Special Guest Daft Punk! Paradiso 6/28 - 6/29/13

Just kidding about the title...unfortunately. But even without Daft Punk, Paradiso was amazing. It's an electronic music festival at the Gorge Amphitheater in George, Washington. Yeah, there's seriously a town called George Washington, and there is a gorge (geographical feature) in George (city). After a pretty crazy day of packing and cleaning and moving out of our apartment and into a new one, Evelyn and I left for Seattle. 3 hours later we got to Tyler's dorm at University of Washington. My friend and roommate of the past two years, Tyler, is in Seattle for the summer, curing cancer. Another friend, Alexya, also came with us to the festival. The four of us left for the gorge, arriving a few hours later after a minor holdup due to some rocks being blasted off the side of a mountain into the road. Apparently that's a common occurrence there. We set up camp and went to explore the campground.

Since the festival hadn't started yet, the only thing to do that night was party in the campground, so naturally there was a lot going on. Some people had driven a school-bus-turned-party-bus, which attracted a large crowd both on the roof and around the bus. We wandered past the bus to find more music coming from every direction and thousands of people walking from campsite to campsite. We had a friendly encounter with some old hippies who caught us admiring the flag on their camper and we hung out with them for a bit. The campground atmosphere was amazing, everybody was there to have a good time and all douchbaggery had been forgotten and left behind.

The next morning we got baked out of our tent before 8am as the sun heated up the desert. Luckily the people next to us had come prepared for the sun and pulled a giant tarp out of their uhaul (yeah, they brought a uhaul to the festival with about 8 people and a couch in the back of it). Their tarp was too big for just their campsite, so we tied it to Tyler's jeep and it covered most of our campsite too. We made some bacon and eggs on their grill and chased it down with some 9am beers.

The festival started at 2 and we went in soon after. Nobody had heard of any of the early artists but they were good. We wandered around the 3 different stages and the rides and eventually found ourselves getting sucked into the main stage crowd, having landed ourselves front and center.

The gorge

For the next 8 hours or so we barely moved. We danced and we jumped but we stayed right up front until the end of the festival that night. Tommy Trash was surprisingly good, throwing down some dirty drops but adding the perfect amount of catchy tunes to his music. Morgan Page was also good, but as Markus Schulz came on and the darkness of night set in, the Gorge began to transcend into the digital world of morphing lights, psychedelic sounds, and mind-bending pyrotechnics. The night continued for what seemed like a magical eternity, with Zeds Dead twisting hip hop into dubstep and Porter Robinson sending chills down my spine with the arena-filling riffs of "Language" and "Unison". Last up was Tiesto, the god of electronic music, with a two-hour set. As the stage rose up and Tiesto came forward, I wasn't sure if I was seeing a DJ or if I was legitimately staring into the eyes of God. His stage presence was incredible and the deep thump of his music penetrated the air as one song evolved into the next.

hard to get a steady photo so this'll have to do

His songs were so fluid, perfectly timed with fireworks exploding, lights flashing, and mermaids dancing. Acrobats lined the stage, doing backflips 50 feet in the air and hanging upside down from ropes with only one foot. Lasers crossed the entire amphitheater and the stars shined down from above. As Tiesto finished his set, I remember questioning whether what I had just witnessed was actually real life. I never found an answer to that question, but I did eat some of the best donuts of my life on the way back to the campground that night.

The next morning we woke up seeming to have deja vu from the day before. Baked out of the tent as the sun came up, bacon and eggs for breakfast, beers before lunch, and hanging out half asleep in the campground for the rest of the morning. We went into the festival quite a bit later that day, tired from being on our feet for so long the night before.

gorge was still gorgeous the next day

As we walked in, we saw Darude playing on one of the smaller stages. That's the guy who made "Sandstorm", which is the song that everybody started a mosh pit to at high school dances and then the principal would get all pissed off. Turns out Darude is actually amazing and has a ton of other really good songs. He really set the ball rolling for the rest of the night, so to speak. After dancing and laughing and crying and having a really really really good time at Darude, and randomly running into some CMC friends, we wandered around the festival a bit more. We saw part of Borgore and Nervo at the main stage, who were both pretty good, and then Madeon who blows my mind every time I see him. I'm a big fan of his song "Pop Culture", so it was really cool to see him play it live. It's so fucking catchy! 

After Madeon, we went to the Digital Oasis stage to see Gramatik. I had never heard of them but Tyler was a big fan, and it turned out to be really cool. There was a dude DJing and a dude playing guitar. Although it wasn't quite the atmosphere I was looking for at that point in the night, his laid back guitar-electronic music was really appealing. I wished he had played the night before when I would have been more in the mood for that type of trippy slower music. They were really good though and the guitarist had a couple of moments where everyone in the crowd was staring at him, mouths agape, wondering how in the world he could make his guitar sound that good. I kept finding myself chewing my gum along with the beat as I became entranced by the music. I made a mental note to tell my friend Matt about it, who plays guitar and I think he would like making music like that. 

Next up was Eric Prydz, who I honestly don't remember much about. I'm sure he was good but I didn't know many of his songs and he didn't do anything too memorable. After Prydz finished, Kaskade came on to headline the final night of the festival. Kaskade was amazing. His two hour set included several Swedish House Mafia remixes, among many others. I'm writing about this three weeks later, and Kaskade's set is kind of a blur in my memory by now, but I know I thoroughly enjoyed it the entire time. He had the lights, fireworks, and acrobatics that Tiesto had the night before, but this time with more mellow house music and less of Tiesto's progressive bassy beats. 

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After Kaskade's set ended, the excitement was pretty much over for the weekend. We went back to Seattle the next day and then Ev and I went to her house on Bainbridge Island for the night. The next day, Monday, was Canada Day so we didn't have to go to work. It's kind of like Canada's 4th of July, but we were too tired from Paradiso to participate in much of the festivities. We stayed on Bainbridge for most of the day and headed back to Canada that evening. Turns out the Canadian border cops really don't like us. They made us pull over at the border, go inside a building, and questioned us separately and together about why we were going to Canada. It seemed that they really didn't want us there. They searched the car too, but found nothing as we weren't doing anything wrong. It was weird because usually Canadians are so nice and overly polite, but I think they might just send all of the assholes to the border so that the rest of Canada is filled with nice friendly people. 

Overall an excellent weekend with excellent people.