Walking through the campgrounds you see folks chilling on their folding chairs snorting molly (MDMA) lines off their folding tables filled with beer cans and piles of previous night's used glow sticks. All bubbly and spun, people seem to have a good time nodding their heads, waving their hands like rap stars and in general dancing hiphop to the dubstep that's mostly played all weekend.
The fashions include lots of scantiness, neon colors, fishnets, dreadlocks, feathers in hair, painted boobies and big baseball caps with hand-crafted graffiti art on them. Girls' dance styles were, for the most part, very squiggly, sexy and stripper-like.
"I Don't Slip and Fall, I Trip and Roll"
Dexfest is a three day dubstep festival in Dandridge, Tennessee that went down for its third year last weekend. It was my first exposure to the American dubstep rave culture and man it's very different than the (European) psytrance scene I'm used to. Then again, some aspects of it remind me of the Finnish "spugedelic" factor - spuge [spoo-keh] is slang for a drunk. Generally this is when getting wasted is more important at a party than the music there.
Anyhow, on the last day I got into the music and danced until my feet hurt too much to continue. Dubstep is just so slow I figured it would surely be easier music to dance to if I was sedated on ketamine (a cat tranquilizer) as some of the patrons there advertised.
Speaking of drug use advertisement, my camping neighbors from Knoxville sold t-shirts with various slogans such as Rave All Day, Jesus raves, Bass Your Face and I don't slip and fall, I trip and roll (indicating acid and ecstasy use). Ironically I did witness a substantial amount of slipping and falling around the festival grounds…
The local police were hip on the drugs and arrested a whole bunch of people. The police presence was really very prominent.
Musical Highlights
The Launchpad stage had many interesting lesser known acts. Cherub was a joyous duo of two guys playing guitars (or bass?! I was too busy dancing to notice) to their electronic tracks and singing entertaining and witty lyrics, more or less in falsetto. Kidsmeal was up next and he played a dj set, scratching vinyls and in this way adding trippy, unexpected sounds to the otherwise a bit dull (to my taste) dubstep. Futexture was another artist who put an inspiring twist to his music with a kind of polyrhythmic and psychedelic sound world.
Emancipator played a tranquil and ethereal set that was very beautiful but at the same time put me to sleep rather early on Friday night. Saturday night's Boombox was funkyliciously great and they actually played two extremely psytrancy tracks that got me jumping around the grassy main stage area like a madman.
Omwoods Cosmic Playground
I made a few friends at the festival, most heartwarmingly Miss HoopRage. She vended hoops, tie dye clothes, jewelry and other festive hippie items. Her 2,5 year-old son Logan was the cuteness personified as he ran around the grounds with his own tiny hula hoop.
I put up a booth as well and offered free hooping workshops and 1 on 1 hooping lessons all weekend. I had a lot of fun decorating my Omwoods Playground booth with all types of colorful blowup toys and lights that I groundscored from previous weekend's Bonnaroo festival.
It was a festival to remember, I definitely got my heavy dose of dancing that I was looking for and held several nice and well-attended hoop workshops/playshops. Many heartfelt thanks to Dex/Sean and friends for putting the festival together. Hopefully I'll be able to go next year too. I wasn't converted to dubstep but was sufficiently turned on to it not to be done with it yet. Actually while hooping today I was disappointed I didn't have much dub on my ipod. Friends, feel free to email me some!
