My 5 favourite sets:

1. Blue Lunar Monkey’s minimal techno on Monday at the Labyrinth

   Early Monday morning (late Sunday night), on my way to bed on the last night of the festival, I finally wandered over to the stage I’d been avoiding. Blue Lunar Monkey is known as a psytrance DJ, so I had no idea what he’d be spinning for his second set. I would have guessed dub or glitch-hop, because there was almost no techno at the whole festival. I knew I liked listening to minimal techno at home, but I’d never heard it live before and it blew my mind.

2. Ed Rush & Optical on Sunday at the Village

   This was one of my best bets (based on this), the only little slice of drum & bass tucked into a late-night timeslot at the Village. Apparently Ed Rush and Optical are known for the techstep and neurofunk subgenres – I’m afraid I don’t know drum & bass well enough to tell you exactly what they spun. I didn’t have the energy that dancing to drum & bass requires, but I stood up on the walkway and the crowd wobbled it for me. I headed to bed as they wrapped up with dubstep.

3. Bird Peterson on Friday at the Fractal Forest

   Funky, electro, techy house: another one of my best bets (based on this) that turned out to be right. Peterson’s stuff is fun and it works well in the Fractal Forest, where people are dancing all over the place.

4. Neighbour on Friday at the Pagoda

   Neighbour spins nu-disco, which is basically tech-house (ie: minimal song structure) at a slower tempo. Normally I find nu-disco painfully boring but for some reason Neighbour is great. Neighbour is one of the key members of Homebreakin Records, based out of Vancouver, so I’m looking forward to hearing him more in the future.

5. Max Ulis on Saturday at the Living Room

   Max Ulis is on the Lighta! label based out of Vancouver. Lighta! was a dubstep label, but most of its producers are moving past dubstep and playing more avant garde festivals like Mutek in Montreal. Ulis labels his style the supergenre “future bass”, although most of his set was more specifically future garage. I’ll have to write a post about post-dubstep and future bass, but for now I’ll just say it’s cool chill-out music (although the dance floor was pretty full, I stayed on the couch).

Rock Pit

The Rock Pit is a big pit sloped toward the stage. It has the worst ambiance of any stage at night, but it’s nice to watch something cool under the big tent in the day. I’m sorry to my friend Leona, who helped build the Rock Pit, that I didn’t appreciate it more.

Pagoda

The Pagoda plays up the DJ-as-priest metaphor: the DJ sits at the base of a giant glowing temple. There aren’t a lot of visualizations at this stage – I think the emotion they were going for is awe rather than fascination. The dance floor has a lot of black light (packing list: lint roller), but occasionally is lit up in bright white light, which is a nice opportunity to see what everyone is wearing. I’m very jealous of the girls who get to glow hoop and dance on the upper decks of the temple – perhaps because the wooden walls around the stage make the rest of the dancers feel a bit like cattle.

Living Room (Beach)

The Living Room could be the main stage at a smaller festival, with a nice big sandy square surrounded by flags to dance in, rear-mounted speakers covering the chill zone, and lots of beach space to play with toys. The largest disco ball I’ve ever seen sets up a cute little zone off to the side. The Living Room’s music was too downtempo for dancing at night but I had some good times chilling (dress warm!), and it’s obviously the heart of the festival during the day.

Fractal Forest

The Fractal Forest is the least DJ-centric stage at Shambhala: the dance area surrounds the DJ on most sides and such a big posse fits into the booth that the DJ gets lost in the crowd. The visualizations are at the back of the dance floor and there are green lazers criss-crossing overhead, encouraging you to look all over the place. And look all over the place is exactly what you’ll do if you’re foolish enough to try to find someone in here – as the dance floor is circular, you can’t even give directions to a part of the floor (I tried “somewhere near the pyramid” a few times without success). Since Fractal is connected to the Village and the Labyrinth, the chill spaces are a maze of twisty passages that I never got a handle on.

Village

I spent almost all my time at the Village hanging out on the wooden walkway ringing the dance floor, which shakes amusingly when everyone dances on it. The Village is sparse on visuals and doesn’t really capture the “Ewok village” theme besides the camouflaged geodesic semisphere over the whole thing, but it was always so packed as to be a good time.

Labyrinth

The Labyrinth is the hippie stage. The stage itself has a big centerpiece of stretched white fabric, that gets lit up in all sorts of ways, but I’m sure the big selling feature is that there are trees right up to the edge, and you can see the canopy rimming your vision when you look directly up from the dance floor. The forest floor has been completely trampled into paths, and there is lots of chill space here, including a renegade chill dome, hookah tent and cafe. I’ve heard that many people spend the whole weekend at the Labyrinth and I can believe it, but I mostly stayed away because I’m not a hippie and the line-up was boring. (More on the opening ritual in another post.)

The Kootenays are too hot to hoop in during the day. Shambhala is too crowded to hoop in at night: there is space in the downtown area, but that’s just a mush of music from the adjacent stages; areas around the edges of the stages have too much traffic (and too much of the traffic is either inconsiderate, inebriated or both). As a result, I did very little hooping.

Apparently I’m a wimp, because I saw plenty of other hoopers: hooping is the most popular flow art amongst Shambhala attendees. Perhaps because poi and staff spinners prefer events (like Burning Man) where fire is allowed?

