Music editor Jacob Haagsma is busy with the festivals. Now he is back at Into The Great Wide Open, on Vlieland. What brings him there in ecstasy?
So, Jacob, how are things on the island?
Yes, nice, nice festival weather for a nice festival. So my weekend can’t go wrong anymore.
Yes, that again, huh.
How did we deserve that? Perfect festival weather. Not too hot, lots of sun, three tiny drops of rain. That makes the festival experience so pleasant. And you know, that festival experience encompasses more than one sister and so many bands in a row.
That is also: walking through the forest on the way from one stage to the next, on paths that are magically and hallucinatingly lit in the dark. Just stand on the dike behind your hotel room and stare over the Wad. Have a beer and have good conversations with dear people, or people you don’t know at all. Thinking about sustainable eating and sustainable living with your meatless bite . Recover from that with beer and bitterballen on a terrace in the village, just outside that festival bubble. Grumbling about the virtually invisible art route. Walking around endlessly with your deposit glass. And, indeed, enjoying beautiful music together. Or just complain about bad..
Knowing you, you will soon start talking about festival experiences of a spiritual nature.
Well, how nice of you to bring that up. I had it Friday, the first full day of the festival after the tentative start (including the great fun Sophia Street ) from the day before. That was already a nice evening. So the next day we walked quietly and satisfied under the sun to the Sportveld, where the Rotterdam guitar band played in the early afternoon. Elephant took office. We flew over the field, we had a chat with this and that one, we ordered a beer (at least me)….
A beer! At the beginning of the afternoon! Does your editor-in-chief approve?
It was functional for this piece, so it must have. By the way, running the editor-in-chief by Newspaper of the North around here too, so I’ll explain that to him myself if you insist on making a problem there.
Anyway, I was completely in the, what shall I say, the vibe . Or the zone . And those friendly songs from Elephant helped a lot with that. Not quite my genre normally, you know, But at that time, in that one zone… Especially when the guitar solos shuffled across the field in sparkling, slightly drawn-out Grateful Dead style, I was really touched and very pleasantly struck by an almost perfect unity of time, place, music and atmosphere. My girlfriend less, I have to say.
It is apparently very personal, that festival experience.
Could be. But still: the idea or rather the feeling that we are here with 6000 people, in terms of paying visitors, to have a good time and experience nice things and who knows how to learn something, that is an important part of that experience. For me then, huh.
If you say so. Have you seen other fun things?
I actually liked Arooj Aftab the best, secretly actually one of the biggest names at this festival that is actually forced to do without big names. It was there on the big stage of the sports field with a minimal line-up, only double bass and, yes, harp.
She comes from Pakistan and what exactly she sings about, we will never know. But how she sings! A beautiful voice, beautiful twists and turns, wide oriental melody lines, beautiful improvised digressions of not only voice, but also double bass (great to use as a percussion instrument too) and harp. The player of that, Maeve Gilchrist if I saw it correctly, occasionally flew wonderfully and unexpectedly off the bend on that instrument.
The sports field became silent, you saw how many people first watched in amazement and gradually became more and more enraptured by this subdued sound fabric. It helped that Arooj Aftab has a sense of humor in addition to a God-given voice. “If I sound like God from heaven, there may be too much reverberation in my voice.”
Boy.
Although this concert might have come out just a little better on the Open Place in the forest, a wonderfully intimate stage where you really couldn’t enter right after because of the terribly long queues for dance act and festival hit Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul, which I luckily had already seen on it regretted Leeuwarden festival Welcome To The Village . In retrospect, that might have suited the sports field better.
But, aren’t long queues part of the festival experience?
You took the words right out of my mouth. But there are aspects of that festival experience that I can do without.