[Boom 2006 review]

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I went to boom to & I totally agree the music on the night was terrible!! I loved the music on the day especially cosmosis but it was to hot to dance, I was gutted! Apart from that I really enjoyed it I will definetly go to the next one, I just hope they sort the music out! Im gonna go to the freedom fest next year aswell the line up is wicked

[Boom 2006 review]

I thought I'd better write my boom review before I forget it all, so here it

is. After spending the 3 days beforehand gathering strength at a campsite on

the opposite side of lake idahna, we arrived in the boom queue at about 8am

on the Thursday and found ourselves directed into an industrial area and the

back of a 5km queue. The industrial area was chaos, with cars everywhere, it

was obvious we weren't going to be going anywhere for a while. An hour or

two later the industrial area had filled up completely, and the local police

started letting vehicles in from another direct, so now there were 2 huge

queues joining the main, huge queue. We waited, and by 12.30pm, we still had

not moved a centimeter, so the government and I decided to park the car up

and take what we could carry and walk into the festival. This proved to be a

very wise decision, it took us about 45 minutes to walk to the gate off the

main road, there was still another 4km to walk to the site from there, but

you make your own luck, and ours was a friend, Kiwi Ben, was 2nd in the

queue in a car that had room for us and all our stuff, so we hitched a ride

with him the rest of the way. We were onsite and wristbanded by 2pm, people

in the queue with us didn't get in until 2am.

 

After setting up camp on a ridge overlooking the main dancefloor, we went

for a dip in the lake to cool and a wander round to get our barings. I was

immediately struck by the scale of the site, it must have been a good 5

minute walk from dance floor to chill out, and from the car park to the

furthest reaches of the camp site would have been about 15 or 20 minutes.

Wicki and Monster Ron turned up around 7ish and we spent the evening

drinking and getting a little bit wonky. Next thing I knew it was 4am and I

crawled into bed. We managed to sleep until about 9am before the heat forced

us out of the tent. After brekkie, I hitched back into Idahna with a couple

of very friendly portuguese guys and picked up the car and drove it back...

there was no queue whatsoever.

 

The music kicked off at 6pm, can't remember who played first, but it was

fairly awful live-band type trance. Sensient played next, and as ever, he

was wicked...deep, groovy progressive. Unfortunately, things went downhill

pretty quickly from there. P-Mac played next, and he started ok, but by the

end of his 2 hour set, the music was already dark and screeching... this was

10pm, and this is the way it stayed for what felt like forever. We retreated

to the chill, and stayed there until dawn having a good giggle. I did

venture over to the dancefloor at one point during the night, I think Highko

was playing, who replaced Kindzadza who had visa problems (yeah, right, like

WHATEVER! ;-), and the music was absolutely horrific. Trauma trance. Just a

trance beat with a load of very high-pitched screeching over the top.

