstep drum and bass whenever I heard it, which is a bit more dark and menacing for my tastes. I didn’t really hear any jungle through it either which would have been good. Some of the dub stuff and the live acts in the day sounded promising, this stage had more live acts than any of the other main stages, but we never really spent much time here. Maybe we just wandered down at the wrong time for our tastes each time. I think its great that this stage is here, but it didn’t really do it for me on this occasion:
Soundsystem was a custom made affair. Looks very much like void design looney bins on the bottom (6x18”). The tops are some kind of full range cabinet which apparently contain a 15”, a 12” and a compression driver in one cabinet.
A typical music selection from the snakepit stage:
These were the 4 main stages, there were a couple of extra smaller venues worth mentioning. The first was the lagoon stage. This wasn’t open at first when we arrived, but its essentially a man made pond lined with astroturf to provide some grip, which people can swim in with a soundsystem at the far end. Played a variety of hip hop, house, disco, breaks. Nice idea, especially for the hotter afternoons, although it definitely wasn’t as enticing as the nice big freshwater lake at Boom. This is a pretty dusty place and by the second day the water was a murky brown colour from all the dust washed off of people. We never went in, just chilled out at the edges a couple of times. These were taken the first day it opened, when the water was still an enticing blue colour, should have gone in then really:
All bass speakers were home made. Looks like some kind of paraflex design for the 18” bins in the middle, double 15” superscoops on the sides, with an 18” W-bin in the middle.
Couple of full range on the top, 12” Nexo and I’m not sure what else. For a minor stage at a lake this had a fair bit of kick to it, especially those paraflexs in the middle.
This is a bit of video footage taken on day 3, notice the definite brown tinge of the water compared to those first photos:
The other of the larger minor stages was chill island. A recent addition to Eso, only having its first outing last year. It’s hard to imagine Eso without it there. It seems a perfect spot for it. This again was away from the main festival site, but the other side from Moby Dicks. It is located in a group of trees just before the landscape turns into salt flats. There are a lot of salt flats in inland Australia as there used to be large inland seas out here, which dried up long ago with the oppressive heat leaving an infertile salt filled soil which not much grows in. Its quite an eerie landscape looking out over it, looks very desolate and lifeless. But it has a strange kind of beauty to it, and the sunsets over the salt flats were fantastic. They built Chill island out here because they noticed that large groups of people were congregating in this clump of trees to watch the sunset each night, so they decided to build a venue out here for them. Its pretty well done really, lots of nice seats scattered around and large egg chairs (which are never as comfy as they look) to lounge around on, and a system playing very chilled/ ambient stuff. It was a great escape from the madness. It also had a large marquee with a load of couches scattered in there, and another great little tent called temple of light which had mattresses and pillows all around the edge and colour changing lights inside it, it was a relaxing place to chill and have a lie down late at night, if you could get a spot in there. Some photos from chill island:
And a Video from chill island:
There were also two other minor venues, which usually had either yoga classes or sound healings or some kind of meditation in them during the day, but had some surprisingly good bands in them at night. These were called the Hammock temple and the hammock fractal. Bit of an odd name as there were not any hammocks in either of them. This photo was taken on the way back from chill island:
So those are pretty much all the venues that host music at Esoteric. We got here on Thursday afternoon and none of the main stages were playing until Friday morning. The only stages playing music were chill out island and Moby dicks. Chillout island was playing some decidedly less chilled stuff compared to the rest of the weekend, and we spent a fair bit of time in the evening up there before going back to Moby dicks and laying down together on what looked like a psychotherapists couch in the Lemon tree and watching the dance floor before getting a reasonably early night. It was a nice relaxing start to the festival anyway, I’m glad we came on the Thursday.
The start to Friday was again pretty relaxed as the main stages didn’t turn on until around midday. Gates opened to everyone else on the Friday morning at 8am, so the car park quickly became filled with cars driving up and down locking for a good spot. We thought that we were squeezed in pretty tight, but two other vehicles and tents ended up setting up in front of us and boxing us in. One of these tents was asked to move by the fire marshal as they were technically on the roadways so they squeezed in even tighter. We’d kind of sectioned off our camp spot with our 4X4 so still had a decent amount of room in our actual camp, but camping gets pretty competitive this close to the festival.
As this was another reasonably relaxed morning we found ourselves over at chill island and noticed that we got there about 20 minutes before the massage space was supposed to start. They had three massage tables set up under a frame with white flowing curtains draped around it. Massages were free, but it was first in best dressed, you just had to turn up there at the start of each day and put your name down on a time slot. Seeing as we got there before anyone else we figured it was worth waiting the 20 minutes and getting the first massage of the festival. That was the plan anyway, but 12pm came and went, with another 5 or 6 people turning up, with no sign of any masseuse. Then half past came, by which point there were approximately 25 people hanging around waiting, some of which just started laying on the tables and giving each other back massages. Some people started leaving, but as we were the first in line it was pretty hard to give up that spot. By 12:45 virtually everyone else had left apart from us, the couple who came after us and one other person. At this point, after waiting around for over an hour, we decided there were better things we could be doing than waiting around for a non-existent massage and went back to the main festival site. Bit of a disappointment, im not sure if any masseuses ever turned up there in the end that day. However, we saw a guy in a pair of undies getting a full body massage a couple of days later. It looked like a very oily affair, in an open area with high winds on the edge of a salt flat. We both had a little chuckle about the fact that this guy was most likely going to get straight up from that table and be instantly coated in a fine layer of salt dust, sticking to that oil as if you were rolling a chicken breast in breadcrumbs ready to turn it into a schnitzel. The massage suddenly didn’t seem so appealing. I’m sure it felt lovely at the time though.
So we headed back into the festival, and eventually got to the opening set on the Sun temple. The first day and night on the Sun Temple was a hard trance takeover. I was looking forward to this as Psytrance is a reasonably new thing for me (well, last 10 years as opposed to the last 20). Psytrance is a very small and marginal scene in the UK and I’d never really listened to it much before coming to S.E Asia and Australia. Hard trance and Hard House however were massive in the electronic music scene I grew up with in the early 2000s. Again, like the snake pit, I think its great to have this variety at a normally psytrance heavy bush doof. Apparently this is going to be a yearly thing at Esoteric, a “warm up” day of hard trance before the next 3 days of psytrance, which I think is an excellent idea. The hard trance was a little hands-in-the-air clubby for my tastes at points, but overall was pretty decent. I would have liked to hear more of the German acid hard trance along the lines Tracid Traxx records than the HTE stuff, but each to their own. I took this video not long after the first tunes started playing on Friday. I took it right at the front to get a bit of footage of the little pond/ waterfall/ giant psychedelic crystal water feature they had going on.
After a while at the hard trance we went over to another area which I haven’t mentioned yet, but was really glad to see here; the cinema/lecture space, called the amphitheatre. Before Boom I would have never considered sitting in a lecture at a music festival. I’m not sure such facilities exist at many other music festivals. Although I’m 100% certain there are hundreds of lecturers you could listen to at Glastonbury, I’d have no idea where to start looking for them. Plus Glastonbury is just so colossal, with so much to see and do that you can’t really see it all in any case, it would seem a shame to spend an hour sitting down listening to a lecture. But at Boom this space became somewhat of a highlight for us. Maybe myself and Andi are slightly more receptive to the idea of a lecture having both been subjected to several years of university, but I’m pretty sure if people actually looked into the program at these spaces then they’d find something of interest. The lecture that me and Andi honed in on at this particular point was that of a Cannabis doctor.
After Andrea's cancer diagnosis we looked into hundreds of natural aids/ treatments to help with cancer and its symptoms, rapidly instigating as many of them as we could into her daily routine. One of the things we came across was CBD/THC oil. To be honest, up until about 4 weeks before Eso I had no idea that you could get a prescription for Cannabis in Australia. But after a bit of research, and a recommendation from a friend, we found a receptive doctor who consulted with Andi and prescribed her a bottle of CBD oil and a CBD roll-on (used for pain relief), and a bottle of THC oil (used for tumour suppression). She had only been prescribed these items a few days before the festival and we didn’t really know a huge amount about them, so were pretty keen to see what the cannabis doctor had to say. His lecture was entitled “Healing with Cannabis”, which seemed appropriate.
We arrived at the lecture about 20 minutes early as we felt like a bit of a sit down anyway. The amphitheatre consists of several rows of old cinema seats in a kind of U-shape on teared level going down towards a screen/ small stage at the front. Perhaps I should just post a picture of the amphitheatre at this point:
We turned up and sat down and were discussing what the doctor might talk about when the guy sat in front of us turned around and introduced himself as the doctors videographer, and life long friend from when they were kids up on the gold coast. He had a small esky full of chilled beers with him and passed me one while we talked about what might be included in the lecture. Then he said “Here comes the doctor now…” And a guy in board shorts and thongs (flip-flops to those of you in the UK. I understand the confusion and amusement with the Australian use of the the word “thongs”, but I can assure you it is a type of shoe) walked over to us. We joked that he really looked the part of a doctor, and he replied that the afternoon before this he was in a convention centre in Ballarat in a suit and tie giving a lecture to a group of doctors and health insurance executives, and it was a bit of a relief to be out here today at a bush doof in board shorts. I instantly realised that if this guy had turned up to a bush doof looking like a doctor in a suit and tie, or a white coat with a stethoscope around his neck, then I wouldn’t have trusted a word he said.
He still had a good 10 minutes before he was due on and so we talked with him and his mate about what he did and what we wanted to hear about. During the discussion he said he had one clinic in Prahran, the inner east of Melbourne, but was opening a second one shortly which just so happens to be located in Langwarrin, around 4km from our house, a remarkable coincidence.
The talk was pretty interesting. He talked about his route to becoming a doctor and a GP and how unsatisfied he was with the results of pharmaceutical drugs on people with chronic pain, who never seemed to get any better and were just having to take more drugs to combat the side affects of the other drugs they were already taking. This led him to looking at alternative options and trying out CBD oil, which worked with amazing effect in a number of his chronic and inflamed patients, so he began specialising solely on Cannabis and its uses.
He has a number of high profile athletes on his books who use him for sports related pain. He expressed a lot of frustration at the resistance from the mainstream medical establishment to even consider it as a possibility. He talked about I think it was a netballer who had been out of competitive competition for a good 5 or 6 years from injury and he managed to get her back to competing again, and I think he said she may even be in the olympic team now after having no luck with the medications she was taking for an old injury and related inflammation. There were a few news stories about it, but no further interest from the medical establishment to use it more widely.
He talked about the cannabinoid system in the human body, which apparently has more receptors in the human brain than any other receptor, and yet its still a bit of a mystery what exactly they are for and what they affect. It probably doesn’t help that we’ve lost 60 years worth of researching them because there has been a blanket ban on such things due to Cannabises legal status. He said that he approached every single university and medical teaching facility in Victoria, not even to teach them anything about cannabis, simply offering a free lecture on the cannabinoid system and what he knew about it, as there is literally nothing in the medical syllabus about it. Not one of them took him up on it.
He then talked about the different types of cannabis and its uses. If I had only just found out 4 weeks ago that it was possible to get CBD and THC refined oils on a prescription, it was at this exact moment that I found out this also extends to fresh cannabis buds. This doctor pulled out a number of large white cylindrical containers which contained the kind of generic typed label on them you would see on a prescription drug packet. Inside each container was several grams of fresh cannabis. He passed them around the onlookers, getting them to smell and look at them and talked about the aromatic and terpene profile of each one and what the affect each particular strain would have and what it would be useful for.
I think whilst this doctor's frustration at the lack of the medical establishments progressiveness on this issue is understandable, the shift of public and political perception on this issue is incredibly rapid. Just 5 or 10 years ago the thought that a doctor might be able to administer fresh cannabis as a prescription would be almost unthinkable. Elon musk (love him or hate him), made a relevant comment during lockdown in California durning the pandemic. His exact tweet was:
“Selling weed literally went from major felony to essential business (open during pandemic) in much of America & yet many are still in prison. Doesn’t make sense, isn’t right.”
He makes a good point; in a few short years cannabis went (in California at least) from a potential life prison sentence, to a substance so critical to the functioning of society that cannabis dispensaries were deemed an essential service and were allowed to stay open during lockdown. And yet people are still serving life prison sentences for possessing it. Still, that’s a hell of a shift in a very short time.
It makes you marvel at the hypocrisy of a society that will happily sell you a substance (tobacco) in every single shopping centre and supermarket up and down the country which is a known causer of at least 15 different types of cancer, and is directly responsible for 7 million deaths world wide each year. And yet at the same time lock you up for possessing a second substance which is actively prescribed to cancer patients to assist with their cancer treatment. I mean, what the fuck?? Just read that last paragraph again and have a think about it for a minute… If you are under the impression that drug laws have been devised by a caring and benevolent government to save you from harm, then I’m afraid you are sorely mistaken.
I’d like to point out at this point that neither myself or Andi are regular recreational cannabis users, and haven’t been for around 15-20 years. We both smoked it daily as teenagers/ early 20s, but have only taken it a handful of times in the last 15 years or more. And I am certainly not advocating that everyone start smoking weed every day. One of the best things I ever did for myself was to stop the daily smoking of cannabis, but it seems it has a myriad of medicinal uses which we would have undoubtably found out about 40 or 50 years ago had we not been locking people up for using it.
