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Post by Phyre Fest on Dec 18, 2017 19:02:51 GMT -5
Still editing my Sunday photos right now, but here's a quick preview from Justice. I think I took 1,000 photos of Justice alone during the set so I have alot to pick through.
I'm home and suffering from lack of overstimulation. All of you who went or have been before know what I'm talking about. Even with lesser festivals, I think all of us at some level are bi-polar motherfuckers, because the mania of a good festival day is why we attend. And since Day for Night delivers a unique, industrial, nighttime feel with all manner of sound and lights drawing your attention in almost every direction (even if it's just an exit sign), anything else is bland. When I catch up at work tomorrow, I'll do some final thoughts and maybe a want or two for next year (Sigur Ros always the Top 1 for me).
This Top 10 is completely disingenuous. There was so much good, it just depended on the moment. There were so many top 1 type moments. There was so much new to me and so much musically that was fucking blow away that it didn't take too many steps or too much time to get to that next moment.
1. Tim Hecker - I'm beat the fuck down but know I'm at a wildcard Sunday night set that might end up being something to talk about. So it's dark as fuck because it's already the blue stage, and he does a blackout set. Someone may have mentioned it last week (or it was on Reddit), but I had forgotten about the possibility. For anyone not there, some of the stage rigging was yellow. This set was one of my favorite EDM sets of all time.
2. Thom Yorke ? I only got to see 40 minutes of this. I had a different perspective from the back left than Phyre Fest did, as the sound and lighting/screenwork was awesome. I closed my eyes a couple of times and it sounded so angelic that I thought I was in Heaven. And it was getting better. This is probably the best set of the festival, but because of the circumstances, I can't give it 1.
3. Venetian Snares x Daniel Lanois - As noted in the Friday recap, with the rescheduling moving everything up, this became a casualty to being my #3 set going in to Nine Inch Nails (#2). I wasn't missing NiN. But because of the rain, I did. And circumstances got me to this set for the last 20 minutes of bliss. This shit was so fucking good.
4. Mount Kimbie - This was a pass-by but ended up being a highlight. I can't wait to see them again.
5. Solange - The show was fine. The band was fine. The dancers were fine. But she gets it on voice. I don't love everything about the songs or the show, but her voice can touch you at a fairly deep level. Good for her.
5 also. Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Except for the couple of out of tune parts, this got pretty orgasmic at times.
6. Forest Swords - Again, a lot of angelic harmonization this time between keys and a bass. I mean how many fucking great sets am I going to see at this?
7. St. Vincent - I don't even know how to rate this. I mostly just shut up and stared at the show the whole time. She is another one who touches you a little deeper. She has so much heart and soul, and now that she's on the stage by herself, she leaves it all there. Mesmerizing.
8. Princess Nokia - Power to women motherfuckers. I get to see her again in 3 months at Buku, so I'm pretty excited (more likely to be an hour set also).
9 (heh). Nine Inch Nails - Needed to be louder. It was still great and could have been Top 1 at almost any normal festival. Rain fucked shit up, but March of the Pigs was just what the doctor ordered. I wanted Hurt so so bad but the rain had me in a fucked up spot around 9:15.
10. Pretty Lights - This is another set that defies classification. I'm used to seeing Pretty Lights like 2/3am, not 6pm. But shit if this wasn't crazy. My boy who is part of PLF (PL Fam) said that the consensus was people bitching because it wasn't a DJ set he hasn't played in 6 years. Hey guess what assholes? We got a one of a kind synth set - even though it often felt like it was close to the edge of jumping the tracks only to be brought back into perspective. I don't even know what to do with this set since my preference is for PL Live. But I like being challenged to listen sometimes. Bravo to Derek.
There's a lot of other interesting stuff that belongs in that Top 10. Like what do I even do with Laurie Anderson's set? That shit was so far out there but so fucking genius. One of my daughter's friends (she's only 20 and of Iranian descent) said it was the best show of the weekend and that Laurie was speaking directly to her (she wasn't on anything). And then so many fun sets like Lil B or Pussy Riot get left off or of Montreal. Or you miss some of the better musical shit like Shabazz Palaces or Jlin. Then I only popped in for a minute during Jamie xx and then caught the wonderful final 10-15 minutes. Refusing to exit Friday only got me those minutes, but it was worth the foot damage of the late night 2 mile walk back to the other side.
^^^ FWIW, rereading that Top 10 and I'm thinking what fucking universe was this festival in for 2017 USA? Nice job D4N.
i too got very close to checking out the barf bags. super rough flight with no shortage of screaming children. waiting waiting waiting in detroit now. this airport doesn't have enough lasers or beatbox wine/cough syrup drinks.
i too got very close to checking out the barf bags. super rough flight with no shortage of screaming children. waiting waiting waiting in detroit now. this airport doesn't have enough lasers or beatbox wine/cough syrup drinks.
