Last year Scott and I had a great opportunity to attend our first folk music festival. We’ve been to many music festivals over the years however they’ve all been related to the electronic bass music culture. We didn’t know any of the artists on the Vancouver Folk Music Festival line up. The only thing we did know was it was a very popular festival that is named one of the 10 best outdoor concerts in North America.

So, how are two electronica bass heads supposed to have a good time listening to folk music? To our surprise it was quite easy. With 7 stages it’s impossible to not find something to make your ears happy and even possibly make your bum wiggle. We were even surprise to find an act or two that used electronica memes during their performance!

Music festival or beach day? Why not both?

As much as this festival is all about the music to the die-hard attendees that line up night after night while the grounds are closed for cleaning to get in first thing in the morning and stake that perfect spot at the main stage with their blanket. This festival is also just about being a diverse community of individuals looking for a good time. Vancouver Folk Music Festival has to have the biggest range of festival attendees I’ve ever seen. It really doesn’t matter who you are or what your into, attend this festival and you’ll find yourself smiling all day long.

Million dollar views for the artists.

On top of this the Vancouver Folk Music Festival makes your experience even better with all the little extra details.

• Amazing vendors with handmade items and wares from all other the globe
• Very child friendly with even a whole section dedicated to the little folks
• Secure bike lock up for just $1
• Location, location! Jericho Beach Park with amazing views of the city, ocean and mountains.
• Pristine grounds. Green grass to sit on, large pond, lots of trees for shade, and no garbage on the ground.
• Beer gardens to enjoy a cold one in the sun
• Workshops to better yourself
• Great place to people watch
• Delicious food options or they allow to bring your own
• All food court plates are a hard plastic and have a mandatory $2 deposit. Return your plate to get washed and re-used to get your $2 back
• Recycling centres with staff working them to help you organize your waste appropriately. Nothing that can be recycled ends up in the trash.
• Free Water!! Just bring a refillable container. (no bottled water is actually sold on the grounds to limit waste.)

The Vancouver Folk Music Festival is on July 15-17 located on Jericho Beach Park, Vancouver. If your in the city and like to have a good time you should defiantly attend. Purchase your tickets online or at the gate. Full weekend pass or single day available. OR, if your on a budget and don’t want to miss out another option is to just head to Jericho Beach and listen to the music from the other side of the fence. The beach is guaranteed to be filled with a great array of people chilling and relaxing. You can even get into the vendors area to buy yourself something unique without a ticket. Check it out.

Our past tropical beach experiences have been great. Our first destination together was Puetro Vallarta, Mexico. It was a 1-week all-inclusive deal and defiantly gave us our travel bug. In that one-week we had such a fantastic time and learned we traveled extremely well with other. Both of us love to just sit back and relax and do nothing except jump in the ocean to cool down. But, we do also like to take part in a few activities. Basically making plans to relax for 2 days then go for an adventure and repeat.

So came our honeymoon… visiting St. Lucia and Jamaica. St. Lucia is still one of our most favorite places in the world. We stayed in our own mountainside villa with our own private pool and the amazing beaches were just 10 mins away. In Negril, Jamaica we stayed at a massive all-inclusive resort and pampered ourselves, as any honeymooners should!

Our most favorite place on this planet in St. Lucia

As much as a great time we had, we often thought to ourselves how amazing it be to do the same sort of trips with friends. So we signed ourselves up for a 1-week all-inclusive deal at a mega resort in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic with our friends Karen and Steve. As stated before in a previous post, we had an amazing week with them. However the entire time we all agreed there was something missing… Good music and more friends! So you can just imagine how excited we were to be attending Sun & Bass together on our European adventure and meeting up with even more of our friends there, James and Christy!

Sun & Bass is marketed as a drum & bass lover’s paradise. For 1 week around 1,000 junglists from across the world fly to the little tropical island of Sardinia, Italy and attend daily parties catered them throughout the town of San Teodoro. It’s quite a experience to walk through a town where barely any of the locals speak English but all you need to do is shout out “WOO, SUN & BASS!!!!” and you will make instant friends with anyone wearing a wrist band within your vicinity.

The beach!!

Previous Sun & Bass events had DJs set up during the day on the beach, which was the main tidbit of information that drew us all in to set our entire European plans around this 1 week party. It sounded like our beach times in the Caribbean but with our taste in music and friends. However, sadly, once we arrived we were informed all beach events are canceled and will be moved to different locations. The beach bar they used previous years had a new owner who was not at all interested in allowing these beach parties to be there. I still shake my head at this guy… I can’t even imagine the amount of alcohol and food sales he missed out on by not allowing some DJ’s to set up their gear at his bar.

