Elements: The Music (2017)

I can’t decide if I want to keep doing this post-festival double recap where I write one post about logistics and one post about music.  It sometimes feels cumbersome which is totally against the point of maintaining a blog that serves no purpose other than that I enjoy writing in it. But on the other hand, I like having a record of this stuff, especially for the festivals that I’ve attended multiple times. So I might reevaluate this. But for now…I guess it stays! (Welcome to my internal monologue, everyone) So anyway, here are some musical highlights from Elements:

GRiZ I love GRiZ, obviously. Normally I’d expect to come away from a GRiZ set saying, “that was funky and upbeat and fun, yay,” and that is absolutely true. But this was a really unique set in that there was a huge chunk of mellow, slow sax jams in the middle. Sometimes I loved it, sometimes it was moving a bit too slowly for me, but overall it was really nice to see something so different from an artist I’ve seen a ton of times (in fact I just saw him last month at Camp Bisco). The video below is (I think) taken during the interlude part of this set.

Barclay Crenshaw This was probably my favorite set of the weekend. Earlier this summer a friend described Barclay’s music as “weird hip hop” and that is…pretty much accurate. This was even further confirmed a few weeks ago after I stumbled upon his website. The concept is:

“In 1884 an explorer found some artifacts suggesting that an alien race has visited the earth and abducted a large group of its children and then returned them a few days later. There are no records of what happened to the children or who they were or even if they returned in the same shape as they left.

The only clues to these strange occurrences are in the cryptic art and music left behind. With every release, the cosmic manifesto at the heart of the Barclay Crenshaw project reveals itself further…”

If you have a few minutes, go poke around this part of his website. I do not understand what’s happening there at all but I love it anyway.

Flying Lotus Stay tuned for a post about this one. For about 24 hours after Elements I thought about nothing except his set because my brain was just trying to process it all. But here’s a video (not from this festival, unfortunately) that about portrays the intensity of his Elements performance.

Zeds Dead I actually didn’t (and still don’t) know much about Zeds Dead even though they’re huge. I saw part of their Mysteryland set a year or 2 ago and just remembered that they played a lot of other people’s songs. After seeing them at Elements I can safely say that a) they’re heavier than I thought they were, and b) they still do play a lot of other people’s songs. Which, hey, is great. I loved it, even if i took more time than usual to figure out what they actually sound like. I can’t find a video I like of theirs so here’s a cool video of a total solar eclipse that I’ve watched more times than is probably normal.