From VenusFestival.com, the flier.

It has become my [illogical] goal to either attend or throw a rave in North Carolina, and possibly get a consistent scene going where I can enjoy my music with others.  As many of you might know, I like the kind of music you’d be hard pressed to hear on the radio or in a club.

As a result, recently I’ve taken an interest in the NC electronic music scene.  After going around Ravelinks and finding some pertinent threads I decided to venture out to my first big electronic music event: the Venus Festival.  I figured that with acts like Planet of the Drums (featuring Dieselboy!), End: The DJ, and the legendary Charles Feelgood, there was surely going to be some kind of showing.  Besides, it would be nice for my first big foray to be at a legit event and not some abandoned warehouse with a scene I wasn’t familiar with.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I’d at least like some names first.

Two days before the showing, I coughed up $45 for an advanced day-pass ticket, and looked forward to what I expected to be the experience of a lifetime.

So I drove out with my girl to Harmony, NC (about 2.5 hours from where I am) on Saturday, October 10th, 2009.  I followed a spray-painted sign to a grass parking lot, and a small stand with a few people standing around.  A tractor was about to ferry about 10 people somewhere.  After waiting around and talking to a couple burly security guys and a woman handling money, we were instructed to walk down a nondescript mud/gravel road.

After walking around a couple bends and seeing a golf cart whiz by with some security on it, I found the Venus Festival:

The Open Area

A few vendors selling food, a couple CDJs set up next to a barn with top 40 blaring, and some people wandering about.  After walking around for a while (and talking to the nice folks at Harmony Farms, the host), I managed to find two small stages and a large indoor arena type area.  I was told by the Harmony folks that the national acts would be playing there sometime around 7 PM, and that I should explore and go see “where everyone is.”  After walking down to the large arena, thoughts bounced around in my head of the massive party that would soon be here.

This is where it’s going down.

Off the side path, I found a tent farm with some music booming and a few clusters of tents.  I saw a few people dressed in rave gear (the first I’ve seen outside of the internet!  Wow!), some great tunes playing, and people practicing poi.

The tent town.

So then we waited.  We practiced some poi, I got out my flowlights and made sure that later on that night, I wasn’t going to completely embarrass myself.  We walked around.  We waited some more.  And more.  And nothing happened, no one seemed to be setting up or doing much of anything.  The biggest signs of life were the glassblowing booth in that big arena I posted up there, and the vendors packing up.  After talking to a few of the vendors and asking what was going on, I got my first inkling something was up.

They were packing up because “no one was here, and turnout was terrible.”  Apparently, yesterday had been even worse.  I learned from talking to some other attendees that, the day before, Planet of the Drums had played to a crowd of 150 people.  To give you some perspective, that’s a smaller crowd than what shows up in most clubs in downtown Raleigh routinely for alcohol and top 40 bullshit.  Planet of the Drums.  World famous Drum and Bass DJs drawing a crowd one third the size of the line for Pixar swag at SIGGRAPH.

After being told to raid the food as I saw fit by the vendors (”We’re gonna have to toss it all anyway.”), I gave a generous tip and left with some sausages.  And a couple bags of buns they were going to toss (ducks gotta eat too!).

At this point, things were beginning to coalesce in my head.  The party paradox: no one was here because no one was here.  Vendors were packing up because business was bad and they weren’t making money.  DJs weren’t showing up because there was no one to play to.  I wandered down to the arena where the only official looking people were milling around.  Besides, there was a huge, white bubble inflating down there that wasn’t there a while ago.

That’s ominous.

I talked to the first guy who I saw setting stuff up.  As to who he is, he’s the guy that the Venus Festival contact e-mail goes to.  His name eludes me at the moment, but I’ll update this when I get that again.  Long story short, he told me that turnout was extremely low, people are going into debt as a result, and all the people that were “good, and still showed up” were congregating in this area.  Not surprisingly, most of the DJs bailed because they’d heard no one showed up.  Really incredible shame.  I heard that one headlining group was still going to be playing that night, though: Astral Projection.  And they were putting on a private concert for the faithful inside of the igloo pictured above.  Awesome.

Stay tuned for part two with the resolution to the Venus Festival (for the time I was there), and some more commentary. Not to mention… An inflatable igloo! DJ Psilonaut! Further speculation about the scene! And a private show by Astral Projection. I promise it will be interesting.

Today I read an interesting article (and Gizmodo’s take on it) detailing an interesting audio study.  Apparently, a music professor at Stanford conducted a study with the aim of determining students’ tastes in music compression methods.  Long story short, the students preferred the compression of MP3s (particularly rock at 128 kbps) to to higher quality [...]

Ever wonder why popular music CDs have no trouble piping out of your stereo/iPod, but when you watch movies you really have to crank your system to hear the quiet parts (not to mention that you get blown away by loud parts)?  Well, it has to do with something called dynamic range compression.  In a [...]

Re-Potting with Resources: What Would You Make?
This is an interesting article.  The jist of it is that nothing in life is certain, and that concentrating on the possibility of what you really want is important.  Which is why I’ve purchased this book.  It’s always been a dream of mine to really be involved with the [...]

Took a little walk to Pullen Park today. Everything was covered in snow, and it was around sunset. Awesome. Leah and I got there a little after the Design School official sanctioned snowball fight… so the ground was a little chewed up in places and whatnot, but nothing ugly at all. [...]

Interesting thing happened to me recently.  At SIGGRAPH2008, I won a copy of Cinema 4D Release 10.5  in the Student Volunteer giveaways.  Awesome.  But unfortunately, because of my work load and the hectic nature of finishing up my schooling for the foreseeable future, I didn’t get a chance to install it.
Fast forward to a couple [...]

Happy retro vector art!
I just stumbled on a band after Youtubing a new game on Steam, Audiosurf.
After listening to the tracks they have posted on their Myspace Page I’ve become a big fan. They’re mostly guitar accompaniment to a pre-written Nintendo synth track (from what I can tell), but the appeal is undeniable. [...]

Anyone who knows me knows that I have something of an obsession with hand-eye oriented hobbies. After my last couple year venture into yo-yoing, I’ve decided I want to take up something simpler and more rewarding (in my opinion), not to mention cheaper. I don’t know if you get simpler than this.
3.5″ [...]

I brought Guitar Hero 3 into CapStrat today, along with my PS2 and one guitar controller. After hooking it up to one of the widescreen monitors, Carson warned me that the audio input/output didn’t work on the monitor. Essentially, we needed to get the audio signal directly to the speakers, from two male [...]

My friend Ben, producing his own media.
We’re getting way too focused. Over dinner with a friend the other day, we discussed that as far as human beings go, we’re getting pretty specialized. It’s generally accepted by [most of industrialized] society that as we grow up, we go to school, and eventually settle into [...]