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From:
Charles de Ledesma As part of the enduring British tradition of having to have happenings in far-flung places (yes, even Stonehenge was in the middle of nowhere in the dizzy mists of time!), Hipnosis and Manchester's Global Sunrise posses had their swan song to the psychedelic summer in deepest Wales, on the edge of Snowdonia National Park, ten kilometres up a forest track.The party had started on Friday, the 11th September but our intrepid team got up there, like most, for the Saturday night. If isolation was the attraction then patience was the necessary virtue as it took a couple of hours to find the site - once on the track - after numerous wrong turns negotiated through the pounding rain. Once there it wasn't any surprise that most of the fifty odd adventurous folk who'd made it were going for the partying-in-the-car option until weather conditions relented a bit. We dried off in the small but perfectly formed chillout tent, beside a piping hot gas fire listening to earthy acid techno. The deep-in-the-forest dance area was small, sandwiched between fir trees, with plastic latched to the branches to keep off the worst of the rain. But as the old haiko goes....as long as ice does not preserve your beard for eternity, you can laugh and dance under the bleakest of skies...things got more cheerful almost immediately, with a few dancers getting going on churning up the dance area's earth into an oozy - but well-sprung - chocolate mud. A reassuring fire spluttered and coughed nearby and as the night evolved the rain stopped and the moon (yes, a full one) and stars came out to play. The music accelerated the warming up and drying off processes too. We got straight into a full-on psychedelic soundtrack - no beating around the bush for once - and it soon became appararent to the small coterie of up-for-it striding, stomping and funkin dancers that this was a party where top, psy-classics were the order of the night. Hardly surprising given that the French team-via Holland Shakti Twins and son Tommy give one the impression of people reared on Goa sunrise beauties. But before Ben Shakti's set I thoroughly enjoyed Ed Tangent, Ollie Baraka and Avi, 'The Greek', who, rumour has it, is the best trance DJ based in Holland at the moment. (Avi gave me a mixed cassette of his and on returning from the mountain-side idyll we all enjoyed his subtle, smooth, but intense style.) Ed Tangent really got the party going as a new car load or two climbed up the path. He flew into a whirlwind tour of strong, scissored tracks, which may well of been familiar to most people, but went down a storm in that deep-night kind of way. Baraka's set really got the bobbing troopers (all ten of us) really tuned in - he's old fashioned in that he likes to take the trancer on a journey, as well as being bang on-the-nail with vinyl mixing and a highly thoughful choice of tracks. Yes, it was funky and evolving, but with mood enhancing clifftop changes of gear as well. Then Avi treated to one of those sets which seem totally perfect - even prepared - for the conditions. He took us back from the precipice of psy-intensity with more intimate music, reminding us that we were high in a forest, somewhere in this beautiful world with a few good friends, and earth and water, all around us. As day dawned we stretched out, no longer needing to keep close to the twisted branches of night music. I realised that only a few metres away a stream had become a raging torrent while others went off exploring their immediate environment. (Too ealry for the mushrooms though.) Ben Shakti went with the mood playing tunes that were full of promise, blending intimacy with expansion. I particularly enjoyed his melting pot of styles; from crisp DAT mixing to slow-build morning lovelies which seemed to ping and fly off the mountains as well as absorbing the sodden bracken and the gushing flow of the water all around. And just as a mid-morning, bucolic, healthy tiredness started to creep in, Ben and Dom Shakti's son, Tommy, appeared - fresh faced after a night's sleep - to instill more thoughful, musical energy into the proceedings. And I was overwhelmed how a 16 year old could get a route map sketched out of such roaring, growling, scything gems. Like the 14 year old, Ali Baba, who was such a hit at Boom this year, Tommy has this music in his bones: he DJs by osmosis, for sure, serious and playful, studious and frivolous at the same time. Don't take up a day job, Tommy! As we left, the warm sun was shimmering through the trees and drying the paths. Soon the forest would be left to its own devices and the echos of psychedelic trance would melt back into the earth. Charles de Ledesma |