#festivalseason - Bass Coast celebrates 10 years of immense taste and endless style.

2018 marked the 10th birthday of Bass Coast and also Rags Music's first in-person experience with the legendary BC festival. After years of whispers of the wonders inside and pleas to attend from musical and non-musical-friends alike, Bass Coast had reached near-mythic status and much to my delight, did not disappoint. In fact, even with my expectations at an all-time high, Bass Coast blew away my ideas of what a festival of its kind can be, do and inspire. After three full days of music, art and colour on a river just outside of Merritt, BC, it is evident that Bass Coast is the result of an incredible group of people – artists, organizers, light/sound people, builders, etc – at the top of their fields, working together to create an experience unlike anything else in the adjacent space around it. There's something immeasurably beautiful about so many talented people working in conjunction to expand, tantalize and delight the senses of not just their friends, but of complete strangers.

Interactive art installations abound throughout the festival grounds, encouraging attendees to interact with not just the art but with their fellow festival goers. Most entertaining among these were the telephone booths. The sparkly phones on opposite sides of the “downtown” area of the festival were hooked up to each other, ringing when the other was picking up and throwing both caller and answerer into the fires of impromptu conversation. Rags Music contributor Shawn McNicoll spent an inordinate amount of time taking pizza orders and pushing car insurance on people, to his own delight and, presumably, the confused delight of the folks on the other end.

The majority of festivals I've been to feature hoards of unwashed/disheveled masses zombie-ing about until the sun starts it descent back under the sky line. But not at Bass Coast. The lovely people of Bass Coast, if not stripped down and cooling in the river, were dressed in their finest and most colourful ridiculously early in the day. From around lunchtime on, wherever you looked, Bass Coast was all-out fashion show and I was more than impressed. Some peoples' dedication to their costumes, to the weirdness, was flat-out awe-inspiring as the heat generally led me to basketball shorts and a t-shirt. If you were one of the people who managed to stay costumed-up in the sweltering heat and swirling winds, I commend you! SALUT!

While incredible lights and art installations, beautiful humanity wherever the eyes laid and breathtaking landscape views all abounded, it was the music that truly brought me there and the music that really made this one of the best full weekends of dancing I've personally had in a long time. The women behind the organization of Bass Coast, particularly the booking of music, have done a fucking incredible job of putting together a diverse lineup that thankfully all shares the same important thread... QUALITY. I admittedly didn't know a large portion of the lineup and I was either pleasantly surprised or straight-up astonished as I made my between stages taking in act after act I'd never heard of. Bass Coast might genuinely be the most musically well-curated festival I've ever attended. These are some serious music nerds putting together this line up and everywhere a brother turned, there was world-class groove to be had.

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5 Questions with Rags #67 - Neil James Cooke-Dallin (Astrocolor, Stray Cougar, Righteous Rainbows of Togetherness)

A musical pillar of Victoria unto himself, James Cooke and his many projects – Righteous Rainbows of Togetherness, Stray Cougar and Astrocolor, my obsession of 2017 (into 2018, apparently) – have been helping keep my hometown way groovy and just a little bit more weird for some time now. It's actually kind of staggering the amount of creative energy this one human being seems to not only contain, but is able to harness and use effectively. “It's just what I love to do. They're all quite different, in terms of what I'm getting out of them. It's feeding a different part of my soul with each project.” It must be a pretty ravenous musical soul inside his body, because the homie never stops. A captivating performer, you should always take the chance to see Cooke playing/mixing his music live, in the flesh, because it's always guaranteed to be high-creativity and high-accessibility, the hardest things to balance in music.

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1. Do you remember the first album that you bought with your own money?

<laughs> Yeah, I do. <more laughing> It was Quiet Riot Mental Health. My buddy's brother ended up getting two copies of it for Christmas one year, so he was selling one of them and I was in grade 2 and I bought a copy of Quiet Riot on the school playground from him.

I remember being weirded out as a kid the first time I saw that cover. Made me feel kinda funny.

I think I was pretty normalized to it by then. I'd been around metal and rock a lot just by virtue of having friends with older brothers and some of my parents' friends. I had Ozzy Osbourne Bark at the Moon on 12 inch already and I don't know if there's a weirder album cover than that. Things were getting a lot more gentrified by the time I purchased Quiet Riot.

When's the last time you listened to Quiet Riot?

<laugh> That's a good question. I'm pretty sure I pulled out “Cum on Feel the Noise” or “Mental Health” sometime in the last year and a half.

Come on, it was definitely only “Cum On Feel The Noise.”
Ahh, I was pretty into “Bang Your Head.”

2. What's your favourite household chore?

I would say I enjoy doing the dishes and cleaning the kitchen. I really enjoy seeing how nice it looks when everything's cleaned up. Have my girlfriend come home and see it and have her evening be that much better.

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