California Love

Somewhere between snorting the ashes of a sacred Brazilian tree, losing my shit at the late-night ecstatic dance party (think somewhere in between yoga and a mosh pit), and taking an earnest crack at cosmic meditation led by a Native American tribal shaman, it hit me: I had become a fucking hippie. After three decades of acerbic cynicism, my ever-deepening jade was evaporating like wisps of palo santo in the dusty haze of a Mojave sunset. And I liked it.

This kind of realisation is a common occurrence on dancefloors, yoga mats, hammocks and tea houses at hippie festivals on the West Coast of the US, and is the kind of transformation that defines (and names) the whole movement as it spreads from the arid deserts of California to festival communities around the world.

In the UK, festival culture too often means a middling status quo of forgettable piano house doused over dancefloors strewn with nitrous oxide canisters stamped into the mud. Stateside, the dying throes of EDM find teenagers still clad in neon gurning their faces off in stadium parking lots while on questionable amphetamine salts and the sad, sad thud of big-room house. But way out in the dusty recesses of California, there’s a movement afoot. The ethos, aesthetic, and elevated hedonism of Burning Man have influenced a new generation of ravers and club kids who now seek a sense of community, spiritual and environmental consciousness, and an appreciation of the surreal. The result is one of the most vibrant and dynamic communities in dance music.

The West Coast transformational festival scene is the best in the world, and it’s not just limited to California or even the US, it runs the whole Western coastline. From deep in the jungles of Tulum in Mexico, where Damian Lazarus’ Day Zero party packed more energy onto the leafy dancefloor than most of the BPM Festival could in a week, to the unbridled decadence of Desert Hearts outside San Diego, up to Lightning In A Bottle and Symbiosis in North California – the twin crown jewels of the whole scene – through to the steps of Oregon’s Mount Hood for What The Festival and into Canada for Shambhala: all these events are loosely connected satellites within a grassroots community drawn together by niche dance sub-cultures and a diaspora of Burning Man-inspired hippie sympathisers.

“West Coast festivals are the best festivals,” says Dirtybird head honcho and worldwide festival heavyweight Claude VonStroke. “I think they’re amazing. They’re really creative and interesting and fun, and there are all kinds of weird people and regular people. The crowd’s not as uptight. They’re more free with expressing themselves and being weird. People are taking care of each other, looking out for each other. There’s so much stuff that you don’t expect to see, and you don’t know why it’s there. It’s cool like that.”

Put on by The Do LaB, who produce the eponymously named and iconic stage at Coachella, Lightning In A Bottle is the leading music festival in the community and a pristine example of an event’s potential beyond just just music. This year, within the space of 24 hours, I watched a performance troupe of silver-painted zombies in Victorian-era clothing stalk through a valley, almost got hustled out of money by feral-looking children during a card game in a frontier town shanty, learned about deconstructing masculine hegemony during a talk in the grass, got lost in an absurdist mystery maze set in a hotel with walls made of teddy bears, and watched a naked man frying on hallucinogens bumrush the stage and attempt to violate Jamie xx during his excellent headlining performance not to mention sets by Steve Bug, Four Tet, and Guy Gerber. Suffice to say, this ain’t your average woods rave.

Ideas like inclusion and participation, civic responsibility, self-expression, leaving no trace, giving, the fact that a festival should be about much more than just music, and that those who attend have a responsibility to contribute to the communal experience – these have all trickled down from the dogma of Burning Man. But the seeds of the transformational community go way farther back.

“There’s a hippie heritage to the West Coast, an enduring mentality that still lingers from the sixties,” says scene legend and UK expat Lee Burridge, whose All Day I Dream parties channel the West Coast vibe while touring the world. “It’s evolved, though. No longer are hippies simply the great unwashed of the world who opt out of what is supposedly normal life. Lots of different and diverse types of people embrace their inner hippie nowadays, while at the same time holding down professional careers. Spirituality, yoga, meditation are practiced by people outside of the granola brigade.”