None the less, our week there was off the charts. We rented ourselves a great little condo to share, drank way too much cheap wine, made some great meals, sunbathed on the beach, laughed our asses off, and danced to some great music in the most classy venues we think any junglist will ever see.

Steve dancing with Jenna G

Our entire groups week highlight would be at Bal Harbor to see Jenna G live. Jenna G is a female MC and lyricalist who has made some amazing music and collaborated with many internationally known DJs like Roni Size. We all didn’t even know she had a live set at Sun and Bass until we got there and saw the finalized line up! What a treat! Getting to check another “I want to see” music artist off our list without even expecting it. Her performance was the most intimate music experience I’ve encountered. We situated ourselves on a small island in the middle of a swimming pool and this was our best decision for the entire week. As Jenna G quite often came and sang and dance on this island right beside us and sometimes even WITH us! It was one of those celebrity OMG I can’t believe I’m experiencing this kind of moments.

Our 8 euro VERY VERY VERY Strong Long Island Ice Teas

Would we go to Sun & Bass again? Yes I think we would, but not during a backpacking adventure. Seeing everyone at the parties wearing different outfits while you are staring at the inside of your backpack wondering how you can dress up your few very casual items. I would go next time with a suitcase and lots of fun outfits. We would also plan to spend WAY more money there as drinks are 8 euros each and water is 6 euros each!! OUCH!!! At least they poured the drinks VERY strong. Because of this strong pour it made buying beers a rip off since they can’t pour that stronger for you. Also, I would bring our spring floats to use at the pool in Bal Harbour! So, maybe one day we will attend it again, but I don’t forsee it in any near future… Attending Burning Man in 2011 shall be our next new festival adventure.

Our big group of friends enjoying the Sun & Bass!

One of the things we had always talked about with Steve and Karen was the possibility of seeing Roni Size while in Europe. Roni Size is one of the pioneers of drum and bass, and his New Forms CD is pretty much what got us involved in this music scene way back when. It was something so different from the other electronic music with broken beats and intelligent rhythms we were instantly drawn in.

Roni Size is a dnb legend. And when we saw that we could see him with the Reprazent crew, it was an instant sell. Off to Get Loaded in The Park we went to see him. Now we’ve been to many music festivals in our day, and have been disappointed from some of the biggest headliners. Fortunately this was farthest from the truth when we saw Roni Size & Represent Crew. It was pretty much the best live music I have ever seen, and I’m so glad that we saw it with Steve & Karen.

One thing about the festival I didn’t like though was the trashiness of the English people. There’s only one type of animal I know that lives in it’s own filth, wallowing and scrounging through the trash for food. We saw people sitting at the food fair and just throwing their unwanted food on the ground; eating in-between trash and leaving whole chicken cadavers while throwing bottles on the ground.

This shit would never fly at one of our festivals back home in Canada. So to enlighten the English during festivals, I’ll illustrate a simple 4-step process on how not to be disgusting.

STEP 1:
Grab your garbage in your hand and locate the nearest trash-can

STEP 2:
Throw it in a trash-can, many are located everywhere. This doesn’t mean NEAR a trash-can, but in it.
(please note in Canada we recycle our plastic but that doesn’t seem to exist here)

STEP 3:
Clean off your hands and pat yourself on the back for being civilized. Well done!

STEP 4:
Head back to the party and have a great time!

This used to look impressive

I remember 8 years ago picking up a copy of Knowledge magazine (a UK based drum’n’bass monthly production) and seeing the picture above with an article attached. I was in awe of the 75,000 watts of sound that came out of this stack, and every word of that article made you yearn to hear the bass rumble.

After hearing Hospitality’s sound setup at Matter Nightclub, which had better sound than clubs in Vancouver, I was stoked to hear the grand-daddy of all sound systems at a special Valve System showdown at the Indigo nightclub inside the O2 Arena. Walking in with anticipation of gut wrenching bass that you can feel in your spine, I should have known something was up as the sticky floor pulled at my shoes and the sound was a bit off.

Its difficult to explain in words what good sound should sound like, especially for music labeled Drum and Bass. Let me first tell you what it should NOT sound like. It shouldn’t make you feel like your ears are about to bleed because it’s so loud. It shouldn’t sound like it’s coming out of the muffler of a Harley Davidson. It shouldn’t sound distorted so you can’t recognize bass versus treble, or vocals. And if you’re the sound guy, you defiantly shouldn’t walk away from the sound booth during your headliners set, it’s your job to control the volumes. Loud is not quality.