Having said this, upon hearing about Andrea's diagnoses and her new prescription, a friend of ours baked us a large batch of weed cookies as a kind of wedding/ enjoy your honeymoon present. Not entirely sure if Andrea's prescription covered us for these (almost certainly not), but we brought them to Esoteric in any case. I was pretty apprehensive about eating them at first as the only other experience I’ve had with eating weed was in Amsterdam when I was 18 and I ate way, WAY too much and fucked myself up for a good 5 hours. Still, we gave them a try and they were great. Much better than smoking it in my opinion. The few times I have smoked it in the last few years its been such an intense experience, pretty much all I’m good for is laying in bed and watching a comedy movie. But these little cookies (baked with a recipe that Andrea can actually eat!) were nice and mellow and chilled, and lasted for ages. We spent the afternoons at esoteric munching our way through our supply of cookies and cruising about on our bikes, taking in the sites and dancing at various stages. I’d forgotten how amazing loud music sounds when you’re stoned. And to be honest how much fun it is cruising around on bicycles. It brought back a funny memory actually from one of the other few times we’ve smoked cannabis during the last decade or so.
When I opened this blog site up again to write this story, I realised that I never actually finished the story of our travels. I initially started this page to document a 4 month trip we did around Europe in a campervan in 2014. The last blog I completed was about Germany, but we left Germany through the north, drove through Denmark and up through Sweden and the Norweigian fjords, then back down Norway again inland, getting the ferry from southern Norway to the north of Denmark, and then spent a week in the Netherlands and Amsterdam before heading home. I didn’t write about any of this, and some of those memories were great. This particular memory was from a highly interesting place called Christiania, in Copenhagen. It’s a place worth hearing about if you’re not already aware of it:
Its a strange place Christiania, almost feels like it shouldn’t exist, and makes you wonder how much longer it can keep existing for. Essentially Christiania is kind of like a suburb of Copenhagen right on the edge of the CBD, but it is an old army barracks which was squatted back in 1971. The squatters started up their own autonomous, anarchist commune, declaring themselves “Freetown Christiania”. When you enter Christiania there is a big sign over the entrance claiming “You are now leaving the EU”. Their community is run as a commune where major decisions are made not by a select few, but by large scale debates and votes involving every resident if they so wish. One of the focal points they voted on in the early days was to decide that cannabis was in fact legal in their community. There is a street in the centre of Christiania known as “the green light district”, in a bit of a humorous nod to Amsterdams red-light district. The green light district is lined with makeshift stalls covered in camo netting, acting as the equivalent of coffee shops in Amsterdam (for those that don’t know, a coffee shop in Amsterdam is not a cafe, although they will sell you a coffee. Coffee shops are where you go to buy weed. I’m not sure why they don’t just call them cannabis or weed shops, but coffee shops is what they are called). The stalls in christiania are much more low key however, kind of constructed out of marquees and tarpaulins. You go in there and there is a wall covered in a camo drape with a slit at the bottom so you can’t see the person serving you (although they may have declared weed legal here, it is most definitely NOT legal in Denmark, and hence not really legal in Christiania either). There’s normally some samples of 3 or 4 different strains in jars on the counter, and you choose the one you want and hand the money through the slit in the wall and they pass you back the weed. Definitely feels a lot more clandestine than Amsterdam anyway, but still, its a known place that you can go in Copenhagen and openly buy weed on the street. And its not only a destination that you can go and buy weed. Christiania is listed on all of Copenhagens and Denmarks tourist information sites as one of the top 3 or 4 tourist attractions in the country. Its actually a huge tourist draw for the city that the officials in Copenhagen seem quite proud of and seem to let the illicit dealings go on there without too much bother. Its a decidedly arty and colourful community (as you’d expect from a neighbourhood illegally occupied by anarchist hippy squatters), with several shops and cafes around a central square which has a stage in the centre of it where I guess they hold gigs, although we didn’t see one when we were there. Christiania is a surprisingly large place for somewhere inside the CBD of a major European capital city; the grounds cover 19 acres and about 1000 people live there. Once you get out of the main square and barracks buildings there is a good two kilometre strip of land running along a couple of large canals/ rivers. These parts are the remnants of an old city fortifications and moat which used to run around the old city, but they are now tree lined mounds running down the river banks which people have built houses on. There are no planning restrictions or regulations here so people build whatever weird and wonderful structures they feel like. Obviously there must be some kind of agreement within the community as to who is allowed to build along the river.
I’ve included here a map of Copenhagen CBD with the grounds of Christiania surrounded in red along the eastern edge of the city. The main town centre of Christiania is in the wider southern portion, with the houses along both sides of what was the old city moat spanning up to the north east. Looks like a greedy developers wet dream. I couldn’t possibly imagine how many 10s of millions all that land that close to the city with all that splendid water frontage would be worth in todays prices, which is why I’m surprised it still exists. I’m pretty sure in Australia or the UK a money hungry government would have booted those squatters out and sold it all off to developers decades ago. It is ex military land after all, so is completely owned by the government:
So as we were in Christiania, we thought it rude not to sample the local produce. We brought some weed from a shady looking marquee, and sat down in the main square to smoke a spliff. You can also smoke weed outside quite freely in Christiania, something you can’t do in Amsterdam. Whilst on our trip we had a couple of bikes on a bike rack on the back of our van and we found it much easier to park on the street a little way out of major cities and bike in rather than trying to find parking in the centre, so we biked in to Christiania. There are no cars allowed in Christiania anyway so we were pretty safe to bike up and down the canals and around the town whilst nicely stoned, but eventually we ventured out into the rest of Copenhagen.
European cities in general are pretty bicycle friendly places, none more so than Copenhagen. They have redone a lot of the road system through the CBD and replaced many of the two lane roads with one way systems, splitting the road in two with a concrete verge down the middle and the other side of each road is now a double lane bike lane. The bikes have pretty much their own seperate road system separated by concrete curbs, and even where the two meet the bikes have right of way at most intersections. Its a remarkably stress free and easy city to bike around in, and it was fantastic spending a couple of days biking all around it whilst getting stoned on Christianias finest produce. It was a tranquil and serene way to travel around the city.
(EDIT: After writing this and then doing a bit more research on Christiania I found out that they shut the green light district down in 2016. Not the police, the residents. Apparently in 2016 a Bosnian immigrant with islamic extremist links was stopped by police with a large amount of cash on him, thought to be money from cannabis sales in Christiania. He pulled a gun out and shot two police officers and an innocent bystander (they all lived, although the suspect was shot and killed). After this the residents had a meeting and voted to get rid of the cannabis stalls. I guess you are always going to get this kind of thing eventually when large amounts of money are at stake in an illegal black market. Bit of a shame as it had operated largely peacefully for over 50 years.)
I've got a few photos here of the houses around the river section in Christiania. There are no photo signs in the main town around the green light district, so I don't really have any of the town centre, but this will give you an idea of the weird and wonderful houses around the moat section. Its hard to imagine that this place is on the edge of the CBD of a European capital city:
These photos are also part of Christina, but they are around the back of the main barracks buildings where Christiania merges into the rest of Copenhagen. I felt it safe to take some photos here without annoying anyone. Some of these buildings are lived in, others are communal/ meeting spaces. This first one is from the road just outside christiania. The graffitied wall around marks the edge, and the buildings behind it are part of the old barracks:
When we eventually got to Amsterdam we figured we would try to relive the time we had in Copenhagen and get stoned and ride about the place. If there’s two things that Amsterdam is possibly most famous for, it’s cannabis and bicycles. It was so chaotic and hectic that we had to get ourselves to the nearest park and wait for the weed to nearly wear off. Amsterdams roadways and bike lanes are a wild mix of cars, trams, hundreds of other much more savvy locals zooming around on bikes, and drunk and high tourists staggering into roads and bike lanes. It wasn’t nearly the experience we were looking for. If you’re going to get stoned and bike around a city, Copenhagen is the one to go for.
We were quite unlucky in a way over how crowded Amsterdam was on our trip. I guess unlucky is the wrong word as it turned out to be a fortuitous coincidence. When trying to book caravan parks/ accomodation in Amsterdam as we were travelling back down through Norway and Denmark we were finding it incredibly difficult to get any kind of accommodation for the few days we were going to be there. (We generally only booked accomodation/ caravan parks in major cities, the rest of the time we relied on finding some kind of wooded area or backstreet to pull up for the night and free camp). Upon doing a bit of research we found out that the 4 days we were planning to be in Amsterdam for just so happened to be the exact same time that ADE was on. ADE is "Amsterdam Dance Event", which markets itself as the biggest dance music festival in the world. 400,000 people come from around the world to Amsterdam for this event. Not really a single festival, it takes place in clubs and venues all over the city over a 5 day period in mid October. Its one of the busiest weeks you could possibly try to spend in Amsterdam, hence biking around when stoned was a highly hectic experience.
But this did mean there were a lot of events and things happening around the city. Although by the time we worked out it was on at the same time most of the stuff had sold out. We managed to get tickets for a Trance/ Psytrance night that Paul Oakenfold (who was great) and Paul van Dyke (who was terrible) were mixing at. The highlight of the weekend however was catching a "reclaim the streets" party. These started up in a lot of European cities in the early 90s as a protest against the laws that a lot of governments were passing to try to quell the illegal rave movement which sprang up all over Europe at the same time in the lates 80s/early 90s. There were large protest parties in the centres of lots of European cities at the time. Usually consisting of an indiscreet convey of trucks that would drive into the centres of cities and then open up the sides to reveal large soundsystems mounted on the back and have an impromptu rave in the CBD, often accompanied by thousands of people who had been notified in advance. They then often drove very slowly through the city streets, pounding out dance music on their way. They still have these occasionally in Europe, but they very much notify the government now and just have them as a kind of celebration/ memory of the underground scene of the 90s.
There was a reclaim the streets party happening on the program, so we thought we would check it out. It started, and later ended, on a largely empty island a couple of kilometres out to the cities east at midday. It was quite an amusing thing to see, this convoy of ragtag homemade soundsytems and vehicles driving all the way around the CBD of the city pounding out underground dance music as they went.
The convoy was going slow enough through the city that you could nip into a shop and grab a couple of beers to drink as you were following and not lose the main convey, which we did on a few occasions. It stopped in a couple of prominent places for 10 to 15 minutes at a time, most notably in Rembrandtplein, which is one of the main clubbing districts of the city, and then worked its way in a loop back out of the city to the island it started at and the party carried on until around midnight. It was a very much a celebration of 90s alternative dance culture, so a fair few classic trance and early goa tunes being played.
Heres a few photos of the Reclaim the streets convey driving around Amsterdam. The first few are all the vehicles congregating together on the island just out the city:
And a couple bits of video footage of the day:
And a bit at night back on the island, 9 hours or so after leaving
Biking around Esoteric during the day really reminded me of the time we spent in Copenhagen, cruising about through the trees and out to chill island and around the theme camps in the campground, all whilst quite nicely baked on weed cookies. The other reason I bring up Christiania is due to the fact of where we first found out about it: In a lecture at Boom festival. They had a resident of Christiania come to Boom and deliver a talk all about their community. She had a slide show of pictures playing on the projector screen and told us all about the founding of christiania and what goes on there today. It sounded like an interesting place and as we were heading through Copenhagen in a few weeks anyway we decided to check it out. You see its always worth checking out the lecture program at these places, there’s often some interesting stuff going on there.
My one complaint about the Amphitheatre, and really my only complaint of Esoteric as a whole: It feels like Esoteric are bang on the money for 99% of this festival and have set it up extremely well. The attention to detail here is incredible, but my one complaint would be with the nighttime screenings at the cinema. I just can’t imagine that too many people want to roll out of a blissful, euphoric dance floor at 3am and stagger into some nightmare dystopian action/ horror movie. I know they had this whole “wild wastelands” dystopian theme going this year, and maybe things will be a bit more optimistic with the “Esoverse” theme they have coming up next year. But yeah, people need colourful, light hearted, weird but not disturbing, entertaining but not violent things to watch in the delicate kinds of headstates they are likely to find themselves in at 3 in the morning at a Bush doof. Weird trippy documentaries about spirituality, cosmology or psychedelics, or brightly colourful animation, or funny movies would be great. Violent action movies not so much. I like the fact that they had a night of music movies and footage from festivals around the world, although I didn’t wander past the cinema this night. Every other time we wandered past it appeared pretty disturbing what was showing there and we hurried straight past. Having come back home and perused the program again it looked like they played some pretty good movies actually, I just don’t think they were the right choice of movie for the atmosphere of the festival. Plus the cinema pretty much backs onto the family camping area, chances are it was highly distressing for some poor kids waking up in the night to blood curdling screams and shootings.
So where was I, ah yes, the Cannabis doctors lecture. As might be expected for such a lecture, there was a fair bit of cannabis being smoked and passed around the lecture space. By the time we left that place we were so stoned that we needed to take an afternoon nap to sleep it off, and promptly went back to the camper trailer.
Upon waking up an hour or so later, I noticed a text message from an old friend of mine from my rope access days in Melbourne. (Abseiling from skyscrapers to carry out construction/ cleaning jobs on the outsides of buildings for those who don’t know what rope access entails). She’s a regular face on the bush doof scene and I was aware she was coming to this and had messaged her about it, although we hadn’t crossed paths in the last 4 years. She had messaged me to say she was in and camped in K13. Turns out they were around 10 camp spaces away from us, a remarkable coincidence in a campsite this big. Still feeling pretty groggy I went to grab a coffee from the lemon tree then went to say hello.
It’s always nice catching up with an old friend, especially another crazy ropey. They often have some interesting stories to tell. She caught me up on all the goss at my old company, then we all headed back into the festival and didn’t see each other again for the entire weekend.
