The Shambhala Journals - #4 in which a coffee line forces our hero to confront Evil.

Music festivals have become one of the main releases my generation has. They are places where we can come together in love, respect, mutual admiration for aural art and the need to escape from the modern condition for a few dusty, sweaty days. They are unarguably important cultural touchstones that breed creativity and openness. But there are prices to be paid, yins to our yangs. 

I’m standing in a line for coffee with my cohort somewhere around 11:30pm-12am on the Saturday night at Shambhala and am overcome with a thought… “This entire event, no matter how gloriously happy it’s making everyone, is built on evil.” I pointed it out loud and we both immediately knew I was right. We are kind of awful people. We laughed nervously/awkwardly at the thought, made a couple snickering remarks and thought nothing more of it. It was time to get our delicious caffeinated beverages.

The coffee tent is a perfect example of the excess and privilege that these festivals celebrate. In the middle of a field at midnight, we can get an iced chai-mocha drink and why? Because we fucking deserve it, that’s why! We are young, rich, beautiful and want our every whim catered to at any given moment!

Lights? Fuck, we have so many we can shoot them around for nothing more than enjoyment. Remember all those Power Smart presentations we had in elementary school teaching us the importance of conserving energy? Fuck ‘em! All the warnings we hear about global warming and the impact of travel? Not our problem. At least not this weekend. We’re free to drive from all over the place to get here and take two hours to get from the camp ground to the highway. (This is much the same problem I have in my heart with flying. Just because we’re lucky enough to be somewhere that allows us the opportunity to go where we please, it probably doesn’t mean we SHOULD.) Plastic is getting used to house glowing goo in tubes because it looks pretty and enhances my party experience.

This all sounds like I’m really down on the whole festival experience, but I’m really not. It’s just an interesting thought. It’s all quite evil. And everyone there, somewhere deep in their hearts, knows it. We are a generation who has watched the people before us squander money on military budgets and government waste while people, not just in our own countries but all over the world, go without basics like food, water and shelter. I, like many of peers, always bemoan the fact that if a mere portion of our country’s defense budgets went to social programs and helping the poor a huge, immediate positive impact could be felt. What if all of us young, relatively rich festival goers took a year off, took the money we would have used for a weekend of hedonism and gave it the causes we actually give a shit about? We could probably do some amazing things. But will we? Probably not.

And that’s fine. I’m not above the fray. I love these festivals. I loved my time at Shambhala. Fucking dearly I loved it. I loved flying to Tennessee for Bonnaroo. I loved taking a bus to Sasquatch. But deep in my heart I know that what I’m doing is hurting the Earth I claim to love so much. Much in the same way I’m completely content to pack up my car full of shit and drive two and a half hours to bask in the glory of nature, when it would be far more beneficial for nature if I just stayed at home and looked at pictures of it on the internet.

Apparently I’m happy to stick my head in the sand for four days and wallow in excess with friends and strangers. It’s cool if you want to join me to. But it’s probably also good to acknowledge, even for a few brief moments between awkward laughter with friends, the evil and the damage that we ignore each time we make these trips to these gatherings of Pranksters.

Gentlemen, to Evil!

The Shambhala Journals - #3.5 in which I get to share one of my new favourite dudes with you all.

By far one of my favourite parts of Shambhala was the Fractal Funk Jam. I like funk music. I like bass. Straight-up. Pure and simple. And because of the good times that was the Funk Jam I was able to see Slynk, in some form or another, twice! (I caught the first portion of his own set at the slightly exhausted hour of 4am before crashing to Earth in a funked-out stupor.) Let me tell you all this - Slynk is a bad, bad man.

To clarify with those of you who may not be down with the parlance of our times (Or the parlance of 1974), he's a bad motherfucker in that good way where you wanna ride with him on a sunny Saturday afternoon, blasting a chonger and rocking the sub woofers at an ungodly level.  

And because he's such a bad, bad man, Slynk has bestowed upon the world this - his funktastic, highlight-reel set from Shambhala's 2013 incarnation. Don't listen to this unless you have some space to stand up and shake your ass. Because no matter how, where or when you attempt to listen to this you will end up shaking your ass. There's no question about it.

Stream it. Download this sumbitch, Just make sure you do it up.

Much love and respect to Slynk!  

Hey guys! I'm really excited to finally upload my Shambhala Fractal Forest mixtape this year. It was by far the best year this year at Shambhala. I had so much fun and it was great to see old friends and meet new ones. Thanks to EVERYONE who made it to my set at 4am.

The Shambhala Journals - #3 in which my love of Hip-Hop is, quite surprisingly, tempered by an electro-soul DJ.

I don't prepare properly for much in my life. Things move around me in an unpredictable blur and usually I'm more than content to move in whichever direction the wind decides to go. However, the exception to this rule is with live music. I like to be prepared when entering a new live setting. Whether it's researching an opener I've never heard of or scanning through festival guides and cherry picking some names that haven't before crossed my radar. (Though I suppose in this case it's sonar.) With this in mind, I asked my good buddy and Guide to the Cosmos, Hingle McCringleberry, to give me some new music to investigate. Much of what he gave me just sort of bounced off of my ears but there was one album that caught my attention, Mad Liberation  by Detroit's newly reigning funk-soul brother, GRiZ. The album blasted my ear-pussy with its unrelenting soul and grooviness. All I want in this new music I'm learning about is FUNKY BASS and this motherfucker delivered it to me in spades. Don't believe me? Fuck you. Listen for yourself.    

