When we arrive on site on Thursday afternoon, the rain intermittently pattering on our car as wait in a line for entry, it’s clear Earth Frequency Festival (14-16 February), on their 15th anniversary, is about to face one of it’s most challenging years yet.
What is usually one of Queensland’s hottest and driest festivals is instead rolling fields of mud, but somehow the build crew and management are calm and euphoric.While setting up camp, there is a feeling of tense, frantic energy in the air. The universal question – will the rain stay away? Will there be muddy feet stomping in increasingly sodden ground? Or will we be sunbaked by the hot Australian summer sun like usual?
We are dressed for the summer, but pulling tarps over our porous tents sourced from our parent’s sheds or K-mart, eyeing potent rainclouds. While the Earth Pod stage runs a bass-heavy sound test, and we taste a glimmer of the party ahead, they roll over us.
This is fairly on-brand for Earth Frequency. The landscape always challenges you, whether it is rain, heat or wind, but this always seems to bond us closer together.
Earth Frequency doesn’t call itself a community for nothing – almost every year you see the same people returning, seeking this seminal experience of dancing, dreaming and doofing together.
From the Kids Realm, which hosted face painting and theatre and revelries for the tiniest of doofers, to the late-night Olympic shenanigans at The Wonky Queenslander, Earth Frequency truly holds the greatest variety of experiences of any doof I have attended (and that’s too many to bother counting these days).
Whether it’s morning yoga, poetry and dance workshops or late-night bass music, fist-pumping with a dance floor esky that brings you here; whether you sleep in the luxury of an air-conditioned cabin, on Love Camp’s couches or in a new friend’s camp chair each night, there’s something here for you.
Image © Forest Fotos
Every kind of person, from every kind of life, converges here, and the way it builds a culture of understanding and respect is tangible.
The opening ceremony, on a clear and sunny afternoon lilting towards dusk, shows this clearly. Welcome To Country invited us all to Ivory’s Rock, the land of the Yugerra and Turrbal people, with traditional song and dance performed by the Nunukul Yuggera dancers.
Figureheads of our community, festival organiser Paul Abad and his powerhouse partner April, whose family grew with the recent birth of their son Xavi, were then ceremonially thanked for the work Earth Frequency does to spread cultural respect and awareness as a crucial part of the wider festival scene; organised without his knowledge, by his operations manager Rachel and her Kiwi team with puka shells and a performance by Maori and the Heilani Polynesian School of Arts.
Earth Frequency plays a flagship role in representing the best of doof culture, a culture often misunderstood by all the people in our ‘normal’ lives, has to offer.
It’s a privilege and a challenge that Paul, his universally dedicated staff and volunteers, as well as the attendees all take such an inspiring amount of responsibility for.
Over the weekend, I witnessed so many minor but magnificent moments of cultural dialogue and critique spread understanding and empathy.
It was there in the beautiful, dreaded doof pixies patting police horses and strengthening community relationships. It was in the importance of the educational seminar on pill testing by The Loop UK hosted in the Conscious Nest, spreading the importance of information and the role of harm reduction in the safety of our community.
It was the topic of talks held by experts on economy and its effects on ecology and psychology as well as one held by Jonathon Sri (Greens councillor for the Gabba Ward in Brisbane) on shaping cultural revolution as a collective. It was a year of importance in the narrative of social change that’s occurring within the context of Australian festival politics and the desire to keep our young people within every kind of party culture safe.
Image © Forest Fotos
It is also flagship within its own artistic community, both in its impeccable musical bookings and its prominent focus on the visionary arts.
Harmonic Spaces, organised by Paul Abad in Byron the weekend before the festival, this year hosted iconoclasts like Mugwort, Autumn Skye, Miles Toland, Luke Brown, Adam One, whose artist talk described creativity like a fire that spreads between us, a metaphor for something tangible I witnessed.
The addition of a visual art gallery to doofs is something that can easily pass under the radar of one’s party experience.
At Earth Frequency, it is held in balance with the attention on the musical talent booked through artist talks, live painting and VJing, the slightly lesser-known art of creating and altering the projections behind a DJ to enrich the experience of the dance floor and the minds moving within it. This is where the visual and the sonic work together in symphony.
Throughout the weekend, there were incredible examples of the dance that two artists of different mediums can play in an environment like a doof.
Mugwort and Clozee, two of the headline artists of each format of art, danced together musically and visually during Clozee’s set to bring the dance floor to an elevated, ecstatic mass moving together in body and mind.
This echoed on the Subterran stage during its closing sets as Chuck from just chuck projected a Halo speed-run by Rynasaurus’ request that perfectly synched with his set.
Following this, Jake French from Satan’s Rainbow, played in picturesque, electric harmony with Hypnagog to bring the stage a satisfying symphony slowly winding down and closing out the stage on Monday afternoon.
Earth Frequency encourages delving into visionary artists and their important space in the pastiche of creativity that blooms from doof culture, and amplifies the atmosphere to one of a truly profound and playful experience.
