capodimonte, italy

and what a brilliant festie that was! absolutely splendid! let me run through my experience with you. :)

timo and i drove down from amsterdam and arrived in bolsena after 16 hours straight driving. wandered around the beautiful lil' town for a while, but couldn't find any available accommodation, so we drove on down to montefiascone where we took a really comfortable room for the night with a very friendly italian woman who spoke english!! (for the record: this turned out to be quite a rare occurrence in italy during our time there.) ate delicious pizza and drank yummy wine on a terrace overlooking lago di bolsena while watching the sun go down. anyone who claims that italy is expensive should get their heads examined - the most expensive pizza on the menu was € 6!

headed down to capodimonte the next morning, and went straight to the festie site. no problems getting onto the site - there was only 3 or 4 cars ahead of us. nothing like the 8 hours we had to queue for boom last year! :P we weren't even after getting our wristbands when we spotted (and were spotted by, one of the austrian crew - bernd). :) we weren't allowed to bring our car onto the festie site, so we had to park the car in the furthest field from the entrance and make 4 trips back and forth before all our stuff was on site. luckily the french contingent had been there since the previous night and had managed to save lots of camping space for us in probably the most sheltered part of the whole camping area.

bit by bit, more and more friends starting turning up and our camp turned into a very international happening. french, irish, dutch, english, canadian, swedish & danish. :) oh, and the spanish contingent arrived the next day. :) s'what i love most about festies - the big reunion. :)

between us, we had 3 big gazebos (party tents) so we were sorted for shade. first night saw us all getting a good night's sleep, and we were pleased to see that the sun didn't hit our tent until gone 9 in the morning! wikkid. :)

so. music kicked off on friday at 6pm with tikal live. they were good, but not as good as i've seen them before. they've gone a little bit more direction cheese than they were a year ago. i'll be honest and say that i can't remember how marchello dj'd, or if pulsar were any good live - i left it too long before writing this review, and my memory's failing... didn't get to see domestic live though, which i'd have liked to.. but i was already snuggled up in my sleeping bag at that point. :)

saturday! got up in time to get the end of antaro's set, which was quite good. x-noize live weren't up to much though. you'd think the tracks were getting somewhere each time, but then they'd fall flat again. plus too much vocoder samples. i hate vocoders. can't say i remember what du serena djed, but next up was silicon sound, and he played a fantastic set. started off easy and a bit progressive, and built it up until it was totally full on. one of the best live sets of the festie. polaris played live after him, also very good, and then loopus in fabula which was, well, as loopus as loopus is. :) i quite enjoyed that too - while slurping damion's vodka and peach iced tea mixture. that's a winner mate! ;) and after that we staggered down to the chillout for a while.

'fraid i had to get some sleep in again on saturday night/early hours of sunday, so i missed wizzy noise, which is not happy about, but sacrifices had to be made somewhere. managed to get up for the 2nd hour of shane gobi's set though, and that was fairly decent. but i'd been waiting for wrecked machines, and he didn't disappoint. really kicking set, i loved it. XP played one of the best sets at the festie i thought! i was expecting to be fairly amused during his set, but he actually played really really well. :) he was followed by pixel, who also played a kicking set. sunday was probably the best morning of music of the festival. we skipped bamboo forest (which we later heard was a mistake), and hopped down to the chillout to catch psyreviews damion's set. that was more than funny, that was pissing ourselves laughing for over an hour. :) around this time, andrei arrived along with a watermelon spiked with vodka, which was devoured by us all rather quickly. that was delicious. one of the few times i've seen timo eat fruit. ;)

i'm not sure if tripswitch knew how to follow on from damion's closing number - brian adams : run to me. ;) but follow on he did, and played a really beautiful live set. this totally distracted me, and then i realised that i'd missed ans! arse! we ran up to the main floor, but he was just finishing. i think it was at this point that i realised that i'd lost my camera. that was a bit of a downer. i retraced my steps all over all over the festival area, but couldn't find it anywhere. :( so after a wee bit we wandered back to the chill to catch some of youth's set. but ehm... at this point i was ehm... becoming slightly incapable of holding conversation, sitting straight or ehm... even being able to see, so i had to make the long trek back to my tent to recover a bit from the slight over-indulgence of various substances i'd previously partaken of. -ahem- =o|
so yeah, i missed youth. =o(
got an amazing night's sleep though. ;)

unfortunately my amazing night's sleep also meant that i missed etnica. we downright refused to go anywhere near the dancefloor while psysex and infected were on next morning... jesus, infected were *bad*, and it was even easy to make that judgement from what we could hear at our tents. horrid singing, horrific guitars, cheesy riffs... and they seemed to think they were rockstars, bless. i spent a bit of the morning wandering around looking for my camera - checking at the info area, but no luck. i resigned myself to the fact that it was only a camera after all, and it was replaceable. i could've lost a lot of more important things.
so once infected finally fucked off, we wandered down to catch altom, whom - if my memory serves me right - were good, but not outstanding. and then sub6 took the mic. literally. i've never been a sub6 fan - i hate vocoders (the only track i totally dislike on 'multiple organisms' is sub6 with michelle 'wailing' wosserface), but nothing had me prepared for what happened next. an mc. gangsta-rapping. sent us reeling... in a bad way. we ran away screaming (no exaggeration). took refuge in the chillout. caught the end of aes dana's set, and hung around for a lot of nova's set. after what we hoped was enough time, we made a gamble and wandered back toward the main stage. then something very fantastic happened. a girl came running from one of the chai tents, and grabbed timo's arm and asked "did a friend of yours loose a camera?" at this point, i grabbed *her*. :) to make a long story short, they'd found my camera on the path between the chillout and the mainfloor, hung around for a while to see if someone came looking for it, when that didn't happen, they flicked through the photo's (thank god for digital cameras), and recognised timo from the photos. =oD
but what was even funnier... is that they turned out to be from groningen, were there with trang and crew, and we have a number of friends in common! small world! and it really restored my faith in human nature. i couldn't believe my luck!
meet my heroes: björn and stephanie =o)

needless to say, that meant i was in excellent form for hallucinogen's live set, which didn't disappoint. simon delivered exactly what was expected of him - an hour of well produced swirling psychedelic music and sounds, playing lots of his well known classics. what is it about his music that's so timeless? :) he was followed by tristan, who was on the line-up as live and dj set, but couldn't dj cuz he had a perforated ear drum. pity, cuz i think he's a fantastic dj, but i'm not a fan of his live sets. although i was enjoyed it more than usual this time, at some point it got monotonous again so we headed off for the chill to catch ott, who was really good! :)