Some of the other flow toys I saw:

• contact juggling balls
• folding fans
• s-staffs
• double glow staffs
• contact juggling various lengths of light sabers*

One of my favourite sights of the weekend was a girl with a green flow wand strapped diagonally to her back like a scabbard or quiver – I think this is the coolest way to carry a flow wand (if only they looked a little more masculine to use).

There were a lot of glow hoops (at one point I saw a girl using three) and a surprising number of the $300 fibre optic hoops, which were on sale at the festival. The fibre optic hoops look wonderful, but when I tried one I found it rather clunky.

I saw a few hoopers who were significantly better than everyone in Victoria, but most people were intermediate. There were a couple of other men hooping. There were only more than 3 or 4 hoopers together for an organized lesson on Saturday, so don’t go expecting a big flow jam or a lot of opportunity to learn new tricks.

* Memo to people in Star Wars costumes: if you can’t juggle your saber, the force is weak in you.

Food was naturally more expensive than you’d find in a city, up to $15 per meal, but it felt like a miracle when everything was still open at 4 AM. There was lots of fresh vegetables and iced drinks. The two espresso carts pulled Starbucks-quality shots and had a reasonable line-up every morning (some of the other carts were serving drip, but I heard it wasn’t very good).

Very few people brought their own cup for drinks. I didn’t see anyone using a reusable plate and doing so might have screwed up some vendors. Supposedly there was some composing going on somewhere, but it was very poorly labelled and it mostly seemed like they were lucky to divert refundables from garbage. Shambhala generates a huge amount of trash – completely different from the Bring Your Own Cup and Matter Out Of Place ideals of Burning Man.

I didn’t look at the vendors until Sunday, when they’d been picked over, and I wasn’t impressed with the selection. Most of the clothing was aesthetically very similar, not reflecting the diversity of the crowd. I was surprised that there were so few glow and flow toys for sale given the type of event (although I might be spoiled in that respect given the stuff my friends own).

I’m told a pack of cigarettes cost $25 on the white market. Foam ear plugs were available for free and I didn’t see what other ear plug options were available (I already have some). The pill testing/needle exchange tent seemed to be doing reasonable business as their chart of tested pills grew over the weekend.

I took showers in the afternoon with a wait around 30 minutes both times. They were completely cold so I used less than my alloted 5 minutes.

My Rogers phone had no connection the whole weekend, but I gather Telus phones had a weak signal. As a result, I can’t review the recharging station.

Shambhala sells 10,000 tickets and adds to that with volunteers, talent and guests of talent.

One of the most striking features of Shambhala is how difficult it is to find and track people. There is no meaningful way to refer to areas of camping (unlike Burning Man’s addressing system). The “downtown” area is a convenient box, but without a single bottleneck. The beach had thousands of people on it all day. And of course once it gets dark you lose people almost immediately in the crowd.

I ran into all the acquaintances I was expecting to be there at least once. Even being shown where someone’s campsite is is not very useful for finding them again unless they’re homebodies.

It seemed easiest to travel in pairs. I tried going out solo one night but found the festival a crappy place to socialize – the past age of instant friendships have been replaced by sets of crews, each doing their own thing. If you go out in a larger group, you either need a standard visible across the dance floor to rally around, or very careful people management for bathroom breaks, etc.

Compared to other electronic music festivals I’ve attended, the average Shambhala attendee is young – in their early 20s – but I didn’t see any of the “cracked-out teenagers” I’d been warned about.

I didn’t see a lot of outright douchey behaviour, and it’s always striking how polite people are when they aren’t drunk, but there were some BMWs in the parking lot and some of the vibe that goes along with that. I didn’t get a chance to spend much time at the Labyrinth, a hippie festival-within-the-festival.

There were some impressive costumes, but it wasn’t as much of a focus as Burning-Man-themed events I have attended. Fun-fur hats and little ceramic antlers were very popular for women (and on sale on site). My favourite costumes:

• The Pope and 4 or 5 cardinals
• The flag of the USSR (“the people gonna get down”)
• A steampunk costume including a top-hat with full deer antlers
• The Jersey Shore characters

I saw less than 5 instances of full-frontal nudity over the weekend and a “moderate” number of topless women.

I attended the Shambhala electronic music festival at the Salmo River Ranch near Nelson, BC.

The highway turn-off is difficult to catch on the first pass, but the logging road to the farm was in excellent condition. We arrived around 8:30 on Thursday morning and spent less than 2 hours in the waiting lot before having the car superficially searched for alcohol (Shambhala is a dry event).

We chose to camp by acquaintances (who of course were devilishly hard to find) in the open field rather than seeking shade. It was a short walk to the music, but a little shade structure couldn’t beat the mid-day heat of Eastern BC and it was impossible to sleep in my tent past 9:30. In the future I would do whatever it takes to get a spot in the trees.

The bass from the stages carries quite well into camping area, so consider earplugs. There was random tent parties on Thursday night before the festival completely started but it was pretty quiet in the suburbs on the other nights.

We had a camper van with a water reservoir that kept us from having to haul water from the central filling station. The water lines were never unreasonable at night, but I was happy to have my 3L water backpack.

Although the roads are watered (watch out for mud puddles!), my sinuses got plenty full of dust. In the future I will try to wear a dust mask some of the time.

We left around 10:00 on Monday morning. There was no use of parking lots, but we got to the highway after about two hours of crawling.