I'd say it sucks to be stuck in Detroit, but you're heading to the only place shittier than Detroit, sooo.....
How was the crowd for this overall? Were people engaged and attentive?
I honestly loved it. I didn’t have a bad experience all weekend. Not toooooo young, but very hip and weird. Didn’t see anyone pushing or being an asshat all weekend.
Post by 3post1jack1 on Dec 19, 2017 11:14:27 GMT -5
So much excellence this weekend. It was great running into the inforoo'ers I did, y'all are all sweethearts.
I'll echo what Rothric said to me at the festival, it was like D4N read our thread last year and implemented most of the changes we suggested, along with some changes we didn't anticipate.
Random observations:
-All chokepoints eliminated. This was huge. So much easier getting inside the building through the main entrance since they removed the art installations that were right there. Moving the blue stage against the far wall eliminated the green stage entrance chokepoint. Opening the entrance behind the yellow stage was huge. Moving the red stage to the opposite end eliminated a minor main stage chokepoint. Due to all these changes it was incredibly easy to get anywhere in the festival.
-Moving the blue stage against the far wall improved the sound tremendously. It's still far from perfect, and it never will be perfect given the nature of the room, but it was much better. Pro tip: the best sound I found at this stage was either on the rail to the left in front of the speaker, or at the back left corner of the SBD (there is a monitor there which helped with the higher frequencies). Lower frequencies still dominated the sound, but last year the bass was flabby, this year it was visceral. That means those lower frequencies had more room to breath and extend, making for a much more pleasing SPL, even if it wasn't high fidelity by any measure.
-Sound at the red stage was still great even with the move, except NIN wasn't as loud as I would have liked it to have been. Sightlines took a slight hit given the upward slope of the floor but it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.
-The new yellow stage was incredible and exactly what the festival was missing. a+++++. Bjarki and Roni Size were incredibly fun in that room. Felt like I was at my beloved Movement RA Underground stage.
Post by 3post1jack1 on Dec 19, 2017 11:51:06 GMT -5
Favorite sets:
1. Venetian Snares x Daniel Lanois - caught the last half hour, insanely beautiful set.
2. Tim Hecker - the most powerfully meditative set I've seen. like nothing else i've seen live. the blackout lighting was perfect. i also love that on reddit all the people who were waiting on Thom are bitching about how terrible it was.
3. Roni Size - what a treat this was! so glad I ditched NIN because of the rain. My loss not seeing a cool NIN set, but no regrets. I have lots of great memories in high school riding around in friends cars blasting "New Forms". So cool hearing straight drum n bass live, and Roni was having a blast with it.
4. Justice - whew! I get it now. Never really appreciated their studio stuff, but they are the definition of main stage electronic music. You'd have to have zero groove in your heart to not enjoy this show.
5. Bjarki - intense wild and weird techno at the yellow stage. so much fun.
6. Ryoji Ikeda - white noise, static, and kick drums. great crowd at this set too, lots of cheering and clapping. It was intense but translated way more joyfully live than I thought it would.
Post by 3post1jack1 on Dec 19, 2017 12:06:18 GMT -5
Let me set this up a little. I made a friend this weekend who does visuals for various live artists. He was at Day For Night purely as a fan (although a friend of his does the visuals for Thom/Radiohead), but obviously he has a professional interest in noting what the visual guys at shows are doing. Not sure what show the below was from, but notice the visuals the guy was using, then notice the guy's t-shirt as the camera pans over. this shit cracked me up:
Post by 3post1jack1 on Dec 19, 2017 12:09:34 GMT -5
#2, me and the same guy I mentioned above were discussing the possibility of Tim Hecker doing a blackout set. Once we got over to the blue stage new friend pointed out it looked the like visuals guy at Tim Hecker didn't look like he was preparing for anything, so a blackout set was likely.
Of course it was a black out set, and during the set I noticed the visuals guy was browsing facebook:
#2, me and the same guy I mentioned above were discussing the possibility of Tim Hecker doing a blackout set. Once we got over to the blue stage new friend pointed out it looked the like visuals guy at Tim Hecker didn't look like he was preparing for anything, so a blackout set was likely.