No, you should be able to feel the bass through a crowd of 4,000. You should be able to understand any vocals that are being played. You should be able to talk to the person next to you because Bass and Treble are two different frequencies. This is what we’re used to back home with sound done by PK at many Calgary events and at Shambhala. This is the high standard we’re used to and expected the Valve Sound System, so hyped up over the world, to compete against.

We were sorely disappointed. It sounded like a blown out nightclub who maxes out their sound to get that little bit of extra juice. Like an old boxer who’s trying to come back into the ring, the Valve System just get’s its ass handed to it by current champion PK. If you want to feel good sound, look up a PK Event and or make plans to attend the Shambhala Music Festival located in Nelson B.C, you’ll not be disappointed!

PK Sound Setup at The Village Stage, Shambhala Music Festival – For the Win!

The term professional partier comes up lots in our dialect. Amongst our group of friends we all love a party and believe we are quite good at it too! We’ve attended many club nights, special events, raves, house parties, concerts and multi day festivals. We have also thrown a good amount of parties ourselves: House parties, huge New Years Bashers, Houseboat Stags, Special Events, club nights, illegal underground raves, and we even had one heck of a wedding that ended with table dancing!

But even with all this previous experience, we had no idea what to except when it came to partying with the French.

Steve found out about this event in Corsept, France named Couvre Feu. It’s a 3-day camping festival that had a beat boxer we really wanted to see performing on the first night. This beat boxer goes by the name of Dubfx and is often caught performing with his girlfriend The Flower Fairy. Dubfx started as a street performer in England, selling CD’s after his performance. He creates music and beats with only his mouth and sings some catchy tunes that all walks of live can relate to. With the power of youtube and camera phones he is quickly becoming a worldwide sensation and is now getting hired to play at all sorts of events.

Couvre Feu sounded like the perfect event to attend first with our friends Steve and Karen. After renting a car in Nantes we headed down an unfamiliar highway in hopes we were going the right way. Our destination was not on the map we had, and directions from the French website were dismal while GPS unit we paid for was of course broken! But our spirits were still high and with smiles and a flyer in hand we made friends with a hippie van on the road. We waved the flyer at them and hoped the nod they gave us was instructions to follow them, luckily they took us right to the front gate!

Dubfx was the first performance of the evening so we rushed inside the circus tent to watch the show. It was a great performance and this is where we started to really get the vibe of the French. Only 15 mins into the start of the entire festival everyone is already grooving hard, smell of Kronenburg on their breaths, huge smiles, and CROWD SURFING! To a beat boxer! This is something we never see in Canada.

The festival was a huge success, and there’s a couple of things that impressed us so much that organizers back home should pick up on.

3 TYPES OF BATHROOMS TO CHOOSE FROM

None of them were prefab outhouse. Option 1: A squat style (but clean) hole in the ground type. 2. Male Urinal TeePee Like Tent Set up (see pic below) Option 3. Normal style wooden outhouse with lights, incense, and a bucket of sood for you to dump over the mess. The result: each trip to the bathroom was always pleasant. We never used the hole in the ground type… thinking that is for guys that are shy about the awesome Urinal TeePees. And with the guys not pissing in the regular wooden outhouse it left the lines short, no wet seats. I need help explaing this?

BEER TENT

Back in Canada you cannot drink at outdoor festivals unless they have a permit to have a beer garden, and then you must drink only in the beer garden which means you can’t watch your favorite act and enjoy a cold beer at the same time. In France it’s open to drink anywhere you want on the grounds. It’s almost like they trust their citizens to be responsible.
WASTE

What waste actually? The ground was next to spotless, it was an amazing sight. The main problem with festivals is dealing with the thousands of bottles and cups. Garbage’s get overfilled and there is no place to recycle your bottle. Couvre Feu solved this issue by making everyone pay an extra euro the first time they go buy a beer which gets you a funky hard plastic re-useable cup that can also be a keepsake item as it has the festivals logo and artwork on it. Each time you want another beer you just bring the cup back. No cup? You pay another extra euro for a new cup. Bam! No more bottle waste except for water…. And well it sure didn’t look like much water was being drank that night! Now the only waste left to deal with is the food with strategically places garbage cans placed where one would sit to eat their food.
BREATHALYZER TEST
Anyone leaving the festival grounds with no wristband (like us as we were not attending all 3 days) were stopped and asked who was driving. That person was then asked to do a Breathalyzer test by festival staff. If you pass they send you on your merry way, and if you don’t pass they give you some tips on ways to sober up and ask you to do another test when you feel ready or find someone else to drive. This is such a smart idea and ensures that people don’t drink too much and go driving.