Full Mad Liberation Album Download Available at: http://www.mynameisgriz.com Mad Liberation is a collection of songs that I have been working on for the past year that ranged from mostly original compositions to varied sample work (retro vinyl recordings and new all original recordings); digital synthesis that took me weeks to master; to live instrumentation tediously and soulfully recorded by myself and some of my very good friends.

The main problem came when I was looking at the schedule for Shambhala's final night. GRiZ was to play at the EXACT same time as pretty legendary indie rappers People Under the Stairs. This wasn't going to do. I am a Hip-Hop guy to my core and one of the big reasons I agreed to come on the journey to Shams was that there's always a fairly big Hip-Hop headliner. I would have to sacrifice the only DJ I knew anything about because, well, fuck, I couldn't be missing People Under the Stairs.

So, after Hingle and another member of the crew met me at Five Alarm Funk (A story for another day!) a compromise was made - I would go with them to watch the first half of GRiZ's set and they would come with me to watch the final half of People Under the Stairs' set. Seemed fair. Well friends, let me tell you...we never did make it to People Under the Stairs. GRiZ delivered even more than Mad Liberation  promised. I was captivated watching him bounce around behind his equipment and by the time he jumped out from behind the gear with his saxophone in hand, I was in love. The fun(k) was infectious. GRiZ, unlike some of the people I saw spinning and sampling through the weekend. was a wholly engaging personality, incapable of letting the grooves go by passively.

I can't speak for what People Under the Stairs did that Sunday night at Shambhala, I wasn't there. But from what the rest of our crew told us, we had made the right choice by staying to watch GRiZ's set in its entirety. (It's still tied in my head with Wick-It the Instigator, but that might have as much to do with Wick-It being a gangsta-ass motherfucker as with the music.) It was the unexpected musical detour of the weekend and I don't regret it one bit.

And that, dear readers, is the story of how electro-funk defeated my love of Hip-Hop, even if only for one night. Only at Shambhala. 

The Shambhala Journals - #1 in which I admit I'm wrong about some key things.

Anyone who’s talked to me for an extended period of time about sports knows that I hate the Seattle Seahawks. I’ll take every opportunity I can to bash them into the ground. But really, I don’t actually hate the Seahawks. I actually just love hating things my good friends claim are great. It’s fun to antagonize people you love. Really, why else do you have friends other than to let out some of the nastiness that gets bent up inside you? There’s nothing malicious about it, just some fun.

My relationship with electronic music has developed in much the same way as one of my best friends in the whole wide world has constantly tried to get me into the genre. It’s fun to resist, fun to push back. It came to the point where my friend was playing me remixes of classics like the Beatles, Marvin Gaye and such just because he knew he’d be able to get a reaction out of me and I was more than willing to oblige with the obligatory, “This is fucking stupid! Why fuck with classics?! Just let me listen to the motherfucking song!” But really, I was wrong. The whole time, I was wrong.

I’m a Hip-Hop guy. It’s been the main staple of my listening diet since I was 9 or 10 years old and got my hands on 36 Chambers and Black Sunday. So, really, just with that information alone my stance on remixes in electronic music is completely stupid. Hip-Hop was, and mostly remains, built on sampling. This is nothing more than a new generation of music obsessives (Something I can wholly identify with) paying tribute to the things that inspired them on their artistic path. It’s really no different than my roommate and I sitting in our living room playing Tom Petty songs on our guitar, except that they’ve created something new that harkens back to something already established as great.

Like executing a good cover song there’s an art to sampling correctly, to breathe your own unique vision into something already in existence and find that delicate balance of paying tribute and not just dick-riding. And the man who helped me see this, once and for all, was Wick-It the Instigator. By far the baddest motherfucker I saw at Shambhala, Wick-It has quickly become my entry into the world of DJs and electronic music. I’m still learning, no doubt, but I think with Wick-It I’ve found the accelerator to the learning process. The curve doesn’t seem as steep as it once did…

This mix has been on nearly verbatim since I arrived back from my journey to the Salmo Ranch where Shambhala takes place each year and if you have the same problems with electronic music that I have had this might help. (Being mangled beyond belief in the forest dancing with old and new friends to it on a giant soundsystem might also help with this as well.)

Full Length Mix: 1. Wick-it the Instigator - Feel Lit 2. LL Cool J - Mama Said Knock You Out (Wick-it 2013 Revamp) (unreleased) 3. DJ Khaled - All I Do Is Win (Wick-it Remix) 4. Lil Jon - Put Your Hood Up (Wick-it Remix) (unreleased) 5. Reservoir Dawgs feat.

My sincere apologies to you, dear electronic music fans. I was wrong. Very, very wrong about the music you’ve been trying to push on me for years now. I’m still always going to be a live instrument guy at heart, but I think there’s more common ground for us to dance on than I previously believed.