You will find art everywhere you look at Earth Frequency. For the first year, an interactive game of costumed performers played and laughed with festival goers to encourage them to engage with one another and embody the sense of fun that exists in the adult playground of a good festival.
Image © Forest Fotos
The Festival’s Poets Breakfast, held at a reasonable 10am rather than the usual 8am, and The Wonky Queenslander in collaboration with Love Camp hosted poetry from festival goers sharing the soft, funny or deep parts of themselves to connect through creating.
One of the most unique spaces, equally challenging and valuable depending on the hour and your headspace is the Liminal Caravan. A project that participates in Tasmania’s Dark Mofo, it hosts grittier, artistic experiences and performances, sometimes uncomfortable or uncanny or strange.
‘Manmade epiphany’ is a concept Kurt Vonnegut coined that fits perfectly in my mind to describe this festival. Earth Frequency creates such a space for self-growth, self-expression, self-exploration that each member of this little community all hold for one another in this space of art and amazement, of music and memory making, of care and creativity.
You can’t help but discover yourself a bit there, out under the bright stars. You can’t help but experience the joys and challenges of personal and community epiphanies.
We are all brought together by this desire for the beauty that comes when people are open to the experiences of each other, and communally share the bright joy, soft vulnerability and catharsis that comes in a throbbing dance floor allowing enough space to truly move to the musical moments we experienced together.
On Friday, Cinii opens Subterran stage with a dark and beautifully strange techno set that entranced the dance floor, ready to start kicking the mud and Earth Frequency 2020 off to a strong start.
Later in the evening, the Earth Pod stage featured a stellar line-up of bass music. Bayawaka’s pounding, energetic bass music sparks a warm glow in the air that lasts all weekend.
JFB, one of the UK’s leading turntablists, took over in an absolutely filthy, technical set that showcased his talent. He ramped the dance floor towards the crescendo of kLL sMTH and dela Moon, who closed out the night with brilliant and bangin’ bass music.
On Saturday I woke up paying for my late Friday night, which seemed to be a fairly universal mood throughout the party. After we all congregate at Opening Ceremony, the festival disperses to fill dance floors and begins warming up with now somewhat sunburnt bodies still stomping in the soft ground, a dissonance we solved with dancing.
Drum & bass, my favourite sonic stimulant, is radiating from Earth Pod and draws me in. SAFE Events, a Brisbane bass music crew, showcased local and interstate talents Doe, Koya Dubs, Nomia and Green Eggs and Sam (who, in my opinion, has a sick name rivalled only by his taste in D&B).
Their comfort playing together, creating a seamless and dynamic flow of filthy and fantastic tracks from the world's best D&B producers bring the dance floor to a perfect boiling point of heaving movement.
It is packed out by the time The Librarian takes over the decks, and she plays a technically astounding set to a frothing dance floor. After which Dub Phizix and Strategy take the stage to slam the point and the bassline home – this is one of the pinnacle moments of the party
Image © Forest Fotos
This is, again, the beauty and curse of Earth Frequency. There is always something astounding you’ll miss. While I experience this, Main Stage hosts the likes of Opiuo and The Mood Swing and Chevy Bass Band, an ensemble of extraordinarily talented musicians and crafted visuals by just chuck.
Simultaneously, on the Wonky Queenslander stage, Barkley’s glitch-hop leads perfectly into BustaFlux, who plays to a buzzing dance floor. His opening track, a new remix of 'Energy' by Sampa The Great sets the scene for an extraordinary and energetic performance of heavy drum & bass.
Fast forward to Sunday night on Main Stage. After a congregational psy-trance day session colloquially called ‘Church’ that missed familiar faces like Tetrameth, but featured fun, zappy and powerful sets from both Zen Mechanics and E-Clip, and a punchy but playful set by Twisted Sibling.
The day moved into techno, with Paul Abad taking the stage at his own party to play his aesthetic of warm, rich and heart-pumping techno. In this, he takes a moment to share the part of him that is the spark that ignited this party 15 years prior – his love of good, electronic music and the passion for playing it.
The sun sets to the sounds of Somatoast's unique sonic taste singing from the subwoofers while people flock towards the dance floor for the tasty sets promised tonight. There follows world-class international and iconic sets that push the limits of sonic excellence.
As the night unfolds from Clozee into Koan Sound into K-Lab, a line-up made in doofer heaven, the strangest synchronicity happens. Clozee also plays a new remix of the same Sampa The Great track ‘Energy’, with her own, unique and precise flair to it that defines her experimental bass music and makes her one of my favourite DJs to see live.
It was a thematically perfect soundtrack for the festival that cemented my realisation that the deepest value of Earth Frequency is in the energy the community collectively co-creates during this festival.
Whether celebratory or challenging, radiant or dark, this festival is a seminal experience that has been cultivated and nurtured over 15 years.
The people who have congregated here form a momentous and meaningful community that finds the balance in supporting and witnessing one another, in both chaos and creation.
It reveals and tunes each of us growing up within to an important epiphany about what we live on earth for. An Earth Frequency, if you will.