Upon getting back into the Doof the hard trance was still playing, but unlike earlier the large circular parts of the sides of the stage had started spinning around in circles. This came as a bit of a surprise. It was kind of cool, although not nearly as impressive as it was once the projectors were on there after it was dark. Here is a video of the spinning parts of the stage around sunset, you can kind of see the start of the projections on the back wall. The place is comparatively very empty. This was on the Friday and I guess a lot of people were still at work because there were like 6 times as many people on the main dance floor from Saturday morning all the way through to Monday night:
The next thing I might mention at this point is the decor at esoteric. This is a fabulously radiant and colourful place. I should probably explain a little more about the venue: The main space of the festival is set up on a plantation, so all the trees are planted in neat rows. Quite a few of these trees must have been removed to accomodate the main dance floors at the Sun Temple and the snake pit, but other than that all the trees have been left in rows. In between the stages there are hundreds of small and large sculptures, murals, art installs and pieces of old backdrops from past festivals scattered throughout the trees. They have constructed walls by crisscrossing pieces of tree branch and tying them together with fairy lights scattered through them, linking gaps between the trees to create a mini labyrinth of colourful artworks running up the whole spine of the festival site. For an event this size there is a phenomenal amount of artwork nestled throughout the trees. As soon as you leave one dance floor you are immersed in this maze of colourful, psychedelic artwork until it spits you out at the next dance floor. Its really quite a compact site, with a lot crammed into it.
I particularly liked the mural wall section, the dreadlocked monkey made from scaffolding, and of course the giant day-glo snail with a little habitat inside his shell. There’s also multiple areas to sit down and chill out, the largest of which is the “couch gardens” a sprawling maze of makeshift walls and shade sails with what must be at least 100 couches scattered throughout it. It seems at every turn in Esoteric there is either groups of chairs or couches or hammocks that you can rest you weary feet in, including around the edges of all the dance dance floors. This makes up for the lack of soft fresh grass to lay down on. This is one of the things that sets esoteric apart, this concentration on art and colour and amenities that aren’t necessarily stages. There’s nothing worse than a music festival that only contains stages and shops/ food stalls. It feels like they’ve spent all their money on lineup and just want you to dance and spend all your money.
Personally, this is the area I would look forward to seeing expanded the most. I know with festivals there is always going to be the drive to make things bigger and better than the year before, and esoteric is really quite young still (this is the 6th Esoteric), but I felt all of the dance floors and sound systems were incredibly well set up and perfectly sized and equipped for the size of the festival. Not saying that the art installations weren’t of course, but I would love to see it grow and transform into even more of a psychedelic labyrinth than it is now, with areas you could get lost in, maybe little tunnels you have to crawl through and secret hidden areas, with colourful craziness at every turn. It reminded me a little of the shangri-la area at Glastonbury; a warren of makeshift backstreets and alleyways with weirdness and strange goings on in every corner. Its impressive the amount of time that must have been spent on a lot of these projects, here’s a few pictures I took in the day time:
And this is a bit of video footage from the back corner of the Sun Temple, you can make out the rows of trees and some of the wooden fences used to make fences between them. You can just about see through the bare part of these trees to the back of the Ascension stage in the distance:
As previous explained, this event was a celebration for our honeymoon. Not only that, this was actually the first single night that we have been able to arrange all night childcare for our kids since our eldest son was born, around 7.5 years ago. And since Andrea was obviously pregnant for the 9 months before that, it had been well over 8 years since we had actually had an opportunity to let loose as a couple without any responsibility. On top of that, we had received the news that Andrea did not have the almost certainly fatal inflammatory breast cancer just a few days earlier. So Esoteric was absolutely a celebration on a number of fronts. But the spectre of cancer was still firmly in our minds, so it definitely wasn’t going to be the wild celebration that we may have envisaged when first planning this honeymoon. If she had received the diagnosis of IBC it would have been a very different experience again, we likely wouldn’t have even taken the weed cookies with us and just concentrated on her health until we knew more. So we felt a celebration was in order in any case. I guess most mainstream people looking for a celebration would go out and get a bottle of champagne and get drunk together. To explain why this wasn’t the best idea I’m going to take a brief sidestep into the work of professor David Nutt:
David Nutt is an interesting character worth hearing about if you haven’t already. He is a professor from the UK specialising in the field of “Neuropsychopharmacology”, which in laymen’s terms is the way that different chemicals affect the human brain and body.
David Nutt received a medical degree from Cambridge university before going into research in this field. He eventually became the president of the European college of Neuropsychopharmacology, and the Chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) in the UK; a body set up to advise the government on drug policy and harm in the UK. So he is one of the most trusted and well researched individuals in the world on the subject, and was the head scientist advising the UK government on the harms of various substances for a number of years. That is until he “went rogue” around 2007.
He released a number of damning papers in medical journals (which promptly got heavy press coverage) decrying the way that drugs were classified and the risks assessed in the UK and the rest of the world. He published a detailed paper on the risks and harms that each drug poses to both the individual taking it and also to society as a whole. He came to the somewhat startling conclusion that alcohol is the most dangerous drug in our society today. A large portion of this weighting was due to the harm it does to society as a whole, but even just assessing the harm to the individual taking it, it comes in at 4th place after heroin, crack cocaine and methamphetamine. And places as more harmful to the person taking it than cocaine, tobacco, amphetamine and ecstasy. You can read his paper in the lancet medical journal here, but will need an account with the lancet (its free):
For those that can’t be bothered to read a medical journal, the simplified version of his drug harm graph is included below:
This was written for the UK, and I guess the one big change that would be observed in shifting this to Australia is Methamphetamines (Ice) “harm to others” weighting. Ice is pretty much non-existent in the UK, virtually nobody takes ice, therefore its cost to society is very low. Whereas in Australia and the US Ice has ravaged whole communities, particularly in regional areas. If this were re-written for Australia then Ice would quite likely be the most harmful substance. Conversely however, crack cocaine is a much bigger issue in Europe and the UK, but is a very marginal thing in Australia, so this would likely be scored a bit lower.
But still, there’s no denying that alcohol scores incredibly highly in its overall harm to its users. There was a second independent Dutch study carried out around the same time which placed alcohol as 4th overall (and 4th most damaging to the individual), and actually placed tobacco as the third most dangerous drug. I often find it quite amusing that in the coffee shops in Amsterdam there are signs all over them asking you not to smoke tobacco, even in your spliffs. Cannabis is absolutely fine to be smoked in coffee shops of course, its tobacco that they view as the danger. This means that tobacco knocks methampthetamine off the number 3 spot from the UK chart, meaning that alcohol is seen as a more dangerous substance than Ice in the Netherlands.
This study was reported widely in the UK press and was seen as a huge embarrassment for the government of the time, which was taking the usual “we’ll get tough on illegal drugs” approach which has been the standard of most governments for the last 50 years.
This wasn’t actually the piece that got him the sack however, that came with an even more controversial paper he composed (available here: Equasy piece), which was more of a tongue-in-cheek thought piece than a piece of rigorous scientific research. In this particular paper he introduced a new drug known as “Equasy”, which kills roughly 10 people per year and is responsible for a large number of cases of paralysis and permanent brain damage, as well as over 100 road traffic accidents. This drug, according to his figures, causes serious harm 30 times more often than taking ecstasy. (He wrote this piece at a time when he was pushing the government to downgrade ecstasy from a class A to class B drug). He then revealed Equasy to be horse riding. Apparently when getting on a horse and going for a ride you are 30 times more likely to be seriously injured than if you were taking ecstasy.
Essentially the paper was a conceptual piece trying to get the public to take into context the dangers that these criminalised substances entail when compared to a number of other much more legal past times. Although Horses terrify me (I feel they are incredibly powerful and wildly unpredictable creatures), I do have a hang gliding license. So I have ran off the side of more than a few mountains and clifftops with nothing more than a fancily erected tent keeping me in the air. Even though during my training my instructors gleefully told of high level hang gliding pilots they’ve known who have plowed themselves into hillsides and died, at no point did I question whether this activity should be legal. And there is certainly no public disagreement on this. The point he was trying to make is that why do we allow people to go hangliding, horse riding, boxing, skydiving, surfing, downhill mountain biking, and any number of past times which have serious injury and death as a very real side effect? And yet feel the need to imprison people simply for possessing a small, personal amount of a drug which statistically speaking is actually safer than a great deal of other activities which are seen as wholesome and respectable.
The public and newspapers failed to see the irony however. This caused serious uproar in the British tabloids at the time, lots of front page headlines along the likes of “UK GOVERNMENT CHIEF DRUG ADVISOR CLAIMS ECSTASY SAFER THAN RIDING A HORSE!” Along with a handful of cherry picked lines taken out of context, creating a massive public outcry for him to be sacked from his position, which promptly happened.
This isn’t to say that he was discredited. No other scientists claimed that he was wrong about these points or challenged his credentials. Even today, now in his 70s, he is still one of the worlds most respected scientists in the field of Neuropsychopharmacology. When he was sacked a number of the other scientists from the ACMD resigned in protest at Davids treatment and they formed their own independent company called “drug science”, which has been a leading advocate for the reclassification, decriminalisation, and further research into a range of drugs for the past 10 years.
Again, if you were under the impression that drug laws were devised by governments through careful, rigorous scientific research into the risks and harms of each substance, then again you are sorely mistaken. In fact, it seems that the few scientists that governments do have advising them on such matters are so exasperated by the unwillingness of governments to listen to the very research that they have been tasked to provide, that they are willing to throw away prestigious appointments in order to try to educate the public on issues that they see as unjust.
I think a lot of the public perception of danger comes from something I encounter in rope access all the time, a fear of the the unknown, and equating their own fear with danger.
This is pretty much the most common conversation I used to have with the public, or other tradies on construction sites, when they see me standing at the bottom of a 65 story building untangling all my various tools and buckets from my harness and sets of ropes leading to the top of the building towering above me:
Them: “Jesus! You must get some pretty good danger money for doing that job??”
Me: “Actually its a remarkably safe industry, its not really dangerous at all.”
Them: *blank stare*… “But… Its REALLY high!"
Me: "Yeah its high up, but statistically as an industry its considerably safer than a lot of construction trades. Very few people get hurt or die doing it.”
Them: "But…That building must be 50 stories tall!”
Me: “Its 65 stories, but you’re not going to be any less dead falling off the roof of a 3 story building than from 65. The trick is not falling. More people die falling off A-frame ladders than they do abseiling.”
People just can’t seem to compute this. Generally because most people are scared shitless of heights and could never imagine themselves hanging in a harness 150m above a busy inner city street they assume its incredibly dangerous. If I really want to spin people out then I put in the line:
“The most dangerous part of my job is driving to work.” This will always draw a very confused look. “I drive for over an hour each way through rush hour traffic, often in the dark and the rain, along with a million other people who are tired, late, hungover, drunk, high and on their phones. Its absolute carnage out there. I’ve had way more near misses travelling along the freeway at 100kmh and someone has cut into my lane than I ever have hanging 50 stories from a building." If you were to transport someone from 150 years ago to today and put them in the passenger seat of a reasonably aggressive driver and get them to drive through heavy traffic they would think we are all a bunch of fucking lunatics; whizzing along at 100kmh in our 2 tonne metal ball of death, with hundreds of other metal balls of death whizzing past next to us with nothing more than a line of white paint separating them. And we strap our young kids into these things??
The only reason we don’t all think like this is because we are so accustomed to driving around in cars. Our parents strapped us into them since we were babies, and their parents the same, but that doesn’t stop it being a dangerous activity which kills thousands of people every year. The most dangerous activity that many people do, probably in their whole lives, is drive themselves to work.
In much the same way, people (and politicians) are reasonably oblivious to the damage and danger of alcohol and tobacco (despite the thousands of people that are killed by them every year) because they are substances that they have grown up around, and likely do themselves. Yet the world of illegal drugs seems arcane and dangerous because they have never come across it apart from sensationalist newspaper headlines terrifying people with the incredibly rare news of ecstasy deaths.
All that David Nutt was trying to do was to draw peoples attention to this completely skewed sense of danger that we have of drugs when compared to other activities in society. It’s an interesting part of human psychology, the fear of the unknown.
Anyway, the long and the short of all this is that if you possibly have cancer, or are concerned about the toxic load and damage that a substance might be doing to your body, then going out and getting drunk is not too much better for you than smoking crack.
Then on the other end of the drug harm scale we see magic mushrooms, Buprenorphine (I have no idea what this is), and LSD. Seeing as they came in with the lowest score, magic mushrooms seemed a good place to start.
Magic mushrooms are incredibly prevalent in Australia, more so than in the UK believe it or not, despite the cold and damp climate of the UK. There are a number of different species grow in Australia as a whole (its a very big place with a lot of climatic zones), although down in Victoria the dominant variety is Psilocybe subaeruginosa, or subs. Subs differ from liberty caps (the only magic mushroom native to the UK) in that they grow on wood, whereas liberty caps seem to need a specific kind of “old, clumpy” grass which hasn’t been disturbed in many (often hundreds) of years. Subs are potentially able to grow anywhere that bark mulch has been put down; parks, schools, supermarkets, outside police stations, pretty much anywhere that is heavily bark mulched could possibly be harvesting subs when the conditions are right. Not to mention that much bigger patches can be found in woodland areas as well. And because they grow on bark/ wood, as soon as they pop up you can see them quite clearly rising above the largely flat bark, unlike liberty caps which tend to hide themselves inside clumps of grass. This means that magic mushrooms are quite easy to get hold of in Australia, and as luck would have it the group of campers camped next to us had a large bag of magic mushrooms with them.
