ElectroJams

From a variety of vantage points to watch the DJ sling tunes, to a close proximity to a bar, to a patio behind the aforementioned DJ, you can move wherever you want if your placement gets to feeling stale. Instead, Mark Farina is a purveyor of plateaus, gliding from one track into the next flawlessly, seemingly without effort, while towing a line that gives the crowd what they want and knowing what’s best for them. Intermittently, local stalwart Chuck Love stepped up to the table and provided live accompaniment on everything from shakers to a child size french horn (I think?) to a melodica. Then along comes Mark Farina at the end of the night, as I’m watching a lightning storm in the not to distant distance with my special lady friend, and I yell in the least romantic thing possible into her ear, “

I was happy to see his name on the lineup this year and ecstatic when I saw he’d be playing Carousel Club, even if it meant missing the end of Odesza. After a time, well essentially after a half hour plus walking through the Forest time, people started to file in. It’d be funny to see the numbers on the amount of people who started at Odesza with the intention of hitting up Amtrac’s set at Carousel Club, then see how many of those got side-tracked in the Forest and then those who wound up stuck somewhere in the Hanger. This year, while enduring our own kind of wait sorting out our wristband debacle, we witnessed staff in the 4ITF/6ITF line siphoning off from the main line when it got too backed up.

Orbiting the Chiptunes genre and computer game designer Uctumi is a Argentinean based producer and programmer, currently working on C64 formats, he is one of these producers that travels down the path of both new production methods with Chiptune Chiptracking and this can be tricky because of lack of production details allocated to the sounds in Chiptuning, but Uctumi has done a brilliant job with this venture, when I heard The Telesounds ( version of space poo intro) it really made me smile in a why that inspired me to find out more about him and his projects. what the Chiptune production in the mid and hi range does to you, accompanying this cleverly is a deep bass and a electric c64 filler surrounding a kick that has almost been relaxed or to told be calm, but the under lining energy is still there. Among that he has a new C64 project out soon, Full Contact is a kept secrete but it looks at first Glance that Kung-Fu is involved, exciting, with the programming help from Majikeyric and Graphics from Grass, Uctumi’s musical talent has given this the perfect finish and in keeping with the C64 bubble without going to far towards modernisation, more to be shown soon. But thats not it, he has Pungas radio, a chiptune and experimental 8bit radio station, with shows/ sections like the Amiga PC module which show cases in my opinion too the diverse and again strange world of Chip tracking and 8Bit music to the International artist section which will hammer out experimental madness from all over the world, so if SIDs are your thing and obscure computer programmed music then head here.

In their own words, Electric Forest HQ says about the festival, EF’s unique approach to focusing on the EXPERIENCE as much as the music, and the festival’s core commitment to building and nurturing community are the very reasons Electric Forest is so special. New this year is a kind of space-loaning program where HQ partitioned out a couple time slots each day in the Psychedelic Chapel to provide an opportunity for attendees to produce their own Forest attraction. I covered the big names of the lineup already, but that’s not quite enough with four days’ worth of music, and that’s not even counting the tertiary lineups for the RV afterparty madness or the Grand Artique’s offerings inside the festival. He’s also the fifth Dirtybird labelmate on the lineup, so I’m not sure why they don’t have a curated stage this year.