I didn’t do any research before I went nor ask people once I was there. Now I realize that it takes much more effort to find good music at Soundwave. Note that there is no trance and little-to-no techno.

Renegade Stage

All house music. I went into Soundwave as a self-identified house fan. Renegade never played anything offensive, but they didn’t play much that excited me, either – I didn’t hear a lot of obvious electro, but my ear may have been overloaded. The beach setup looks awesome, but it’s kind of spread down the beach with the dance floor at one end.

Chill Zone

If there are a bunch of people dancing in your “chill area”, you’re doing it wrong. I was expecting ambient, but the Chill Zone was only downtempo relative to the other stages. The music wasn’t bad, but it seems like a lost opportunity and it got in the way of ordering at Juice Monkey, which was in the middle of the Chill Zone. No comfortable chairs.

Live Stage (“Daielektik”)

This stage is set up for a huge crowd but a lot of the live productions were lame and the fact that this stage was closed half the time make it a black hole in the middle of the festival. I’d rather see the live shows spread around the other stages and something else done with this field.

Liquid Soul

There’s a cliche that jungle stages are always out of the way at electronic musical festivals and Soundwave is no exception. I was never over here in the morning, when I suspect they were playing dubstep, etc., so I mostly just heard drum&bass here – and fell in love. Unfortunately, there was rarely a big crowd. They seemed to be sporadically selling water and hotdogs here. The stage is a bit separate from the beach, but there were cool fire barrels and a laser show on the rocks every night.

The Meadow

I think the music was mostly breakbeat? (The sign post said “groove ahead”.) If you stand in The Meadow in the daytime, you think “this would be awesome full of people at night”. Unfortunately, I don’t think that state ever occured.

The three best things I heard:

1. Nicolas Sfintescu of Nôze (Paris) singing live
2. Shamik (Vancouver) repeating his dubstep beatboxing from Soundwave 2008 when Mat the Alien didn’t show up (probably got abducted again):
   
3. Wookie & Joshua’s (Victoria) progressive tech-house in The Meadow while the sun was still shining through the trees: this is the only time that The Meadow captured the ewok village feel it seemed designed to evoke.