Starscape 2003

Pictures

Sara and I went out to Starscape 2003 last night. We spent most of saturday burning copies of my mix CD to hand out (Sara whipped up the CD insert on her Mac since mine doesn’t like doing much of anything else when it’s writing CDs. One day I’ll get that 32x Plextor into a FireWire case. Anyway…) and then ordered some Chinese delivery for dinner before heading out. That chinese turned out to be our downfall for the evening.

We arrived around 10pm, and already parked cars were lining the outbound side of Ft. Smallwood Rd. This kind of worried us, but we pressed on and the wonderful Parking Nazis guided us to a parking space in a field about 500ft from the main entrance. A few more minutes spent forking over $80 for two tickets and we were in.

It was odd for us this year since, as some of you may know, Sara and I worked to put together the Psytrance area at the 2002 Starscape. We spent that whole saturday from 8am on building, painting, positioning, waiting for power, checking sound… so much work that by the time the party started, we were all already exhausted and didn’t venture far out of our area for the whole night.

So this time around we got to do what we couldn’t do last year.

Of course, the two main areas this time around were the BuzzLife and Ultraworld tents. We pretty much preferred the former (we’re not big at all on DnB.) As soon as we walked into the tent, we spotted Big Nick and Thomas, and the DJ on at the time was spinning some rather groovy breaks, which seamed to turn to the hard industrial side of things later on. We danced a bit, hunge out with Foamy and crew who were on lights, and then left to go see when the Bhuto performance Sara wanted to see came on.

We were told the Bhuto performance would be at the Ultraworld tent, but we weren’t sure what time it was to go on… so we hung outside and waited for a bit while listening to some MC show how ghetto tuff he was to the crowd. Man, that was some funny shit. Kinda cemented the realization in me that DnB/Jungle is the white boy’s rap. It’s hard in juvenile proportions and lacks really any kind of intricacy or emotion (to you DnB heads: I’m referring to any kind of melody. Intricacy doesn’t apply to how many trash can-like whaps you can get out of your 909.) After waiting around some more and taunting the eyes-rolling-back-in-their-head rollers, we decided to go down and check out the waterfront.

Damn. The pier that everyone knows and loved was totally smashed by Hurricane Isabel the prior weekend. It looked as if a huge wave came along, lifted it out of the water, and just dropped it. Too bad… hopefully the city can find the money to fix it before next summer. I turned and saw the “Hypereal Netmeet” sign on the hill, but no one was there and I figured I’d check back later. A little bit later, though, we started to smell something familiar in the air… Kerosene!

We followed the wind to find our friends Janet, Dusty, Patty, and some others from Virginia wowing the crowd with their fire-spinning skills. I snapped some decent pictures of them spinning, and you can find them over in the gallery.

Pretty much the same vendors from last year were there again, and the poliferation of blinky light vendors was amazing. Everyone had rave toys to sell. Kind of kitschy if you ask me. I lost count of the number of kids I saw that had alternating blue and red LEDs flashing from some oriface or accessory.

By the time 1am rolled around, the aforementioned chinese dinner was beginning it’s onslaught on our stomachs (suggestion: Do NOT order from China Thai in Arbutus.) I think Sara had it worse than me, so rather than dance with fate (and potentially long porta-potty lines) we decided to head home.