Of course it was a black out set, and during the set I noticed the visuals guy was browsing facebook:
Let me set this up a little. I made a friend this weekend who does visuals for various live artists. He was at Day For Night purely as a fan (although a friend of his does the visuals for Thom/Radiohead), but obviously he has a professional interest in noting what the visual guys at shows are doing. Not sure what show the below was from, but notice the visuals the guy was using, then notice the guy's t-shirt as the camera pans over. this shit cracked me up:
Let me set this up a little. I made a friend this weekend who does visuals for various live artists. He was at Day For Night purely as a fan (although a friend of his does the visuals for Thom/Radiohead), but obviously he has a professional interest in noting what the visual guys at shows are doing. Not sure what show the below was from, but notice the visuals the guy was using, then notice the guy's t-shirt as the camera pans over. this shit cracked me up:
I'm still pretty dulled down, but I'm essentially caught up at work after missing a couple of days. All 8 of us who went (including 1 newcomer) had a ball and plan to be back in 2018. It's just too cheap and easy for the quality experience you get to not go to this. Staying downtown was a fun move. Uber rides were rarely more than $7 or $8. There was a train a couple of streets over that would have even made all that cheaper, but we never did look at the logistics since the fares were cheap anyway.
The place we stayed at was megaton bomb. It was a corner unit on the top/30th floor of a condominium and apartment building which looked out over the city and then to the east depending on which balcony area you went outside to. It slept 8 comfortably.
We lucked into GA Plus and some of us got Super VIP bands. That meant mostly free booze all weekend and the perks that come with VIP. The VIP bar was hit a lot later in the nights, so after mid day, I just sucked it up and went to the pay bars since I didn't have time to stand around in there waiting for a drink. VIP gave you front right of both the Green and Red stages. For the earlier shows, that meant rail. In the VIP area, they had some snacks and also brought us out doughnuts iced with the D4N half moon/half sun logo which was cool. There was also free High Brow coffee cans from Austin that were available any time you wanted one. What I'm less sure of is the specific bars. I think Heiniken's were like $9.00 but depending on which bars you were at, they were either 12 or 16oz. I never specifically looked into whether they discounted for the smaller ones or not, but that's mostly what I drank along with the occasional red bull and Deep Eddy's.
I agree with Rothric and Postjack's analyses of the changes. The doors being open behind the yellow stage to that group of bathrooms and smoking area was great. You could also come around the front left of the main stage (Red) to get back there. So you didn't have to go all the way around the building and back through it which would have been the case if they didn't have those doors open. Grounds were mostly well maintained throughout, and there were ample trash/recycling receptacles to keep trash to a minimum.
All food we had was delicious. There was a giant variety, so we ate Tex Mex, Middle Eastern, Japanese, Korean, South African, etc. all weekend. Nothing I ate was worth tossing. Because they moved some of the trucks to the back of the red stage, there ended up being 2 minor areas with 5 or so truck and then the main area between the red and green stages with the other 15-20 of them.
Pretty Lights gave the finger to all the whiners bitching about him doing a synthesizer set. Haha. Fuck those whiners. I never saw it, so I can't link. But that's great.
Crowd was great. It was diverse in ages, gender, race, ethnicity, orientation, etc. I saw one dude hurl on Saturday and get put into a wheelchair, and I saw EMTs rolling wheelchairs around the festival a few times though I never saw anyone else get put in one. Most of security was either private, HPD or HFD. All of them were friendly, non-intrusive and more or less out of the way. They let you be if you weren't fucking around, and since nobody was, they pretty much let everyone be.
I was hoping to meet everyone and say what's up, but I only ended up running into cmack a few times, spent a few times, Fuzzywarbles a few times and Jim Maddog on Friday. My phones were loaned out and I was offline through most of the festival other than the schedules, so I missed Ken Bone's PM until I was at Tim Hecker. I'll be sending you over a # in a bit so that doesn't happen again.
I'll for sure be heading back in 2018, and my kids all want another Day for Night trip to Houston for Christmas next year. So we're going to do it. For anyone who finds this experience as interesting as the rest of us do, you should make the effort to do this next December. Fuck facebook whiners who will complain about everything, but you haven't read any meaningful complaints (except that water issue) from the 20 or so of us Inforoo people who went. And these are people who travel around the country and world to see other festivals. So it's not like we don't have a point for comparison. It's cheap to stay in Houston. It's cheap to travel to Houston. It's cheap to go to this festival on a presale. $100 presale gets you a ridiculously badass weekend. You could literally save about $15.00 a paycheck and make this happen it's so fucking cheap to do. And based on their lineups from 2015, 2016, 2017, you already know you're ahead the minute you spend the $100.00. So I'm in for 2018 and was all along anyway based off only 2016 when I made up my mind. This year just reinforced that I was right.
1. Venetian Snares x Daniel Lanois - caught the last half hour, insanely beautiful set.
2. Tim Hecker - the most powerfully meditative set I've seen. like nothing else i've seen live. the blackout lighting was perfect. i also love that on reddit all the people who were waiting on Thom are bitching about how terrible it was.
:hearts:
#3 and #1 respectively from me. LOL on the reddit douches.