So on the Friday night, just after it got dark, we ate a small handful of magic mushrooms each. Subs are almost twice the strength of liberty caps gram for gram, so if coming from the UK you need to be careful with the dose here (a mistake I’ve definitely made before). We danced at the Ascension stage until we felt the mushrooms starting. Mushrooms can make you a little body heavy and uncomfortable in the stomach while they take effect, so we went over to couch gardens to have a sit down for a bit. It’s good having the couch gardens there to sit down on an actual comfortable seat, and there’s so many couches that there always seemed to be several free to choose from. Couch gardens was lit up a lot less vibrantly than the rest of the festival around it, not to say that it was dark there, but no flashing neon lights or UV paint in here, just simple lighting and plain backdrops. Which I’m sure is by design so that trippers who are peaking a bit too hard can come and crash and aren’t going to be overly stimulated. Couch gardens is a bit of a maze in itself and the couch we chose was down towards one of the dead ends. Much to our amusement several groups of people walked all the way past us, realised there was no way out, then doubled back with a comment of “How the hell do I get out of this place??” Or something similar. Once our stomachs felt settled and we were happy with the level of moving and breathing ground in couch gardens, we ventured back out into the rest of the festival.
Even though we had spent the best part of two days cruising around this place during the day and night before, and its not really a huge place in any case, but once you added several thousand people and hallucinogenic drugs into the mix it became strangely disorienting walking around. We frequently lost our bearings and had to stand in the middle of tracks looking in each direction and really thinking about where things were. We spent the first 2 or 3 hours of the trip, most of it really, wandering up and down and looking at the sights. I don’t think we danced once for about 3 hours. As I said before, this place looks reasonably impressive during the day, but at night it is lit up with UV lights everywhere and you realise that all of the artworks are painted with UV paints. It’s a complete sensory overload walking through this place at night with all the sound systems running, especially after taking mushrooms which enhance all the bright colours. Although I took a few photos, I don’t feel like any of them do the place justice, you can’t really make out how vivid and luminous everything looked:
And this is a bit of video footage I took walking along the side of the Sun temple and up the spine of the festival towards the bush techno stage. Again its hard to make out just how bright and vivid it all looks in person. The UV light globes themselves look pretty overpowering on this footage, but you barely notice them when you're there:
And this second bit of footage walking into the Bush techno stage:
We spent a good few hours walking around just looking and laughing at stuff, walking out to chill island, and back up to Moby dicks. It wasn’t until we started coming back down that we actually ventured back into the main dance floors. And if the lights on the artwork were impressive, then the stages themselves were even more so.
Bush techno stage:
Ascension stage - lighting and projections were much more hectic and frantic here, to match the music:
And this one a bit closer in to try to get the projections on the stage. The projections looked a lot better further back, but the phone wouldn't really pick it up because of the other lights:
The real highlight visually however was the sun temple stage. I’ve never seen a stage quite as impressive as this in the nighttime (apart from maybe the pyrotechnic madness of Arcadia). Incredible projections on this one, the hours and hours that must have ben spent programming them all, as it wasn’t the same few patterns repeating themselves. It’s worth remembering that this is the size of a 4 story building and isn’t built in some purpose built showgrounds or stadium in the middle of the city where logistics are easy, this is 3 hours into the bush. Outstanding production values:
After we had kind of come down from the mushrooms we ate another couple of weed cookies and spent the next few hours dancing and admiring the stages, and then catching a great band in the hammock temple before heading back to chill island and laying down in the light temple for an hour or so, eventually heading off to bed at around 3am.
The next day we felt pretty revitalised from our mushroom trip the night before. This is a point I would probably make to people who may doubt the placing of alcohols high ranking on the “drug harm” chart posted above. My piece of evidence; The hangover. Other than the small handful of times I’ve given myself food poisoning, or had a really bad flu, easily the 20 or 30, or maybe 40 worst times I’ve ever had in my life, have been spent laying curled around a toilet bowl the morning after drinking heavily the night before. To be fair, I feel like I am much more adversely affected than a lot of people. I have a few friends who claim they never get hangovers, I don’t understand these people at all. It used to be an ongoing joke between Andrea and myself actually back in the days when we drank more. During the night out she would be the one rolling around the place, way more drunk than I was, and I would be the one guiding her home. But then the next day it would be me dry wrenching into the toilet for 4 hours. This seemed most unfair. It wasn’t every time, a lot of the time I could go out and drink a fair bit and not be too adversely affected, maybe a slight headache, tiredness and and a hankering for greasy fried breakfasts. But on those times where it affected me badly, they were truly the worst I have ever felt in my life. Such a rotten and disgusting feeling. Clearly my body at least views alcohol as some vile poison that must be purged from my system the morning after taking it. I don’t want to seem like I’m “anti-alcohol” in this post here, I like a nice refreshing pint (or schooner?? Whatever the fuck that is?) of pale ale after a hard days work as much as the next person, but I certainly don’t think there is any moral or health related high ground to be taking over anyone who enjoys a different poison to get their kicks, and certainly the morning after effects of ingesting alcohol are the worst of any substance out there.
Taking hallucinogenics on the contrary has the curious affect that you often feel better than you did before taking them. You feel strangely revitalised and refreshed from the experience, like you’ve been on some epic quest and learnt a great deal about yourself. You feel reflective and pensive about what you went through the night before. You may feel pretty tired if you’ve stayed up late into the night, or all night, but there’s certainly no vomiting into toilet bowls involved.
We ate a decent breakfast/ lunch then went back into the festival. We ended up back at the Hammock temple (or maybe the hammock fractal, I can’t remember which was which) for a crystal bowl sound healing. This was put on by a lady 'Alexis Star', whom we met whilst waiting for our non existent massage the morning before. She was half of the second couple who arrived shortly after us. She was working doing a couple of different things at the festival, one of which was this crystal bowl sound healing, which also involved some kind of Cacao ritual. It was a nice relaxing way to start the day, although it would have been way more relaxing if the snakepit stage wasn’t 40m away. Its pretty hard to concentrate on the delicate chinking and chiming of crystal bowls and gongs when you’ve got a 30kw rig pounding out drum and bass just behind you. Considering how compact this site is and how many stages they’ve got there its set up pretty well that you don’t get much sound interference in most venues. Apart from these two spaces which are supposed to be relaxation places, but are only a few metres away from a stage playing drum and bass. I’m not sure how else they could arrange it to block the sound anymore, but it does feel like it defeats the purpose of these spaces. They would almost be better off over at chill island, but then these are great spaces to stumble across some good bands and live stuff in the nights, which wouldn’t happen if they were way over at chill island. Maybe they just need one of them here doing more live performances and bands and one over at chill island doing meditations, yoga and sound healings.
When first looking at the programs we had high aspirations of doing yoga every morning, and brought our yoga matts along with us. There’s certainly a lot of yoga happening here, but we didn’t actually go to any of it in the end. This crystal sound healing was the only relaxation thing we did the entire festival, other than the lectures.
The daytimes were generally pretty chilled at Esoteric. I’m sure we danced a fair bit at both the sun temple and ascension stage during the day, but also ate a lot of good healthy food and recharged. We perused the shopping stalls, and brought ourselves a couple of items of psy/ bush doof clothing each. We lay on the grass at moby dicks and generally took things easy.
At some point during the day however someone offered us some LSD. They had it as tabs so we didn’t need to take it there and then, and seeing as it was pretty much the next least harmful drug on the drug harm scale we took them up on the offer and purchased a couple of tabs.
I’d just like to point out at this juncture, that although I am referring to magic mushrooms and LSD as the “least harmful” drugs, which physically and in terms of addiction potential they almost certainly are, these are still incredibly powerful substances, and are not for everyone. I’m not advocating that everyone start taking LSD instead of drinking, as people with past trauma and mental health issues can be affected very badly by psychedelics. (Although psychedelics have shown very promising therapeutic use in curing alcoholism and helping people come to terms with past trauma, this almost certainly has to be done in a controlled clinical setting. This was the way a lot of hallucinogenic research was going in the 1960s before it was outlawed because people were having too much of a good time on them. Much like we are only just now finding out about the medicinal uses of cannabis, the next wave of discovery will almost certainly come in the form of psychedelics, once society gets used to the idea). But for those who aren’t battling some internal demons, I feel there is a monumental amount of positivity to be gained from these substances. It reminds me of a drunken conversation I had with an irishman in a backpackers many years ago. We got onto the topic of hallucinogenics, and as he was drunkenly staggering around the backpackers kitchen, with a whiskey in his hand, he slurred the following phrase in his thick Irish accent: “A life without hallucinogenics, is like a life without ever making love.” It seemed oddly profound in that backpackers kitchen at 3 in the morning. Its a phrase that has stayed with me ever since, and one I whole heartedly agree with. Personally I think the same goes for ecstasy too. I couldn’t imagine going through my life without having experienced the joy and the exhilaration of these substances, and the experiences and escapades that they bring. Like my man says, try to imagine life without making love, that’s what you’d be missing out on.
So in any case, we procured some LSD, chilled out for the afternoon, then went for another nap back at the camper in the late afternoon. Now, the thing with LSD, is that it is incredibly long lasting, its a real commitment. It take 1-2 hours to take effect, and can then last for up to 8-10 hours. Whilst Saturday night was the only night that music continued the whole way through the night, we didn’t particularly want to be up all night and trying to get to sleep in the day the next day. Although the temperatures were significantly cooler this year than previous years (last year there were days of 40C, this year it was mid to high 20s) it is never fun trying to get to sleep in a tent (or camper trailer) when its light and hot outside. So my plan was to take the acid around 6-6:30pm. That way we might get to enjoy the sunset on it as well as being able to get to sleep at a reasonable time whilst it was still dark. Trouble is our afternoon nap lasted until 5:45. We got up, had a bite to eat, and considered what we wanted to do. We really didn’t feel motivated for a full acid trip having just woken up and were debating putting it off until tomorrow, but Saturday night was the main night of the doof. After much deliberation, and not entirely on board with it, we took the LSD at around 6:15pm.
For those not familiar with hallucinogenics, the whole concept of “set and setting” is very important. If you drink a load of alcohol, you will get drunk, if you take ecstasy, you will come up and get high, the effects will generally be the same whenever and wherever you do it. But for hallucinogenics, how you feel going into it (the set), and the atmosphere you are in (the setting) play a very important part of how the trip will go. Whilst the setting (esoteric) couldn’t have been any more ideal, we definitely didn’t feel a huge enthusiasm going into it (the set).
We slowly made our way back to ascension and danced for a bit, until we first felt the tingling of the acid, by which point the sun was getting pretty low in the sky so we took a walk out to chill island to watch the sunset as we hadn’t watched the sunset out there yet. By the time we got there it was bit of a strange feeling, nothing visual, but a great sense of contentment and slight elation, tingling in the stomach. It felt a lot more like the early stages of ecstasy than any acid I’d had before. Looking back on it this was a sign of things to come. We found a bench and watched the sun set along with 100 or so other people. I took this video, the last video I managed to take until the trip was nearly over. You can see the massage area as I turn around with white curtains flowing in the wind and two people giving a massage on the edge of the salt flat:
Much like Boom festival, once the sun sets here it gets cold pretty quick and you need to rethink the clothes you are wearing, so we started the walk back to our camper. By now the visuals of the LSD were just starting, things looked much brighter and more vivid and were starting to move and shimmer, but there was still an unusually powerful sense of uplift and Euphoria. Its only around a 10 minutes walk back from chill island to our camper, but we were highly distracted for an extra 10 minutes marvelling at a tree which had around 20-30 large dragon flies flying all around it, they looked great shimmering against the beautiful sunset sky, almost like they were gliding through some glowing orange water, creating trails and ripples behind them as they went. By the time we got back to our camper the acid was astonishingly strong, and just the simple act of changing clothes was proving to be quite a tricky operation. This was the cause of much hilarity between us, and we were falling about laughing at how difficult this pretty mundane act had become, making it even more of a challenge.
By the time we were dressed and ready for the night the sun had well and truly set, but left that fantastic rainbow glow in the sky that you get in the flat plains of outback Australia. Easily the best 10 sunsets and sunrises that I have seen in my life have been in the outback. The rainbow affect you get in the sky from a deep orange at the horizon, through a complete range of colours to the deep purple of the sky is out of this world. Those skies always remind me of my time working in the mining industry in Western Australia when I first came to Australia as a backpacker over 10 years ago. I was often left agape by the beauty of the skies at remote mine sites in the Pilbara and Goldfields. Whenever I would comment how beautiful it was to the local miners who had worked there most of their working lives, I was often met with bemused looks and comments along the lines of “What you on about mate, this place is hell on earth, a scorched wasteland that only the flies seem to be able to thrive in”, which of course it is, but there’s a definite alluring beauty to the mornings and evenings in the outback. This was the last photo I took on the Saturday night, as we were walking back into the Doof:
By this point this was already pretty much the strongest acid we had ever taken, not just in terms of the visuals, but it had this overpowering euphoria to it, more euphoric and uplifting than pretty much any ecstasy I’ve taken. It almost took our breaths aware, it literally became hard to breath at points from the rushes of pleasure, something I’ve only really experienced with ecstasy. I’ve never had LSD like it, especially from how we were feeling going into it; tired and groggy and not particularly motivated for a long night ahead. It completely took us off guard, and it wasn’t even at its peak yet. Perhaps it was just very strong acid, but I feel there was something else at play here. Perhaps we just needed some kind of release of tension after the last few months of strong emotions? Perhaps it had been building up even longer than that and was us finally being able to let go in this way? After the trip I tried to remember the last time we took acid, which turned out to be at a small psytrance rave an hour or so out of Berlin on the same van journey when we went to Boom festival and Christiania, over 8 years ago. So I guess it had been a long time since we had taken it, although this was stronger than even the first time I ever took it, and definitely a much more overwhelmingly positive feeling, it was exquisite, sublime. It was almost as if this was a different drug to the one I’d been sold as LSD all those other times. Everything looked amazing, everything felt amazing, life was just amazing at this point as we walked back into that festival.
The closest structure to our campsite that we walk past when entering the doof is not one I’ve mentioned yet; the art gallery. This is where we rolled into first.