Nothing psychedelic about it in my opinion; and no-one looked like they were

enjoying it while they were dancing either. Just lots of faces looking very

serious at best and very aggressive at worst. I didn't meet anyone at the

festie who said they enjoyed it. That was the last time I visited the dance

floor after midnight. At 6am we ventured back to the dancefloor for

Shawnodese's dj set; it was just starting to get light and we thought the

music might change as the sun rose. It didn't. It just got darker and

darker; at 7.30am he played a track with the sample "pure evil" repeated

several times. It was the worst set of the entire festival for me, and

everyone else I was with, simply because it was completely inappropriate for

the time of day, and a lot of people were gagging for something different

after being subjected to the barrage of darkness for 9 hours. A couple of

friends from bristol even got up and went and asked the sound engineer to

turn it down ;-) He certainly wasn't playing to the crowd, who were just

bobbing up and down going through the motions, so therefore he must have

been playing to massage his own ego.  Afterwards Electric Universe played,

which, although I don't like all the guitars (and guitar player/rock god

posturing) and over-the-top melodies, was like having my brain flossed with

the finest silk compared with what had come before. He was billed to play

for an hour, with Transwave afterwards, but for some reason Transwave didn't

play then, and Electric Universe played for 2 hours. Next up was a

portuguese dj, can't remember his name, but he started off very well and we

finally got some good music for an hour or so, before he descended into the

biggest cheese fest I've heard since I used to go to parties in belgium. At

least that was funny though. When the gorgonzola had been polished off, it

was Banel's turn, and he played one of the only 2 good prog dj sets of the

festival Next up was Liquid Soul, and in my book he saved the 1st day. It

was progressive psytrance at it's very best, groovy basslines, lush pads and

beautiful melodies; one of the highlights of the festival. Sadly the good

music didn't last, cos Matera from Tropical Beats took to the decks and set

the tone for a large amount of the progressive music at Boom. It was housey,

plodding nonsense with opressive basslines and bored me relentlessly and

eventually sent us packing back to the chill out.

 

A quick word about the chill at boom, I've never been to a better one. It

was a beautiful indonesian bamboo marquee, surrounded on 3 sides by the lake

and it was absolutely enormous with masses of shade and loads of space to

collapse. I've no idea who played when, but the music was usually pretty

good, especially after the music on the main stage had finished at 5pm each

day; when we heard some beautiful downbeat trance that reminded me of the

golden days of Transient Dawn.

 

Sunday, Monday and Tuesday have already blended into one, possibly because

they were very much the same as each other (and I don't have the schedule

written down to refer to!), lots of shite music punctuated by a couple of

hours of good music; and possibly because of the mescaline and the opium ;-)

We didn't bother staying up all night again, cos there was absolutely no

point, so we slept from about 1am until 7 or 8am, when we thought it was

safe to venture to the dancefloor. Overall the music was better than the 1st

day, but there was still an awful lot of shite. There were good DJ sets from

Teko, Goblin, Ma Faiza, Marko (who seemed to play a lot of

Rastaliens/Braincell tunes) and Sally Doollally who played the other good

prog set (and finished up with Minilogue's rmx of Teardrop by Massive Attack

=D), there were excellent live sets from Billy Cosmosis, who gave the

performance of the festival, dancing like a loon, totally and genuinely into

his music, and Commercial Hippies, who were absolutely rocking. There were

other good live sets from yotopia, lish, transwave (providing a very welcome

old skool blast from the past), broken toy and cosm, who gets the prize for

remix of the festival for his brilliant re-working of queen's another one

bites the dust ;-). A special mention must go to Pysnema who provided a

combined audio visual set, playing good music and mixing it in with video

footage of the festival so far and also soundbites from performers and

punters, very innovative stuff =D I've got to have a bit of a whinge about

most of the progressive music played at the festival, especially the dj

sets, they were all exactly as I described matera's set, and it was a bigger

disappointment to me than the night music (I was expecting to hate the night

music, but I was expecting to enjoy the prog). If this is the new trend then

it seems that progressive psytrance is losing it's psychedelic elements and

becoming much more electro house/cocaine music. Quite a few of the acts

seemed to be from Tropical Beats, and not one of them made me want to buy

anything from that label.

 