So, that is Couvre Feu… If you like attending festivals and there is an act you want to see you should check this festival out. It’s a well-run operation and a great party. Where else can you find people going off crazy and crowd surfing to hardcore polka??

]]> http://dreamalittledream.ca/the-french-know-how-to-party-couvre-feu-2009/feed/ 3 http://dreamalittledream.ca/random-nights-with-friends-can-lead-to-many-things/ http://dreamalittledream.ca/random-nights-with-friends-can-lead-to-many-things/#comments Sat, 07 Nov 2009 09:56:29 +0000 Dee http://dreamalittledream.ca/?p=1435

About three years ago, on some random night the usual was going on in our routine lives. It was yet another late evening (or early morning) with our friends Steve and Karen and we had just got back from some drum and bass show and were now looking for some chill out time. But on this random night, instead of talking about how good the DJ was, or how we were not looking forward to work on Monday we instead shared our dream with them on how we wanted to take an epic trip across the world.

This topic of conversation then inspired Steve to tell us about different huge drum & bass festivals he has heard about over in Europe, Sun and Bass, Innovation in the Sun, Hospitality Nights, Valve Sound System, etc. And of course also how all our wish list DJ’s are just locals over in Europe.

Many more random nights of the same went by but all through them we continued to talk about how awesome it would be to witness these shows with our own eyes. To the point we agreed the best way to experience them would be together as the 4 of us. And so the seed was planted! Scott and I still had the dream to travel the world and now our friends Karen and Steve had their own little dream to travel Europe with us.

For about a year the seed didn’t look like it would ever grow and become reality until one random end of the summer night. We were already not looking forward to cold winter and how it would be great to escape the cold and hit a beach together. Much to my surprise this “hopeful speaking” actually turned into a reality and that November we meet up with them in Punta Cana! From this moment I knew our hopeful Europe speaking would become a reality. It was all a matter of when.

Before we knew it we where actually setting dreams into plans. Picking tentative dates, places to go, things we must do, researching events to attend, and then choosing the location to start it all… and of course of all the places in Europe to choose from. We choose Amsterdam to set us off on the right foot.
Finally on a warm summer day in August of 2009 we got off a train in Amsterdam and like it was out of some teenage summer movie we saw our friends down at the end of the walkway with the same travel tired weary smiles as us.

And so begins the next leg in our adventure…. Surrounded by the comfort of our friends.

]]> http://dreamalittledream.ca/random-nights-with-friends-can-lead-to-many-things/feed/ 2 http://dreamalittledream.ca/jungle-worship/ http://dreamalittledream.ca/jungle-worship/#comments Mon, 20 Jul 2009 20:19:19 +0000 Dee http://dreamalittledream.ca/?p=1209 Before I get to the Jungle Worship… my first order of business is to announce our Liverpool pictures are uploaded to Flickr.

Check them out by clicking on this awesome hot link that will send you to flickr land.

We’ve used PictoBrowser in the recent past to show the photos as a gallery within our posts but found the site was taking to long to load… We are on the hunt for some new photo plugins. Please give us any feedback or suggestions you have on how we should handle our photos.

Okay…. On to the Jungle Worship!

We headed to London just for 1 night to attend a Hospitality Night at Matter Nightclub.

We have been hearing about these nights back in Canada for many years and have always dreamed of attending one… finally we had our chance! London was only a short train ride away from Liverpool.

Not to our surprise the night was everything we expected and more. Matter Nightclub is one of the best venues we have ever step foot in, the music was great, the people were all so very happy to be there, not a frown in the entire club! Even the bar staff and security were smiling and grooving to the music.  The only thing missing from the night was having some friends by our side to share the experience. Low and behold… we find out there is another Hospitality Night slated for Sept 4th. Which means we can attend again with our friends Karen and Steve who are meeting up with us in August! Tickets are already bought!

Hospitality is an event hosted by the Hospital Records label which consists of these following producers and DJ’s of drum & bass music: London Elektricity, High Contrast, Nu:Tone, Cyantific, Logistics, Danny Byrd, Mistabishi, Future Sound of Cambridge, and Q-Project.

Their sound is a softer, funkier, and more soulful side of Drum & Bass music which is known as Liquid Funk. Trying looking some of the artists up and see if you like it. Many people who don’t like typical drum & bass music because it’s too fast, hard, aggressive, dark, etc actually really like this sound. I love to listen to it most while driving in my car. Especially during rush hour Vancouver traffic. It’s upbeat, happy and uplifting with a very positive message.

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