There is a large, sprawling art gallery at Esoteric. It is open air with shade sails over the top, with lots of walls and open spaces with different areas devoted to different artists or different types of art. This again was a bit of a maze, with maybe 8 or 10 different rooms/ areas constructed in a kind of big circle and 3 entrances at various sides of it. All of the art is very colourful and detailed, and perfect for ogling at when highly tripping on acid. We spent a bit of time in here the night before on mushrooms, but it didn’t look anything like as lively as when we went in there on Saturday evening. The art gallery is a pretty entertaining place at night, plenty of trippers enjoying the colourful visuals of the psychedelic artwork. It isn’t just a visual gallery either, you can buy everything in there, and certain artists have whole stalls of paintings, canvas prints, posters, fridge magnets, backdrops and other such items that you can buy and take home. Here are some photos of the art gallery and art inside. These first few are the different entrances into the art gallery:
But there was one piece that stood out to us more than any of the others. It wasn’t the most multicoloured or dazzling piece, but something about it just stood out to us more than anything else. We weren’t the only ones either, this regularly seemed to draw a cluster of people around it, gazing admiringly at it. We had a number of conversations about it with people around us and although we went around the whole gallery 2 or 3 times, we seemed to keep gravitating back to this one:
This piece just seemed to be alive. The orange/red colouring behind the clouds to the right seemed to glow and shimmer as if actually on fire behind it. The darker clouds to the left seemed to spin clockwise and move like some kind of tempest, the hands in the centre looked to press out of the painting towards you, and the three moons seemed to gyrate and orbit around each other. As I said it wasn’t as vibrant or psychedelic as some of the others, but this one captivated us the most.
When we originally made the decision to sell our glamping ticket, we did so with the proviso that we would spend the money we got back for the glamping on a piece of art work from the gallery as a wedding present to ourselves. The above piece is the one we came home with. I’d like to say that we plucked it off the wall there and then, brought it and disappeared into the night, heavily tripping, with it tucked under our arm. Although this would have made for a good story, it almost certainly would not have made its way back to our house. We came back the next day in a more sober state of mind and looked all through the art gallery again, but decided that we still liked this one the best, and brought it then. It was a pretty fortuitous time to be purchasing it actually as it just so happened that the lady who painted it (Tennessee) happened to be on the till in the art gallery that afternoon, so we got the rundown on the story behind it.
Tennessee started on this painting at exactly this time last year, at the last Esoteric. She set up her easel at the Ascension stage and began painting. The copy we brought was not the original, it is a canvas print. The original was 2m x 1m, so very large. The one we came home with is 1m x 500mm, making it a quarter of the size of the original but still pretty big. She rolled it up and took it everywhere she went for a year, painting it as she travelled. It went to festivals in Croatia, over to France (she is French, but lives in Melbourne) and a few other places and eventually back to Australia. The original was sold to an American. She only finished it just before Esoteric this year, so it took an entire year to complete.
The piece is inspired by the small little figure in the painting to the right of the belly dancer and left of the ruined city near the canyon. This figure is her ex of several years, who was an inspiration and encouragement behind a lot of her art work. She painted this after they broke up and it symbolises her world falling apart and turning to dust, and her eventually coming through the other side. Each bit of the painting represented a different emotion she was going through at the time. The crack in the ground she painted in the early stages when her heart was broken, the hands in the sky was later on when she was trying to let go and push those memories away, and the lighter blue sky and the rays of light coming through the clouds are the light at the end of the tunnel and symbolise her finally getting over it. She said she uses her art as a therapy and painting this helped her get through that tough time. I find it quite synchronicitous and ironic that we should stumble in here high on acid on our honeymoon, celebrating our wedding, and find ourselves so drawn to an art piece produced around a very painful breakup. “From every ending comes a new beginning”, or so they say. Despite the pain she was going through Tennessee has made a beautiful piece of art around it, and we couldn’t be happier with our choice in buying it. It sits proudly on our wall at home, a beautiful memory of our honeymoon, and also of the epic trip we were on.
For those who are interested, Tennessee goes under the artist name “visionary art by messiah”. Her website is here: https://www.visionaryartbymessiah.com/ Check it out, she’s got some awesome art work.
Anyway, after losing ourselves for the best part of an hour in the art gallery, we ventured out into the rest of the festival. By this point the LSD was well and truly at its peak. I guess concentrating on the art we hadn’t really noticed it getting any stronger, but now attempting to navigate the art/ sculpture walk up through the centre of the festival it felt like we were clinging onto each other for dear life. We both had ear to ear grins and eyes as wide as saucers trying to take it all in. Esoteric festival literally doubles in size from the Friday to the Saturday as I guess a lot of people still work on the Friday. This is a public holiday holiday weekend, Monday is a day off for most people so turning up on the Saturday you still get 3 solid days of party. The music doesn’t stop until midnight Monday night, so I gather that a lot of people work the full week leading up to it. This meant it was significantly more hectic walking through there tonight, and we were way, way more fucked up. We walked the length of the festival and ended at the far end of ascension stage and sat down in the dirt at the back, couldn’t even be bothered to find a seat, just plonked ourselves in the dirt at the back near the sound engineers tent. At this point it was almost a little too intense to handle and I needed to regroup for 20 minutes on the ground before I could go back in there. We sat on the ground watching the Ascension stage from afar, coming to terms with it all. Its actually a decent view of the festival you get from back here. You can see the lights rippling through the trees to the left at the Bush techno stage, like a rainbow coloured rainfall through the trees, and also all the way out to chill island on the right, with the light temple glowing softly in the distance. Plus the madness and pounding music of the Ascension stage straight in front. We sat here for 20 minutes composing ourselves and getting used to the intensity.
It was during this 20 minute contemplation that I came to a realisation. I don’t say this next phrase flippantly or lightly, as I feel I’ve experienced a hell of a lot in my 40 odd years on this planet, but sitting here watching the chaos of the ascension stage and taking in the rest of the festival, having just walked our way through it, it came to me that; this is the most incredible thing I have ever experienced in my life. That Saturday night at Esoteric, with the colours and the lights and the art and the sublime sunset and the projection mapping on the stages, all whilst under the influence of that exceptionally strong LSD, was the most incredible, spectacular and astounding experience of my life. It really took my breath away. It was complete sensory overload, but in an amazingly positive way. Not just for me, we were both in awe of what was taking place in front of us, we could barely articulate it to each other at the time, but we both feel like we went through something pretty extraordinary at Esoteric.
After the 20 minutes of sitting in the dirt and coming to this realisation we felt we were wasting a good time sitting down here, and eventually pulled ourselves up and got back on the dance floor at the ascension stage. Dancing came much easier than it did the night before on the mushrooms. We danced at ascension for a while then ventured back into the psychedelic art maze. We took our time through here and stopped to marvel and have the occasional laugh at each piece. There’s a rather weird display which has the vibe of an ancient burial ground, with a load of bones and animal skins hung up around the place. You can walk all the way through it in a circle and there’s these weird tribal noises playing from speakers throughout it. We found it quite amusing the first time we walked through it the night before, but as high as we were this was a definite no-no, and we hurried straight past. The next art install however was the giant day-go snail, which was much more to our tastes in this current state. We were having a good laugh at the day-go snail when we got engaged in a conversation with someone clearly as high as we were who echoed our sentiment on the weird and wonderful art installations. One of the things he said before he left us was “how could they do this??” And it became a bit of a moto for us for the rest of the night. “How could they do this??” How could they put all this crazy artwork here, and create this incredible festival.
Eventually we made our way back to the sun temple. The sun temple was pretty impressive the night before, but my god, tonight it just looked jaw dropping. I’ve never seen projection mapping and visuals used so well on a stage. I’m just going to post a couple more of these videos, as it just blows me away every time. For those of you who have experienced a strong LSD trip before, just try to imagine what it was like seeing this live whilst tripping on acid:
We would have spent a good 2 or 3 hours at the Sun Temple going into the night. At one point someone came up to us in the middle of the dancefloor and said “you know, you two have just got the biggest smiles on your faces, and I absolutely love it. You just look like you’re having the best time.” Which of course we were. It was nice to have someone reaffirm that for us though. That sun temple really is a sight to behold, its a fantastic setup, as well as an epic vibe in there. From the Saturday morning onwards it always seemed to be packed with around 2000 people.
We had a good dance, but eventually journeyed out and walked over to chill island to catch our breath. This was the first point that I noticed the acid dissipate slightly as we were laying down on one of the now destroyed massage tables which had its soft top laying on ground beside it. They always looked pretty flimsy and I guess one finally gave way. We were watching the lasers up in the trees and it finally seemed that the LSD was subsiding. Not that this was a welcome sight, we had an incredible time, but this was the first instance that I noticed it was less intense than before. It was nice catching a breather however. Im glad that chill island is there so you can go and escape completely if you need to. Chill island is another area I’d quite like to see expanded. It would be good to get another area you can lay down in like the light temple. And maybe some more lighting/ projections to look at, as it feels a little bare over there at night.
One of the best chill out spaces I’ve come across at a festival was that of the InSpiral (previously ID spiral) chill out area at Glade festival back in the UK. The Glade stage is an area of Glastonbury festival, but they broke off and started their own dance music orientated festival in the mid 2000s. It was the highlight of dance music festivals around the mid 2000s, it wasnt the biggest, but it was generally seen as the best. Their chill out area was put on by a group called InSpiral. The most effective part of it was quite a simple concept really. They had a number of tall, irregularly shaped pillars scattered around the central space which were made by stretching white sheets around a metal frame, and then inside the frame they had a series of colour changing lights set up which were programmed along with the others to go off in sync. They also had a number of other sheets stretched out with projectors playing on them. I’ve done a bit of YouTube trawling as I wanted to see some old footage of it, but found even better than that. This is a 20 minute documentary taken at Glade 2009 with the guy who set up InSpiral talking about their ethos and space. Personally I found it interesting as I was there at this event, and the 2 or 3 prior to it, but other people might not find it as interesting so to get an idea of the white columned lights and projections I am talking about you can skip to 11:30 mins in.
Pretty simple, but it worked very well and it was a great space to walk into under the influence of hallucinogenics. Its worth noting that they’ve used mainly lights inside these things as projectors back then were much larger, more expensive and nowhere near as capable as they are now. Im sure with Esoterics projector based wizardry they could have a similar thing set up but with really detailed and synchronised projections playing up the inside of each one. It would look pretty good over at chill island anyway, soft glowing coloured art installs kind of throbbing with colour and projections along with the chilled soundtrack. Just a thought anyway, I feel they could do with another light based artwork at nighttime. The lasers set up through the trees look nice, but there’s definitely room for some more night time eye candy up there.
Although Glade festival and InSpiral are no more on the festival scene these days, I might take a little while out now to talk about a few UK festivals which may be of interest to your average Australia bush doofer who may be heading over there at some stage. We don’t really have bush doofs in the same way you do here, we don’t have the land and the space to put parties on in the wilderness like you can here. You can’t really travel for 3 hours anywhere without passing through 10 medium sized cities. Whatever large areas of natural woodland or wilderness we have left are usually protected because we’ve cut so much of it down and built on the rest of it. There’s a thriving illegal rave scene which will play some pretty heavy Hardtrance/ techno/ psytrance and they are usually held in the kind of spaces you might put a bush doof in, but because these are usually thrown up as quickly as possible to get the music on before the riot police find them, there isn’t really any time or effort put into the art and decor like you can here in Australia.