For example, California’s transformational scene is now where the well-bred, sunkissed, upper-middle class suburban daughters of baby boomers blossom into festival goddesses. They descend upon dancefloors like mermaids from Neptune, replete with neon-dyed hair, sparkles, glitter, skin, smiles, and tabs of acid, wrapped up like trippy fashion aliens. The feminine energy at transformational festivals is strong, from the performers to the dancefloor to the workshops and production teams. “It’s a very open atmosphere, a safe atmosphere for women,” says Ashley Lorona, a dusty dancefloor regular who works as a brand ambassador for a biodegradable glitter company. “Everybody has room to dance. There aren’t a lot of guys creeping out on girls. There are things that I would wear at a transformational festival that I would never wear in a club or at a rave, because I know that it won’t be viewed as a sexual thing.”

At Symbiosis, I’m dancing waist-deep in a lake. Across a crowded dancefloor so shrouded in dust that you can barely make out the limbs moving through the haze, Justin Martin drops a boisterous booty house set from a bamboo stage swathed in autumnal colors. The sinking sun casts an amber hue on bohemian ravers deep in the groove, waved-out hip kids in circular shades floating on cartoonish inflatables, topless sirens sea-bathing and bemused toddlers splashing around. Behind me, a hovercraft built into the shell of a vintage Delorean sports car whizzes back and forth atop the water. Amidst this idyllic bedlam, I wade into the deep, gingerly remove my trunks and let the cool freshwater seep into my netherest of regions. And then the acid kicks in.

On the subject of drugs: California is home to the finest marijuana the world has to offer. Even the pretenders in Amsterdam will shush their protestations when presented with a chubby spliff of Jack Herer or any OG varietal. Furthermore, California’s close proximity to Mexico means it’s the most directly connected to Mexico’s thriving international drug trade. Although this fraught situation has ghastly political and human effects for many, for California’s festivalgoers it means one thing: lots of high quality narcotics. But the traditional drug of choice, passed down through hippie lore from the Grateful Dead through Phish and Bassnectar alike, is the good ol’ fashioned hallucinogen. Nothing fits the model of transformation like your very own acid-soaked Kool-aid test through the circuit’s conveyor-belt
of surreal experiences.

Despite this, medical emergencies are rare and deaths are so far (touch wood) unheard of at transformationals. Harm reduction organisations like Dancesafe and The Zendo Project are ever-present, offering literature, psychological and medical attention, and in some cases, on-site drug testing, a policy still considered taboo at most mainstream festivals. The Drug Policy Alliance has stated that “Lightning In A Bottle had more going on in terms of harm reduction than any other festival in the United States – by far” in 2015. The community is blazing a trail towards true harm reduction in America’s archaic drug policy landscape. These festivals may be parties, but the interactions they engender manifest in the real world.

The Flemming brothers who run The Do LaB openly state that the musical programming is a gateway to cultural discovery, a trojan horse into the community, and nobody is a better example of this process than Desert Hearts. After discovering The Do LaB at Coachella, a gaggle of colourful party animals from San Diego formulated their masterplan on the dancefloor at LIB for a renegade campout off the grid with one stage, 72 hours, only house and techno. Two Burning Men later, Desert Hearts was born. Since then it has become the most talked-about event in the underground dance scene in the US. Easy on the esoterica, heavy on the hedonism, the approachability of Desert Hearts is an example of the transformational scene organically regenerating gateways to appeal to a widening network of cultural elements. The fact is, Desert Hearts’ success is a harbinger of the transformational movement’s mainstream potential and future direction.

This is further evident in the corporate festival industry’s adoption of transformational traits. SFX’s Mysteryland in New York State, sister festival to Tomorrowland in Belgium, has taken to offering yoga and mediation among other hippie-centric elements and DJ bookings, and it’s no secret where they got their inspiration. The Do LaB’s Dede Flemming does not fear over-exposure. “I think it’s good that parts of this style of festival are being poached a little bit,” he says. “It creates more exposure for the kind of stuff we’re trying to share with the world. If it comes from a place of greed or selfishness, well, it just won’t last long. It’s not like people will be fooled.”

In many ways, the flourishing of transformational festivals is a sign of the American dance public weaning off of EDM corporate mega-raves. People are looking for an experience with more of a human touch and a collective consciousness; for boutique productions geared towards niche tastes and made with love – something most massive festivals just can’t provide. Even if you’ll never be into healing crystals or psy-trance, there is definitely something going on in the desert.

“In my opinion, the dust becomes a great equaliser,” says Lee Burridge. “Everyone is suddenly from the same planet... even if it doesn’t seem like it’s this one.”