The strange journey of dreamSTATE continues on and amazingly enough we have survived. We left Toronto around four in the afternoon making our way north. Got to cottage country around six and ran into our first problem. The Native Canadians had blocked the road to the docks. Scott eventually negotiated a ride down the hill in their pickup, so we unloaded our van of gear into the back of the pickup, unloaded it at the dock, loaded it onto the ferry, unloaded from the ferry and into another pickup which took us across some incredibly bumpy paths to the site. So far so good, a few greased palms (20 here 20 there) and we were now about to enter our first rave. The natives said it was over 5500 strong. Rather hard to tell. We were dropped at a clearing which evidently was the entrance and here we were told that we had to move our gear, past the main stage and through its crowd, past the vendors towards the beach, along the beach past more vendors, another tent stage and along to the second stage - the ambient tent, all on foot over soft sand.

This portion of the journey took about the same time as it took us to get there from Toronto. Steve Sauve and I took the two two-wheelers stacked with racks and suitcases of gear and wires and attempted to push and pull them through the sand. Mario (my design partner and camera guy chronicling the journey), Scott and a native teen handled the carryables. They left me behind, literally in their dust. They had come back to help me. Anyway, enough of the hell, we were lucky only two pieces of gear went down. One of Scott's synths and one of my efx just weren't up for the journey.

The good part was that we played right on the beach looking out across Georgian Bay and all of these peaceful blissed out kids were hanging and chilling, listening to the thump and blast while soaking in the sun. It really was sort of like a modern day Woodstock, there was a great vibe. Kids would be walking up as we were playing, talking to us, hanging over our equipment and asking what we were doing. People were coming up offering us warehouse and other gigs. It was so flipping cool.

Playing was pretty weird though, the drum&bass from the main tent would be blasting out over the beach infiltrating our soundspace, mixed in with the waves lapping up in front of us. What else can you do but jam with it, I'm sure the DAT tape that we made off our mix is going to be much sparser than we'll remember. It would have been great to have had Perren there to make a live recording of what was going on all around.

We finished up around one and basked in the starlight for a while before packing up. We knew it would be hell getting our gear out of there. We were on the ferry as the sun was coming up and back in Toronto by about eight in the morning, incredibly baffed, stiff and hoarse, but we made it with a lotta help from our friends. Anyway, we survived and made new friends for dreamSTATE. ~ Jamie