Also Psytance is a very marginal scene in the UK. In continental Europe you have large festivals such as Boom, Ozora, Psy-fi and Hadra where it is the focus. These kinds of festivals don’t really exist in the UK. There are a lot of fantastic music festivals however, and a lot of alternative dance music festivals. In my opinion the best thing that the UK has going for it is its festival and music scene. There’s an incredible array of events happen in that small island in the summer months, with something to cater to everyones tastes. Whilst I don’t exactly have my finger on the pulse of that scene any more, I believe the closest thing you are going to find to a high production level, large scale bush doof like Esoteric would be the festivals Noisily and Illusive, closely followed by Tearout, as it is a little smaller than the other two. All of these have a fairly large psy lineup, although its certainly not the central focus like it might be here. Drum and bass/ jungle/ breakbeat, and even hard trance and acid tekno are bigger than psytrance over there. Here are the most recent after movies I could find of Noisily, illusive and Tearout if anyone is interested. Illusive looks to have a really decent psy line up for 2023:
Tearouts movie doesnt seem to be on youtube, I can only find it on facebook and cant download the video, the link is below:
Personally I haven’t been to either of these events. They have evolved after I left the UK, but they seem to be the closest kind of experience. They are a nice size as well, that 5000-10,000 people range for a festival is about perfect if you ask me. Its large enough that there’s a substantial budget to be spent on artwork and stages, but not so big that you’re constantly fighting with the crowds to get from one stage to another and can’t get anywhere near the front of stages. Another one I would highly recommend which I have been to is Beatherder. This is a great festival, its a bit further up north towards Manchester and Leeds. You’re unlikely to encounter any psytrance there at all (definitely some house/ techno/ trance however), but the vibe of the place is top notch. It’s actually reasonably family friendly as well this one:
The other one worth mentioning is boomtown fair. This has turned into a bit of a monster, close to 80,000 people now, which would put it as the biggest dance music festival in the UK, if not in all of Europe. Personally I don’t really like battling with that many people. Boomtown fair has a dedicate psytrance stage in a nice patch of woodland, but again it is a minor stage and not the focus of the festival. Here is boomtowns after movie:
One of the central stages of Boomtown fair, and also of the later Glade festivals is also worth a mention as it is kind of its own entity now, and that is Arcadia. Originally starting as a stage at Glastonbury festival, and eventually taking over an entire field at Glastonbury with their pyrotechnic madness, they became a central point of both Glade festival and Boomtown fair, but in more recent pre-covid years they have taken their giant pyrotechnic spider on a worldwide tour and hosted a variety of one or two day events in parks in the centres of major cities. Its been to Bristol, London, Seoul, Miami, Bangkok, Taipei and Perth. Its an incredible spectacle, has to be seen to be believed. Looks like a bushfire disaster waiting to happen for sure, but next time they do a world tour if anybody from Esoteric or any other bush doof crew wanted to plonk this is the middle of flagstaff gardens or the botanic gardens for a night of techno, psytrance and drum and bass then I’m sure it would go down really well. Its made from old recycled military and industrial equipment like gantry cranes and jet engines, and uses a recycled biofuel for its flame throwers. The stage is a bit unusual in that you can dance right underneath it and all around it, so the soundsystem tends to be a surround sound affair, with speakers mounted around the legs and underneath it pointing outwards, but also speakers further out pointing in towards the main spider structure. They’ve got heaps of videos on their YouTube and webpage, particularly the ones from Glastonbury are worth checking out as that’s where they tend to push the boundaries and try new things. Even if you're not considering going to a UK festival any time soon this is worth seeing as its a mightily impressive feat of engineering. This set of clips is from their last world tour:
I’ve mentioned Glastonbury festival a number of times in this blog, but won’t start talking too much about it here as I’m sure I could write another similar sized blog on Glastonbury on its own if I got going. I would recommend that absolutely everyone make the effort to check out Glastonbury at least once however. Its quite unlike anything else you’ll ever go to. Saying that Boomtown is a bit too big at 80,000, Glastonbury pushes 220,000 these days. It’s incredibly busy and hectic, but I feel its worth the crowds. It’s the largest Greenfield festival in the world. I remember a news paper headline a few years back proclaiming “Glastonbury festival now bigger than Norwich!” Which I found a little amusing as its the city nearest to where I grew up. But yeah its the size of a medium sized city. (Ballarat is 110,000 for comparison, so roughly twice as many people as live in Ballarat go to Glastonbury festival). I’d always been put off Glastonbury and seen it as some big commercial festival with only big name bands, as it gets days worth of coverage on mainstream TV channels over in the UK, but they only ever cover the headline acts on the main stages. What I wasn’t entirely aware of until I went was that there’s this entire section of it in the bottom corner which is a whole city of underground dance stages and venues, with a shit tonne of crazy art work and sculptures, rather euphemistically referred to as “the naughty corner”. There must be 30-40 sound systems and stages set up in this area alone, some of them incredibly elaborate, and it only covers roughly 10% of the festival site. I’m sure that your average bush doofer could go to Glastonbury and spend the entire week just in the naughty corner and not leave disappointed in the slightest. It’s a wild place. Its a little interesting that this area originally started up because back in the days of acid house/ enormous illegal raves in the late 80s/ early 90s, the illegal ravers would set up their own “fuck you Glastonbury party” just outside the perimeter fence playing techno for duration of the festival. Rather than have all these people removed, Michael Eavis (the land owner and founder of Glastonbury) approached them and instead offered them a large budget to join the festival and put on their own party in the bottom corner, and he simply expanded the perimeter fence to include it in future years. So the naughty corner was born from the 90s illegal rave scene and evolved from there. But that’s the last I'm going to say about it. If you’re only ever going to go to one UK festival, I’d make it Glastonbury, it’s one of a kind.
Weirdly I couldn't find a nice concise aftermovie from Glastonbury. Theres loads of videos on YouTube about it, but they are all ones that people have made themselves, I couldn't find an offical one from the organisers. If you want to learn more about Glastonbury theres more information than you could possibly read on the Internet about it.
As I’m talking about UK dance parties I couldn’t really leave it without mentioning the parties that got me into the whole dance music scene in the first place; Free parties, or illegal raves. I grew up in one of the most rural parts of the UK. There certainly weren’t any decent alternative dance clubs around, you were lucky if your village had a pub in it, so illegal raves became pretty big for us in the small towns and villages of Norfolk and Suffolk.
These were very much a “DIY” affair, with hand built soundsystems and tens to hundreds of people chipping in communally with the organisation of them. They weren’t massive parties, usually 5-700, with the biggest multi-day ones being about 1500, and the budgets for putting them on were next to nothing, but the raw, euphoric energy at these parties was unlike anything I've ever seen. The thing which very much made them unique was the style of dancing. It will definitely look odd to an outsider who has never experienced it. There used to be what people might know as a mosh from metal gigs, but along to a dance music soundtrack. It wasn’t anywhere near as chaotic or disjointed as a rock mosh, much more tightly packed and unified. As it was along to the distinctive beats of dance music the whole thing used to bounce and move as one entity, seemingly moving and spinning around with a mind of its own. It was intense. Its hard to describe the feeling of being in the middle of it to a tune you love, but its one of the greatest things I’ve ever been a part of. Kind of like having a really intense, physical workout like Thai boxing, but mixed with the euphoria of the most frenzied dance party you've ever seen. I was quite surprised when venturing out of that scene to find that literally nobody else did it, not even really other illegal rave scenes elsewhere in the UK (at least at that time, its a bit more common now), it just seemed to be our little corner of the country and our little parties that did it. Which is a real shame, as it is an awesome feeling getting in there and just letting go. I’m not really going to be able to describe it to someone who has never experienced it, so its going to be best to just post some video footage.
For those of you back in the UK that were there for these parties, I've got a real treat for you here. I was going to link to a couple of the usual youtube clips that have been floating around online for years with footage of these parties, theres not many of them out there. But I recorded several hours of footage myself at these events. This has sat on mini DV tapes for the last 18 years, in the too hard basket of getting it onto a computer because the tapes are so old its hard to find a set of equipment/ cables/ drivers to get it onto a modern day computer. To be honest this blog would have been finished 2 weeks before this if I hadn't convinced myself that I needed to access these tapes to put some fresh footage in this blog. It was quite an ordeal getting it on there but man it was worth it. I've got a bit carried away in this section, I initially was just planning on posting a couple of bits of footage and a short few paragraphs about it, but once I had all that footage to play with I kept expanding it and adding more. It might not all appeal to the Australians reading this as its not really relevant to your scene, but I know some of you from back the UK will get a real kick out of this.
You can tell it was a long time ago by the grainy quality of the video footage, even though I shot most of this footage on a hand held video camera which cost as much as a modern day smart phone, the footage is nowhere near as clear as the footage I took at Eso with a mobile phone 20 years later. Anyway, here’s a couple of videos of the mosh, or stack as we used to call it, at our illegal parties. This footage has an MC on it, which was pretty rare at raves, I'm not a huge fan of MCs on dance music, but sometimes it works well to hype the crowd up. Yes; it looks very hot, and sweaty, and smelly, and with a reasonable chance of personal injury. And yes it definitely is all of these things, but the feeling of being in there for it was extraordinary, quite unlike anything else. What I wouldn't give for a time machine to put myself in the middle of that stack:
I might just talk about how dance music evolved in the UK before posting these next videos as it took a bit of a different route to most countries. And certainly a very different route to Australia, which was a few years behind Europe in catching on to dance music. I'm by no means any kind of expert on Australia's dance scene, but it seems that it was largely brought over by British travellers and expats who had experienced the rave scene and acid house days in the late 80s and travelled down to Australia via Goa and Thailand, bringing influences from their music scenes also. It seems Dance music and underground raves didn't really start here until 1990-91, and were very small scale when it did compared to what was taking place in Europe.
Dance music started with house music in the mid 80s in Detroit and Chicago in the USA. This rapidly spread to the UK and Europe and 1987-89 saw colossal illegal raves all over the UK and Europe, but particularly around the outskirts of London where crowds could get to 40,000 people at a completely unlicensed and unadvertised rave. The music was generally a mix of acid house and piano house. Lots of vocals and pianos. As an example, Black box (who made the chart hit "ride on time", which I gather was pretty big in Australia also) were actually a huge name on the illegal rave scene. Ride on time was the biggest selling record in the UK in 1989 and was played heavily at the illegal raves of the time.
There were similar scenes in Italy, France, Belgium, Netherlands and Spain. Germany were a little late to the game as their dance music scene didn't really get going until the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989, but exploded incredibly rapidly after that. Generally through the years 87-90 the music was very similar everywhere, acid house, piano house, and the start of techno, houses slightly darker and heavier brother.
In 1990-91 however the Uk started to take a different route. Whilst everywhere else in Europe kept the 4 beat house/ techno sound and dropped the pianos and vocals, producers in the UK started using sped up hiphop beats in their productions, giving the UK a very distinctive breakbeat sound which didn't evolve anywhere else. This sound eventually went on to form the basis of Jungle, drum and bass and breakbeat, but before all of these genres existed the breakbeat sound coming out of the UK went under the name "Hardcore" (generally referred to now as "Oldskool Hardcore", or just "Oldskool"). Not to be confused with the trash that gets called happy hardcore these days; mega cheesy and super fast bouncy gabba techno, proper hardcore was made from the kinds of breakbeats and large basslines more recognisable in Jungle or D&B these days, but considerably slower and still had a lot of the pianos and vocals from the piano house era of the late 80s. Hardcore was absolutely massive in the UK in the early 90s, but non existent anywhere else in the world. Legal Hardcore dance events were filling out huge clubs, sport halls and events spaces up and down the country, often with 10s of thousands of people. Plus illegal raves were still drawing crowds occasionally in the 10s of thousands and generally playing a slightly darker, less piano-y version of hardcore.
Hardcore seemed to evolve very quickly, getting much faster between the years of 1991-94. During 1992-3 it started to become a bit darker and a sub genre known as "Jungle techno" was born (which has the basslines and breakbeats of jungle, but still has a 4x4 kick drum in there also). Then in 94 it split into two very distinct camps; Jungle and happy hardcore. Up until 1996 happy hardcore was still very breakbeat and bassline driven, rather than the 4x4 techno version that it turned into in 1996 and people know today. Jungle stayed largely as it still is today, and Drum and bass split and evolved from it very early on, and eventually breakbeat branched off towards the late 90s also.
Those early years from 1991-94 are looked back on with nostalgic, misty eyes by a lot people in the UK as the "golden era of hardcore", and there is still very much a large scene for it today, packing out events occasionally in the thousands. This influence has been a very firm background to a lot of dance music in the UK, and essentially started this whole breakbeat and amen snares path that the UK has gone down ever since. This isnt to say that they dont make anything else there, obviously there is a huge techno/ trance/ house scene as well and there always has been, but hardcore is something that was distinctly British and was very much seen as a sound of the underground. Trance and house were seen as commercial and clubby, whereas hardcore was the sound of raves and underground dance events (although because of its huge popularity became commercial itself).
So Hardcore, Jungle techno, Jungle and early happy hardcore were also very big influences on our 2000s rave scene as well. We played a lot of newly produced drum and bass, breakbeat, hard trance and hard house, but also a lot of the earlier sounds of rave and hardcore. The videos above show trance/ acid trance, but this was nowhere near all that was played. These events had an incredibly diverse mix of music playing at them and the genre of music could switch drastically with each set. Generally on any night you would hear at least one set of; Hard Trance, techno, happy hardcore, jungle, breakbeat, hard house, Jungle techno, piano house, drum and bass and oldskool hardcore. Generally it was the harder and darker styles of music being played at night, with the piano and more vocal stuff in the day time, but not always.