We got up at 7am on the final day to catch Dick Trevor's DJ set, which

proved to be the best one of the festival for me. It was just what I like

from a full-on morning set, a groove, no cheese, and a sense that the set is

actually going somewhere. His mixing didn't seem to be quite up to his usual

very high standards, but that is only a very minor gripe, cos it was still

very good. Next up were Bio-Tonic (I think!), they were nothing special,

mainly because of too many cheesy vocal samples, but they didn't have us

running for the hills. W00t-ah (aka Zen Mechanics) was next on, playing

live, and boy does this man have the tunes at the moment, his set was up

there with the Commercial Hippies and Cosmosis for me. He needs to work on

his interaction with the crowd, for me, but he's only just started playing

live, so this will come Then the music suddenly turned progressive with a

DJ set from Flow Records' Pena; unfortunately, after a promising start, this

ended up being the same as most of the rest of the progressive and it bored

the pants of us. Fortunately, Andromeda came on next, and they were up there

with Liquid Soul on the first day, really smooth, rolling tunes with

perfectly judged melodies. Their remix of Jean-Michel Jarre's Oxygene is

straight out of the top drawer and their stage presence is good too, lots of

bouncing round like loons and interaction with the crowd. After this we took

a break from the dancefloor for a few hours, as the music was going on until

midnight, so we missed vaishiyas and mapusa mapusa, but came back for

Cellie's DJ set at 6pm, which was good but nothing special. After that it

was the return of the Dickster playing as AMD with Jules Hamer (Aphid Moon),

this was excellent too, and had the crowd, which by this time was absolutely

massive really going for it. Deedrah followed them with his live set, which

was also very good, finishing with a stonking re-working of Reload. Finally,

to close the festival, it was the return of Tsuyoshi after his self-imposed

exile to techno-land. He started well enough, but by the end his tunes were

straight from the camembert collection; loads of 'orrible guitars and

over-the-top melodies.

 

All in all, I've never been to a festival with so much crap music, now I

know this is my opinion, but it is also one shared by everyone I know who

was at the festival, and the vast majority of people that I met there. I

have nothing against dark music in general, there are acts out there that

are hard, dark and psychedelic, Scorb, Deviant Species and EVP to name but

three and some of these should have been included on the line-up. There was

also an imbalance in sheduling for me, with the amount of full-on and

progressive equalling the amount of trauma trance, and there being more

progressive than full-on. Finally (I've prattled on about the music for too

long already), the break each day was too long, with the music finishing at

5pm and only starting again at 10pm. I realise time is needed to set up the

stage for the live bands that start each night, but two hours should be

sufficient for that imho, and it would give extra time to squeeze a bit more

full on onto the schedule, without making dark/prog fans suffer.

 

Apart from the general vibe, the amazing location and good times with

friends, old & new, what made Boom 2006 so special was the level of

production and the attention to detail from the organisers. First of all

they (finally) listened to the criticism of 2 key areas and did something

about it; the sound system was sorted out, no more out-of-synch 4 stack

system, instead there was 2 stacks of immensely powerful, but crystal clear,

Funktion 1 sound. And then there were the toilets; Boom festival toilets

have passed into legend as the most disgusting around, but not this time;

they were cleaned at least 3 times a day, there was always an attendent and

there was nearly always toilet paper, right up until the day after the music

finished. I've never been in better festival bogs... good work, fellas!

There ware also good touches all over the festival, a sprinkler system

fitted into the roof of the main floor, which provided a light refreshing

rain, and caused people to put umbrellas up when smoking chillums ;-), the

dance floor was covered with gravel so there was no dust; there were

recycling bins at various points around the dance floor, which people used;

there were sprinklers fitted outside the restaurants to keep the dust on the

track down; there was an amazing wooden bridge connecting the chill out with

the sacred fire area; there were shade structures built on the beaches; the

hippies were regularly hosed down, with great joy, by the bombeiros

(firemen), making the place smell better ;-) The art installations dotted

around the site were also great; the sacred fire area and the liminal

village looked fantastic, but I never spent much time there. My only slight

complaint about the set up, was that there were no back drops anywhere, I

love a good back drop, me, and it would have been nice to have seen some

next to the dance floor or the chill out. The queues on Thursday to get in

were unfortunate because it seemed that everyone arrived at once to get

there early before the queues started... cos it seemed that very few people

arrived on the Friday. Next time, please open the gates on-time (they were

eventually opened at 11.30am when they were advertised as opening at 6am),

or even better, open the site 2 days before the music begins.

 

Overall, it was a fantastic festival, and I'd definitely consider going back

in 2008, but please sort out the balance of music!

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