Erik

July 18 2005

Erik Lacroix

This was a truly strange and twisted weekend. When I arrived early on Friday I was babbling nonsense in broken French to the interesting people I rode up with, one from Québec, the other two some excited travellers from France. Our timing was great - we got in at dawn, ready to take on the day. After driving down a convoluted, bumpy forest road for 30 minutes we were happy to find a large, open space for the festival, and found that there was already a decent population of partiers on the grounds. I started off saying hello to my friends with the French crew who I'd been hanging out with in Montréal, Neurotik Soundsystem, a group of hilarious and insane revellers who had been part of the Spiral Tribe / Network 23 legacy in Europe. Their experiences with the open concept free illegal parties known as Teknivals indicated to me that Europe had done significant things to curtail the efforts of the collective free scene out there, with things often getting totally out of hand. In contrast, by the end of the party the OPP had visited the site a few times, made no searches or arrests, and appreciated that we were aware of and compliant with the five crown land rules. However, there were a few things that made me aware that much would have to be done to prevent the fate of our European counterparts.

The music was excellent all weekend, although it seemed like things had gone rather mental on Saturday, when I nearly found myself in a fight with someone who had allegedly robbed another person at the party for sixty dollars. I was wearing a pink shirt (Pinko bastard that I am) and I had a beer bottle in my hand when we confronted him and I believe he was one of those people with a severe phobia towards beer because he pulled a knife and proceeded to talk like he had lost a good deal of brain capacity. This idiot made everyone at the party feel unsafe while we tried to persuade him to come clean and leave. Despite this rather excessively stupid man and his friends I found most people at the event to be very open and respectful. Local residents were a blast to have at the party - they were friendly, fun, and volunteered their assistance quite freely. At one point we were treated to a visit by a water truck, who sprayed down heat-exhausted party people entirely for free! However, not everyone had a clear perspective on what sort of attitude the organizers were hoping for.

That is to say, there were certain issues with how a lot of participants understood this event, ranging from carelessness with regards to safety to utter disregard for issues of garbage and hygiene. It seems that one of the big cons to an autonomous zone is that people often take the idea of free parties for granted, or see work as a form of payment rather than a responsible and ultimately rewarding experience. To me it seems that many people are too brainwashed by the idea of hierarchy and hegemony and that as the result of this sort of flawed thinking, many people at this year's event had the idea that it was the responsibility of some sort of central organizing body (seemingly viewed by some as being the Weskodyne Warriors) to clean up after everyone. Dealing with burned-out barbecues and tents filled with garbage was no fun, although the rest of the festival certainly was.

One of the highlights of the festival was the laser show from the Weskodyne stage, which created a bizarre tryptamine tunnel effect along the length of the runway of the festival grounds, a former airport for crop-spraying flights, while projections against the sheer face of the quarry made it look like the stone was melting; Maybe it was the paper dissolving on my tongue. Not really sure. Afterglow set up a long string of Christmas lights which ended at a surreal stage consisting of tons of gear for live PA and blacklights, playing psychedelic trance which echoed in the distance through the crags above. Neurotik's austere black and white stage and onslaught of French hard techno ripe with spectrum-twisting grinds and high tempo funkiness gave us a good taste of the new imports to Canada via Montréal. The Pink:sox stage was somewhat like a post-apocalyptic crash-zone, playing random experimental forms of cyber-punk überhardness while surrealistic visuals were projected on to the surrounding tarp. The Spazz Collective came up from San Fransisco to do their circus-freak funkiness and the Havoc crew brought up a few hardcore and jungle DJs to represent Brooklyn, NYC.

The theme of the weekend, to me at least, was figuring out how to be a highly principled and compassionate warrior spirit in the face of the things you fear. Between the thug robbers and the amount of DJs caught on their locked grooves for too long on Saturday night it was a bit of a challenge to figure out where my centre was. I walked to the top of the quarry with a friend and talked about synchronicity and it dawned on me that each of us was having some sort of self-realization process that weekend. I met many interesting and beautiful people, had the company of some of the best people in the planet, and felt great hope for the future of this festival. From its humble beginnings, the Canadian Teknival has grown and evolved into a uniquely effective festival with international draw to pull in people from France and win the respect of our counterparts from other countries. I feel with the sort of foundation we have already built that things are surely looking up from here. Everybody got to express themselves in a new and fresh way - I for one felt so good at being able to express myself on so many levels in the course of the weekend that I now feel like I can take on just about anything. I got that vibe from a lot of people and at the end of the weekend I felt pure and loving, spiritually whole and free. And freedom is what it's all about.

Peace.

Erik Lacroix.