Personally I loved all the vocal piano music in my early years of raves, it was my favourite stuff to listen to in the beginning. Probably had something to do with the fact that I had just started taking ecstasy for the first time and I don't think there is a style of music out there that screams "The ecstasy was great when we were making this!" more so than oldskool hardcore. In fact, I'm going to post what I think is a completely hilarious tune here which is a real sign of the times back in the early 90s. This isnt something we would have ever played at our raves, bit too pop-y and commercial for that. Its not really a good example of "hardcore" but has a similar kind of breakbeat and uplifting synths that you might have heard in old hardcore of the time. I'm more just posting it because it amuses me. That song is "Ebaneezer Goode by The Shamen". The narrative that the Shamen put out to the press when quizzed about it at the time was that it is about this guy that the band knows called Ebaneezer Goode who is a bit of party animal and the life of the party wherever he goes. Its very obviously written all about the drug ecstasy however, which the Shamen were only too happy to admit a few years later. The chorus consists of the band yelling "Eezer Goode, Eezer Goode, he's Ebaneezer Goode!" over and over again. This very plainly sounds like "E's are good, E's are good, his ebbing (effing) E's are good". But even all the verses where he is talking about Ebaneezer, he referes to him as "he", which in the British way of dropping the "H" becomes "E", and so the whole song is written about ecstasy. Just have a close listen to the lyrics, its really not subtle in the slightest. The funny thing about this is that this song was number one in the UK charts for 4 weeks before the BBC banned it. Which meant that the band went on tops of the pops (a popular mainstream live TV show in the UK counting down the 40 biggest selling tunes of the week with live performances) and yelled "E's are good!" over and over again at the crowd on live TV on several occasions. Its hilarious really, only in the 90s could they have gotten away with this:
Although thats a highly amusing piece of 90s nostalgia, as I said before, it isn't what we would have played at raves. This is a better example of Hardcore, made in the same year as Ebaneezer Goode (1992). You can clearly make out the breakbeats and basslines which would later go onto form jungle and DnB:
This next bit of footage from our parties is definitely what people would have called Oldskool, although It's closer to the house side of thing than hardcore. Piano house will always remind me of hot sunny afternoons in the forest, happy sunshine music. I used to like the energy of the stack to this stuff, because its considerably slower there was a real bounce to it, the whole thing felt like it moved off the floor half a metre each time. A lot of people thought it was too cheesy to be played at raves, and yes it definitely is cheesy but nothing put a smile on my face more and made me happier than dancing to this in the afternoon, especially on ecstasy, its got that vibe written all over it. Although having said that its happy sunshine music, this piece of footage was taken at halloween, it would have been pretty damn cold. The weather never stopped them, I can remember one party on new years eve one year which had a daytime high of -8C, night time low of around -15C. Getting in that mosh for 5 minutes can sure warm you up quick though:
Just going to post another one of these piano house ones here. I've always had a bit of a soft spot for this one. The same day I first brought my decks I went into the record shop next door and this is the very first vinyl I ever brought. It was something of an oldskool anthem at our parties. Again very vocal and piano-y, actually in the forest in the sunshine here as well. Theres a fair few less people at this one. This party went on for 3 days, this was the third day. I used to like it when the stack was like this though, when there were just a few of you that really knew how to dance like this and you could bounce and roll off each other. Theres only 10 or 15 people on that dance floor but the energy they give off is fantastic. Pure euphoric vibes, I love it:
This next one here is the upper limit of when hardcore split apart, in 1995. This is happy hardcore just before it turned to a kind of techno. Its still got quite a heavy 4 beat behind it but still has the breakbeats and big basslines of Jungle lurking in there. Much quicker than the earlier stuff from 91. This is a quick tune anyway but the DJ is also playing it very quick here:
This is what would be referred to as "breakbeat hardcore". This is one of the pieces of footage which has been lurking around the internet for the last 10 years, I couldn't find any other examples of breakbeat hardcore on my footage. This was a new tune at the time of the video (which makes it nearly 20 years old now) but there are still producers making this style of breakbeat hardcore today. There has always been a scene making this kind of hardcore in the UK, although much smaller than it was in the early 90s. You can hear the influences of modern breakbeat and drum and bass, but with the piano and uplifting rhythm of happy hardcore. No other illegal rave scenes around the country really played this piano house and hardcore sound, it was nearly all techno and hard trance at other parties. I used to love hearing those pianos in the daytime though:
We can’t claim to have started dancing like this to Dance music however, that honour went to a crew a few years before us called Exodus, from Luton. Luton is an extremely rough part of the UK, a very deprived area with a highly multicultural population and a really big issue of ethnic gang related violence. Around the time of Exodus parties Luton had the highest murder rate in the country. Exodus brought people together in a way that nothing else in the area could. You had gangs of Asians/ Turks/ Lebanese/ Africans who normally wouldn’t go within 20 metres of each other without pulling out weapons on the streets, and yet they all went to exodus and were happy to be pressed up against each other in the mosh at these illegal parties. It was because of this ability to bring people peacefully together that they had quite large ranging support from the community in Luton, not just from ravers, but from elderly people and parents who never went to them, but saw that they were bringing together all these ethnic groups in a way that no other community outreach program could. (They did not have the support of the police however, and were regularly harassed to the point that bedfordshire council opened an investigation into the polices handling of Exodus.) They provided a free party to the bored and poverty stricken youths who didn’t have anything else to look forward to and wouldn’t have the money for a dance club. These parties, as the name suggests, were “free parties”, both in terms of free from regulation, and as in they didn’t cost anything. A donation was asked, “pound for the sound” was the moto on the gate (at both Exodus and our own parties), which is nothing for a 14 hour dance party. A similar event inside a club that only lasted for 6 hours would be 15-20 pounds.
There’s an amusing story of a three day riot on the Marsh farm housing estate, which is a large commission estate (council estate) on the edge of Luton. In 1995 Marsh farm saw three days of rioting, looting and setting cars and buildings on fire whilst van fulls of riot police tried and failed to aggressively quell the disturbances. Saturday night came around and Exodus made it very publicly known that they were going to be throwing a party a couple of miles out of town, and the whole estate cleared of rioters as they all went to the local Exodus party and took out all their frustrations there in the stack. I can imagine the mosh that night would have been brutal. When they returned to town the next afternoon they’d calmed down and forgotten all about the rioting and went home.
Exodus used to attract around 3-4000 people every second Saturday, which even if everyone is only paying a pound is a reasonable about of money. Exodus used to put money from their parties into community regeneration projects and help for the disaffected and homeless in the area. They squatted a large derelict farm on the edge of town and lots of the regions youngsters who would have been hanging around on the street used to go there and help renovate barns and plant veggies instead of smashing up bus shelters and getting into fights in the town. They also squatted a large manor house, called HAZ manor back in the early 90s where most of them lived. Its pretty criminal really how many empty/ dilapidated stately homes and mansions there are scattered around the UK. I guess if anyone has seen the Guy Ritchie movie “The Gentleman” (Fantastic movie by the way if you haven’t seen it, one of Guy Ritchies best), he explains pretty well why all these large stately homes fall into disrepair as the government in the UK takes 40% inheritance tax on any amount over something like 300,000 pounds. Which means that if some lord dies who has an estate worth 5 million, then the government want 2 million of that, even if the whole 5 million value is tied up entirely in the house and land. This means that a lot of landed gentry end up poor and losing their elaborate family homes. Not that I want to make people feel sorry for these poor posh lords who have grown up in huge country estates, but it does explain why there are so many of them left to rot in ruins because people can’t afford to run them and keep them. Exodus ended up occupying one of these rotting old manor houses and renovating it.
I’ve included links here to a couple of documentaries made about exodus. Theres a couple of hours of material here, so if you think it might interest you then give them a watch later:
exodus from babylon (this is just a trailer, I couldn't find a free web version anywhere)
I never went to an actual exodus myself, they stopped doing parties in 2000, which is the year before I went to my first rave. I managed to go to a dance event at HAZ manor in the early 2000s however. They had a large barn out the back which they kept their sound system in and threw small scale parties in there.
There was a group of about 20 or so slightly older guys from Norfolk/ Suffolk who used to go to Exodus in the late 90s, these were the guys who brought the mosh from Exodus back up our way and started throwing parties under the name “Brains kan”. These parties were the catalyst for the explosion of this kind of event around our area. Whilst I wasn't there from the very beginning, I was certainly there very early on and became heavily involved with the organisation of these kinds of events for a number of years. It was a very different background atmosphere from Exodus however. We didn’t live in an inner city area with huge gang violence and poverty to deal with, we were just bored, white country kids living in sleepy little farming villages with nothing to do. So these parties were a lot more fluffy and care free than the simmering undertone of racial tensions that there might have been at Exodus, but still had the same high energy stack vibes. It seems a bit strange that this style of dancing didn’t translate to other rave scenes around the country in the years following exodus, as a lot of people from around the country went to it, but at least Brains kan kept that vibe alive.
This video here is a montage of a few different Brains kan events, with the soundtrack being produced by a veteran of the scene using voice samples from a TV news report on one of our parties which was aggressively shut down by police using CS spray, attack dogs and riot police (although it took them 12 hours to get into the building we were in). Its a bit strange looking back on it all now that this was occasionally front page news in newspapers and the main item on nightly news. Although this is a regional news channel, Anglia News covers an area of around 6 million people, so about the population of Victoria. Its hard to imagine an illegal rave getting shut down as the main news story on Melbourne’s news, but it seemed to be surprisingly big news in our area on a number of occasions. It was always a surreal experience reading front page newspaper headlines or watching news reports on a party that you were just at.
The track itself in this video was pressed onto vinyl and became an anthem of these parties. This is a live recording of it, complete with crowd noises, taken on a handheld video camera, so the sound quality of it isn’t fantastic, but adds a bit more realism to the footage. The first 30 seconds or so is a different tune, the tune he made starts with the police TV interview. The actual party that the sound is from is the one inside the warehouse where you see the vinyl spinning around on the deck near the beginning. This is live footage, and the other video parts have been added on:
As mentioned previously, decor or art work was pretty much non-existent, they were thrown together as quickly as we could get them up before the police found them, which is a very real possibility in the UK. I’ve only been to a couple of unlicensed doofs in Australia, but it seems you have so much land and space here that I would imagine they aren’t really on the polices radar. In the UK however, even in the rural part we lived, interactions with 6 or 7 vans full of riot police and dog squads was an occasional possibility. Generally if the music started up the police wouldn’t risk coming in hard at night, so as long as you can get a tune on the deck before they get there then you’ve got a party for the night. I can recall a time when there’s literally been a hovering police helicopter over the top of the Quarry we were setting up in, with its searchlight shining on us and ordering us via the loudspeaker to leave the area whilst 4 or 5 vans of riot police were putting on their battle gear at the edge of the quarry. At the same time 300 or 400 of us ran manically around throwing speakers out of vans, piling them into a wall of sound and running out wires to get it turned on before the police made it in. It was highly exhilarating, but equally terrifying. Getting that first tune playing as we all piled into the mosh under the helicopters searchlight and then watching it fly off into the distance to leave us to it is one of the greatest buzz’s I’ve ever had.
They really were organised on a shoe string budget. I remember once we went to what was supposed to be a much larger illegal rave a couple of hours away for a public holiday weekend. We got there on the Friday and parked outside it as the police had already blocked entrances and we walked across fields to get there. It was quite clear that it was not going to last the night and we went back to my car to see it getting towed away by the police along with any other cars that had parked nearby. We all managed to get lifts back home with other people and I remember standing on my driveway at about 6am, more concerned about the fact we didnt have a party to go to for the weekend than my car sitting in an impound lot 100 miles away, standing there with about 8 other people discussing what to do. We were literally turning out our pockets and wallets to scrounge together enough money to put petrol in the generators to throw our own party that night. We already owned pretty much everything we needed to throw a party by this point so had no hire costs and the odd amplifier could always be borrowed from other people. We decided it was feasible, made a few phone calls to get together everything we needed, got a few hours sleep during the day, then managed to pull off a party that lasted for 2 days and 2 nights. (That party was Mayday bank holiday, Eccles old cinema 2003. Instead of the usual techno or hard trance, Dj Pierre - Everyday was played as the first tune, it was pretty memorable if you were there.). With virtually no sleep, a few hours notice and a budget that consisted of the spare change in our pockets we were able to put together a party that lasted for around 40 hours.
Having worked a fair bit on larger and much more legal festivals through the lates 2000's Im highly aware that these take months to organise, and weeks to build. Its amusing how spontaneous and last minute these parties were often thrown together. Also with a large scale festival (or bush doof), the entire year is spent preparing and organising for next one, its one event per year. During the height of these parties, we were putting together roughly 3 per month, so almost every weekend, for about 5-6 months of the year during the summer, and still one or two a month through the winter. It was a full time preoccupation. We spent pretty much all of our spare time either scouring the countryside for venues, in large scale meetings planning them, or building speakers and acquiring equipment to make them bigger. None of us ever got paid for any of this, nobody took any money out, all the money made from them was put straight back into the next one or new equipment. It took up pretty much all of our spare time and attention for a good few years with no other compensation than getting a party at the end of it and the sheer love of doing it. A party at which we could easily have all of our equipment seized and end up arrested. But it was worth every single second we put into it, they were fantastic times and I will always look back on them very fondly.
Its a shame really, the first ever blog site I started up, over 10 years ago now, was purely to document my stories and experiences from these early raves. There was heaps of material in there, Easily 50% more as I’ve written here, with some really astonishing, unbelievable stories involving riots, arrests, police chases and drug experiences. They were wild times for sure. My story from Esoteric is pretty tame in comparison. I’d love to be able to link to that blog site now to share those stories, but the blog site completely shut down without informing me and I lost my page. I still have all the word documents, just not on a nicely laid out blog page with video footage and photos added to it. Maybe I’ll get it back up and running one day, especially now I have 4 hours of footage I can cut up and chuck in them. I’ve certainly enjoyed writing about these parties again anyway, it gives me a warm glow every time.
(Edit - having said this, I remembered that the first blog post I wrote didn't have any photos or videos in it anyway, its pretty short really, maybe a 10 or 15 minutes read, it was more me coming to terms with the emotions surrounding what we all went through. It was kind of ritten to people who were there for it, but some of you may appreciate it: Hunter Thompson rave analogy)
Just going to chuck another piece of footage here. This is what the Dutch and Belgians were making around the oldskool era. This is what evolved into Gabba techno, which was a bit of a dutch speciality. Much slower than gabber, but you can make out the solid 4 beat and hoover style noises which became widely used in Gabba. I used to really like this style of old techno too, again because it was a bit slower than a lot of modern stuff it had a good bounce to it. This one is one of my favourites, as I'm sure anyone who knows me knows. It was one of my most played tunes at these parties:
But despite the possibility of riot police, or maybe because of it, the physical vibe and energy of these parties was like nothing I’ve ever experienced before or since. Since leaving the UK I’ve been to alternative dance events in at least 8 different countries. Its something of a fascination of mine, and I’ll always try to find out underground dance events in new countries I go to. I’ve been to some excellent parties, and Esoteric is right up there with the best of them, but nothing really compares in terms in the frenetic, raw exhilaration of those raves. But I guess part of the problem is that as a traveller its pretty hard to find events as underground as those raves. An Australian coming to England in the early 2000s would have never been able to find out about them, as Im sure I am unable to really find anything quite as underground as that anywhere else I go. I’m going to post one more video here from one of these events. If anyone out there watching this has seen an equivalent high energy mosh such as this at any dance events anywhere in the world then I would really like to know all about it, please get in touch. I live in hope that something like this exists somewhere else out there, that people are having as much fun as we did in some other corner of the world.
