Memory of a summer festival

[imomus]

I'm really not a summer rock festival kind of guy -- I've never been to Glastonbury, for instance -- but the Goldmund Festival, held by a lake in a forest 30km north of Berlin, is supposed to be one of the better ones, and this year Rusty Santos, who recorded big chunks of my Ocky Milk album, was playing. So Hisae and I set off on Saturday on what turned out to be quite a trek, trying to find it.

First of all we had to get tickets -- none were being sold on the door. I located the last few at Dense and headed to Oderberger Strasse to pick them up. The website had absolutely zero instructions on how to get to the site, especially by public transport. Somehow I got the impression that Goldmund was happening at Schloss Lanke. So we took the S-bahn to Bernau then took a taxi to the tumbledown castle. Some people were having lunch out on the grass. Hisae needed to go to the loo, but the castle is now in such a state of decrepitude that it doesn't have running water.

"Wo sind die toiletten?" got the melancholy reply "Keine!"

"Im natur, dann?"

"Ja, im natur!"

So we spent a couple of hours wandering about in the forest (it was rather pleasant, bedding down on moss and listening to woodpeckers rather than rock music) before realising our mistake. There was no music festival here after all. We had a meal in a local hostelry (the landlady was feeding a posse of local policemen and their wives, it was all scarily rustic, and they hadn't heard of this thing called "the internet") then took another taxi. This guy was able to find out from his central control (who did have the internet) that the festival was in Biesenthal, a town ten kilometers away, but not exactly where.

So he just dropped us in the centre of this tiny town (which apparently housed a concentration camp during World War II) as night was falling. We found the festival by asking around, learning that the lake was probably where it would be happening, then following the distant rumble of music. Some of the forest roads were so dark we could hardly see a thing as we walked down them, and spiders and fierce dogs abounded.

We got to the site ("Wilkommen und viel spass!") just as Rusty was finishing his set. But the place was pretty magical, like a funfair with all sorts of food and drink stalls, kino screens, giant chess boards, treehouses, a sauna, all lit with clever theatrical lighting effects (trees shone blood red, white rays spread through the night sky, flecks dappled the ground). Ticket sales had been limited to 500, so it was quite a manageable size, and the people were quite cool and interesting looking (I also provoked interest from the photographers for my red ear pads, eye patch and Granatengarten hoodie).

We hadn't brought a tent, so we spent the night under the stars, lying on a comfy rubber sofa by a big campfire. From under our sleeping bag I enjoyed the set played by Horton Jupiter, aka Michael from They Came From The Stars I Saw Them; pretty wild song structures, and a big Sun Ra influence. The other music I heard (DJ sets and some German sub-Radiohead band) was pretty dismal, and we didn't stay long enough on Sunday to hear any of the music acts.

Sunday was sort of blissful -- we drifted on a raft, watched people bathing naked and sauna-ing by the lake, played giant chess and listened to Chopin -- the ambient area was playing classical music, which was much more civilised than the boomboomboom from the main stage. Having to sleep through constant din all night (as well as inhale toxic fumes from a fire) was like having someone else's iPod welded to your head. I thought of the poor animals in the forest, condemned to listen to this bunch of aggressive apes blaring their tribal music across the lake.

Wouldn't it be great to have a festival like this without any music at all? With bird-listening forest tours instead? Never inventing electricity is one of the greatest things animals have done.

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Those birthrate stats:

Japan 2.8 per thousand and declining (http://www.indexmundi.com/japan/infant_mortality_rate.html).

US 7 infant deaths per thousand births and rising (http://abcnews.go.com/Health/GlobalHealth/story?id=1266515).