This footage has an MC on it again, this one is from the Exodus crew (they used to have considerably more MCs at Exodus). We used to have a few of the old exodus lot make the 2 hour journey out into the country for our parties as that was the only place you could get this kind of vibe at that time. One of the regulars died in a car crash on the way home after one party. The next party loads more of the old exodus crew came up as a memorial dance to him. Its a bit longer this one, I've let it play for 4 tunes as its all pretty good stuff. Particularly the tune 4:50 in, great bit of hard trance and mosh to it. It was a pretty emotionally charged party, even though I didn't know who Lee was. Good energy to it. This ones for all you geriatric stack warriors out there:
This isn’t to say that this vibe doesn’t still exist at raves the UK, there is still a pretty active illegal rave scene over there. And this kind of moshing is pretty wide spread now, although it doesn’t seem to have quite the euphoric unity and cohesion of those early parties. Hard trance is still very big in this scene, and is actually a lot bigger than it was back then. Those parties used to have a real variety of music playing at them. From what I gather, hard trance is the dominant style of music played at them these days, and it has spawned its own sub-genre of music called “free party hard trance”, which is the kind of hard trance played at illegal raves and more underground dance clubs and festivals.
One of the biggest names in this realm is actually the guy who made the Brains kan montage video and tune with news report samples above; Fudalwokit. His style is a little different to much of the free party hard trance out there as a lot of it is harder and more “whompy” than the stuff Fudalwokit puts out. His style more resembles mid-late 90s acid hard trance as he was one of the original group of 20 or so guys who used to go to Exodus and brought the stack vibe back to Norfolk. That mid- late 90s acid trance was really big at Exodus and our early parties (it always got the biggest mosh going anyway), and his stuff is modelled on that, but made with modern equipment and production.
I couldn’t help but notice that there were a number of European hard trance DJs being flown out for that Friday night at Eso. If the Esoteric Gods are listening to this, I implore you to get Fudalwokit out here next year. He released an entire new album at the start of 2023, so his stuff is new and current, and he’s a pretty big local headliner and stage closer at alternative dance festivals such as Illusive and Tearout. Its a real taste of the UK underground and rave movement, which I gather would be a little closer to Esoterics ethos. I’d love to see him mix on that Martin audio rig on the main stage on Friday night, not just because I’ve known him for over 20 years and it would be good to see him out here, but because he makes some heavy hitting hard trance that I think would go down really well. Anyway, I’ll let the music do the talking, these are a few of my favourites, but he has a pretty large collection on his Soundcloud page and an even larger collection in his back catalogue. Get him out here, you won’t be disappointed:
So where was I before that deep dive into UK rave culture, ah yes, laying down on a broken massage table in chill island with the acid starting to dissipate slightly. When I say slightly, it was still a very strong trip, so we had quite some time left yet. We went back to both ascension and the sun temple and danced for an unknown period of time and as we came down a little a more, and the night got a little colder, we realised that the clothing we had managed to cobble together right at the start of the trip whilst highly inebriated wasn’t actually adequate for the night we were now experiencing and went back to change again into something more suitable. After changing we walked back past the Lemon tree. It must have been reasonably late as Moby Dick had shut down for the night, but there was an open mic night and about 60 or 70 people in the Lemon tree. The guy on stage was an American and was rapping some conscious hiphop about the state of the world/ political system today and he had all the audience yell in unison after each couple of sentences “What the fuck!!”, which he had rhythm with the lyrics he’d just said. I wish I could remember some of his lyrics as it was pretty good. I bring this guy up as it wasn’t the last time we bumped into him at Esoteric.
We walked back into the festival via the cinema (showing something disturbing and violent) and then to the hammock temple tent. The Hammock temple tent had a band of sorts on which became something of a highlight of the festival for us. When we got back home in the days after Esoteric I was happy to see a post on the esoteric community group from someone saying something along the lines of “did anyone get any footage of that awesome band in the hammock temple late Saturday night/ early Sunday morning? That set changed my life and I really want to relive it!” That set was by a group called “global party people”. Not really a band as they were mixing psy/ techno, but one of them was playing a variety of drums over the beats and they were chanting Hare krishna style chants over the top. Sounds weird but the energy of these two was fantastic, and they really got the crowd going. The guy especially just had such a great smile on his face throughout, he seemed absolutely thrilled just to be there in the moment, drumming away. It was a great set anyway, and it was the first time I pulled my camera out to try to capture something since the photo of the sunset. For some reason I only captured 20 seconds of it, but you get the idea.
It was 3am by the time Global party people finished, 9 hours after we took the LSD. Although the visuals had pretty much finished, we still had a warm, euphoric, satisfied feeling, and really didn’t want the experience to end. But we were pretty drained by this point as we had spent many hours dancing. We walked back to Chill island in the hope of finding a spot in the light temple for a lay down, which we managed and and lay there for another hour or so, eavesdropping on the various amusing conversations being had in there at 3 in the morning, and reminiscing on what we’d just been through, it was an incredible experience that trip. At around 4:30am we finally called it a night and went to bed.
Again we spent the morning the next day with this fantastic glow, remembering how great it felt last night and feeling very reflective and humbled by the memory. We also spent most of the morning eating good healthy food and drinking fresh restorative juices. Certainly long gone are the days of turning up to a 2 day illegal rave with nothing more than a gram of MDMA and an eighth of weed in my pockets. It feels like healthy, sustaining food is a must these days. (We are middle aged now after all, which is a sobering prospect. I still feel like a 20 year old raver at heart.)
We had planned to see quite a few of the lectures today as there was a lot of material on psychedelics which looked interesting, but we failed to make it down to any of those ones. The only thing we ended up seeing there was by accident really. We were just walking past and there were a few people gathered around the huge white, intricately painted banners at the back of the ampheatrere area. When we got closer we noticed it was the same guy we saw going the live hiphop in the lemon tree the night before, only this time he was explaining the stories behind these banners, along with his wife. They were part of an American Indian group called the Beehive collective who among other things produce and distribute graphics to increase education on a number of social topics, one of which is to raise awareness of destructive mountain top removal coal mining in the Appalachian mountains.
The graphic they were going through was entitled “The true cost of coal”. All of their graphics are incredibly detailed and have a lot of detail going on in them, and don’t really lend themselves well to a computer screen, much better off blown up on a huge banner like they had at Eso. They have high definition photos on their website which you can easily zoom in on to see the details (here: True cost of coal ).
He explained that this graphic represents 6 generations (going from left to right) spanning from the time before coal mining when nature was in harmony, through industrialisation and the relentless expansion of coal mining and consumerism, and then a generation into the future where there is a period of resistance to the old model and then into the regeneration of old natural landscapes.
He asked people listening to pick an animal on the poster that caught their eye and he explained the story behind each animal and how they were effected by this true cost of coal on their lives and landscape. It was a very well thought out art work and it was interesting hearing the story behind it and the beehive collective. There is a highly detailed pamphlet that goes with the cost of coal banner available here: Coal pamphlet
This pamphlet explains it all in much more detail than I could here, and also in more detail than he was able to go over in the talk, although in the talk he went over a fair few things which weren’t on the pamphlet, he couldn’t go over every point. I’d recommend giving it a look, and also their other conscious artworks as well. They all raise some very pertinent points on a variety of social issues, mainly geared towards America and central America it must be said. They have very detailed explanations of all of them on their site. They had a pile of posters there which you could buy for a donation to their cause. We brought one of the true cost of coal ones.
I decided to keep quiet about the 3 years I’d spent working in mining when first getting to Australia, I wasn’t sure how well that would have gone down. Although I nearly brought it up when discussing the image at the top of the graph towards the right of the inflatable “waving arms” advert guys with the slogans “Go Green!”, “Donate now”, and “Feel better!” Written on them whilst flying over the top of the capitol building to indicate the greenwashing that a lot of major companies and governments undergo to make make themselves at least look like they care and clean their consciences somewhat. I found this certainly relevant to my situation as although I worked in mining for 3 years, I have now worked in the wind turbine industry for the last 4 years, and certainly my conscience does feel better. But at the same time I’m also probably more aware than most people that although these companies do make wind turbines, they also make jet engines, cars, consumer goods and engage in a whole range of other consumerist activities which are really part of the overdevelopment problem they are referring to in this graphic. Wind turbines are just another income stream for a lot of these large companies. Still, I feel its a step in the right direction.
After this we went back to drop the poster off and eat some lunch. The rest of the day was pretty chilled, although we made our way back to the hammock tent as the Global party people from the night before had told everyone they were playing another set some time this afternoon. We caught the last 30 minutes. The music was a little more chilled than the night before, more of a breakbeat/ techno vibe today than the full on psy the night before, but it was still a great atmosphere. They got all the crowd together for a group hug and group dance at the end which was the closest thing I’ve seen to a mosh outside of those Norfolk raves. I didn’t get any footage of this last bit, but got a longer bit than the night before, showing the happy zeal of the two members. What a couple of legends: (you can also make out the trees of chill island pretty well in the background of this footage)
This evening was significantly more chilled than the one before, we definitely weren’t going to top last nights experience anyway. We ate a couple of weed cookies and floated about the place, dancing and walking about. This is actually the evening that I took most of my night time footage and photos as I hadn’t really thought about taking the camera out the last couple of nights due to our level of intoxication. We stayed up until about 2am before getting an earlyish night.
This now took us to Monday, the final day of the doof. This was a very chilled day. At one point I went back to the art gallery to pick up the piece of art we brought the day before. People had brought art all through the weekend but left it there as part of the gallery until the Monday when everyone came to pick it up. It was chaos in there, I felt a bit sorry for the people on the tills trying to sort out the mess. A lot of the disorder came from the fact that the computer systems and internet there kept going down intermittently throughout the weekend, so they didn’t have a detailed list on a computer of who brought what and when. Some of it was on the computer, but a lot of it had been scrawled on all kind of bits of paper which seemed to be stuffed and crammed into various spots behind the tills, so just to find one persons purchase was taking 20 minutes sometimes. When we went in the computer system was down and we couldn’t pay for our art at first. Also the cash points had long ran out of money by that point, but their card machine eventually worked so we were able to pay but I remembered our order got written down on one of these scraps of paper. It looked like a very stressful operation for the till staff. I wasn’t in any kind of hurry so happily waited around, but I would have been in there for an hour at least.
One of the things they did on the Monday which I thought was a really good touch, was that the amphitheatre had a whole afternoon of stand up comedy. This is a great time to have some stand up comedy playing, as everyone is chilling out and winding down, and we watched it for over an hour. They should definitely do this in future years. The music still went on until 9-10pm on the main stages so we got a fair bit of dancing in on this day too. It was a bit of an emotional moment seeing those main stages power down for the last time on the Monday night, seeing it all come to a close. Moby dicks was still coming up with the goods until midnight though so we went and danced up there. And as it was the last stage open until midnight it was the busiest we had seen it all weekend. Then at midnight there was something very unexpected; a fireworks display. Whilst this might be standard practice at the end of UK festivals, normally I would have thought that bushfire restrictions wouldn’t allow for such a thing. Especially after I made a huge mistake at Tanglewood. The whole festival I had just assumed that there would be a fireworks display for midnight on new years eve, and had been telling my kids so all weekend as they had never seen a large fireworks display before. They were extremely excited about this and my eldest had forced himself to stay up until 11pm and was so overtired he was lulling around the place, pushing through the tiredness and repeatedly asking how much longer it was going to be. When I eventually went up to the info tent to ask about the fireworks and where they would be, they told me that of course there wouldn’t be a fireworks display as the bushfire restrictions wouldn’t allow it. Breaking this news to my now extremely overtired 7 year old did not go down well and he spent a full 10 minutes rolling around on the ground screaming and losing his shit over the lack of fireworks that he had been staying up for. It took us a good 15 minutes to calm him down and he eventually just fell asleep on the dance floor in the middle of the festival after we told him he could come out later and see the laser displays if he woke up, and having carried him back to the camper to sleep, he somehow stirred himself at 2am bright eyed and ready to watch the lasers...definitely my son. So it came as a surprise to see a large fireworks display to end Esoteric, especially in an even hotter, drier area, but it was a nice ending point.
So comes the end of my blog on Esoteric festival. Andrea has just pointed out her amusement at the fact that this has come in at well over 30,000 words, which is roughly the length of a university thesis. So if you’ve made it this far into my warbling thesis on Esoteric, well done! Thanks for sticking with me.
In closing I’d just like to say; its a hell of a party they are putting on out here. The production levels and attention to detail here are fantastic, especially for an event this far into the bush. The overall setup of the stages and all the art nestled into the trees is very well done, and the projectors on that main stage are out of this world. Although there are multiple chill out spots and activities among the festival, I wouldn’t call it chilled out in the slightest. Its a hectic assault to the senses, especially at night time, but the overall affect is highly impressive. The sound systems sound great, the sheer amount of artwork and colour is awe-inspiring, and the amount of amenities and activities to do when you’re not dancing is great for a festival of this size. This is one of the best events I’ve ever been to, certainly in the top 2 or 3. I really couldn’t fault them for anything, other than the night time screenings in the amphitheatre maybe. I’d love to see the art areas expanded significantly, and a bit more colour and light installs up at chill island, (and maybe Fudalwokit play on the Friday 😉). Other than that, this festival is perfect the way it is. Never change Esoteric, you’re smashing it out the park here, good vibes all around.
If you ever get the chance to make your way down to the edge of the desert in regional Victoria around the first weekend of march, then I highly recommend checking this out. I know there is a near zero chance of anyone I know from England flying out for this, although having said that there were a large number of French at this festival, and at least 2 we spoke to had flown out specifically for this festival, and were going back to France a few days after. There seems to be a big following for Esoteric in France. Anybody who does read this back in the UK who may be coming out here at some point anyway, you should definitely keep this in mind. Yes its very psytrance heavy and quite different from anything you may have seen in England, but this is precisely why you should check it out. Embrace something different.
We left Esoteric with such a warm glow from the weekend, compared to how we were feeling going into it, we felt completely revitalised and rejuvenated from the experience. Pretty sad and emotional to leave, but so glad to have experienced it. Thank you Esoteric, it was just what we needed.
