A reminiscence of some fantastic music-related adventures in 1999

Can I have some change?

As August ’99 neared, I knew that my time in Japan was drawing to a close – my visa was expiring and I had grown weary of the energy-draining lifestyle prevalent in Tokyo. I desperately wanted to head to Europe to see the total eclipse, yet knew not what to do. Around July 20th, I decided to try a tactic I had used with success before: I wrote in the past tense and from a third-person point-of-view the story of my decision-making process and how it was successful, how I managed to get to the Solipse festival in Hungary. This was a kind of past-tense affirmation, basically stating from a future perspective that what it was that I wished to happen had already happened.

Well, the next morning, my sister called and I felt more compelled to tell her I was thinking of leaving than I might have had I not done this writing (I had thought of it for weeks but not broached the subject). She was a flight attendant, and told met that she would send a ticket. Phew! There was THAT taken care of. What to do about my apartment? Ten days was not a lot of notice. Well, about ten minutes later, my sister phoned back to say that a mutual friend had been thinking of moving back to Japan and he would be interested in taking over my apartment. Problem solved.

I made separations from work and started preparing to leave. It was a challenge but I managed, and spent two days in Vancouver (having got the last seat on the flight over) before heading off to London, again on the last available seat – both with guest passes courtesy my sister.

London reunion

From Heathrow Airport, I called the Twisted and Matsuri offices, and managed to reach Alison at Matsuri. I headed over and had a chat – Stella Nutella was there, and we had a nice hello. I went down to the Earthdance office in the same building, and Chris Deckker was there with Tsuyoshi – an unexpected reunion of sorts. Chris was going to head south to the Lizard Eclipse festival the next day, and said I could probably get a lift with Chrisbo – we gave him a call and confirmed that. I could stay there for a couple of days before I needed to leave for Hungary. Alison gave me the contact for their travel agent so I could get the best flight to Hungary (“he’s the best,” she said), and I tootled off to stay with Nori, a friend from Tokyo days.

We’re off to see the Lizard

After just 24 hours in London, I met with Chrisbo and we drove down to the Lizard festival, arriving shortly after sunrise. The dude on the door ushered us in with a great lively spirit, and to this day I have no idea what he said – his dialect was so strong that neither Chrisbo nor I could catch a word.

We had a good laugh the whole time there. I got to see Mark Allen and Tim Healey again, Tim once again proving himself to be one of the most dexterous linguists I have met and Mark just being a lovely person to spend time with. There was a whole lot of planning happening at the Source tent, and the show eventually went off well. I wasn’t sure how to head back to London. I knew that Stef from Total Eclipse, who had not yet arrived, would be driving back up to the airport to go to Hungary, but I didn’t want to risk waiting in case he had no space in the car, so I hitched a ride with Andy Guthrie (from Funkopath, who was also in Prana and Medicine Drum), whom I had met at the Fuji party in 97, and stayed with him in Leamington-Spa for a night before heading down to London.

On a wing and a prayer

I went to Alison’s travel agent to get the ticket I had reserved. He had booked me one of the last seats to Hungary at a very decent rate. Stef had said that they would be arriving on the later flight, but I had booked the earlier one. As the agent was checking my reservation, a spot opened up on the later flight – but since I still had no guarantee of being able to head to the festival with Stef, and as his flight was arriving at about 11PM the night before the eclipse, I decided to take the earlier one. Tsuyoshi would be arriving about 30 minutes before me, so perhaps I’d be able to head over with him.

The line at the airport for the flight was insane, and the flight itself was a classic, the landing in particular. I don’t know what Malev (Hungary’s airline) serves their pilots, but I suggest they tone down on whatever it is – I had never experienced a plane bouncing on landing before, and I was not the only one who looked a little shaken when that happened. But I was there, a mere week after having left Tokyo.

Transport troubles

Tsuyoshi was no longer at the airport, and the young fellow who had been assigned to tell us where to go told me to get to the train station. I did and waited in line for what seemed like forever to get my ticket for Simontornya, a small town from which a shuttle bus would take me to the festival. The departure time was nearing and I had to ask a few people ahead to let me through, which they did. I got my ticket, ran up with my bags (which really weighed a ton at this point) – and couldn’t find the platform. It was supposed to be on platform ten, but they only numbered one to nine. No conductors seemed to be able to point me in the right direction (no comment) and I missed the train.

It was the last train for the day and the eclipse would be the next morning. I was fuming and didn’t know what to do, so I went to Pizza Hut and started journaling. I reasoned that since I knew Stef would be arriving at the airport at 11, I could just go there and hope for the best. There was nothing else to do, and stressing out would only make it seem more unpleasant, so after my pizza, I hopped in a cab and went to the airport.

I met a lady waiting there who turned out to be Loic’s girlfriend, Fanny. We had a nice chat and when the plane finally landed, we had a lovely reunion with Stef and Loic. Serge had already headed to the festival with his girlfriend Alex, and Stef’s partner Miyuki hadn’t come along. There was indeed room for me in the car, so I was saved!

Strange beginnings

The Bordeaux Boys had been told by the organizer to take a cab and that they would be reimbursed. As a result, we didn’t think about the fact that the meter wasn’t on. We drove for at least an hour before we arrived at the village. We finally found the organizer, a fellow who goes by the name Shakespeare. I had heard from Chris Deckker that he also calls people Fish. I figured I could expect him to be a character, and that he was. He poked his head through the window and asked ‘Who are you?’, his eyes darting around at lightning speed. Stef introduced everyone, pointing at me and saying, ‘This is our sound guy. He’s been with us since the beginning.’ A dispute ensued about the price for the cab, with Fish-man wanting us to pay first – Stef refused and eventually it got sorted out.

We waited around the office, where a group called Zion Train seemed to be having an unpleasant time getting themselves organized with accommodations at 3 in the morning. We were driven to our abode, a house nearby, where we dropped our bags before being escorted to the party site.

Inauspicious beginnings

I must say that I have rarely been as appreciative for well-disguised good fortune coming my way as I was at that moment. Seeing the huge size of the festival grounds and arriving in the dark while it was raining, I could see how it would have been well nigh impossible to connect with any of my friends to share one of their tents had I arrived earlier as planned. As we walked around the festival, it started to pour. A couple of generators were cutting out on the main stage, and the whole thing seemed a shambles. I was seriously concerned for the state of the festival, but still delighted to have made it and to have been granted such good luck. After about an hour on-site (during which time I bumped into a good mate from London while we stood under a tarp in a downpour), we were driven back to the house and we crashed in our lovely dry, warm beds.

Dark to light, light to dark…

When we awoke at nine o’clock, we were delighted to see that it was a beautifully sunny day. The sky was clear and our moods lifted. We were introduced to our homestay people, who were a lovely couple – one humungous fellow and his wild wife who made up for her lacking teeth with warm-heartedness. She tried to compensate for our inability to understand Hungarian by talking louder and more slowly. (It didn’t work, and throughout our stay Stef would occasionally regale her with a made-up language spoken with similar volume and intensity.) When they found out Stef and Loic were musicians, they pulled out a super-old synth that was lying around the house – seeing the Bordeaux masters looking at and pretending to play this thing with a Hungarian farmer was hilarious.

We went to the festival in time for the eclipse, and unable to find Serge (whom we met shortly after the eclipse), we went up to the top of a hill to scope out a good spot. The atmosphere was shifting as the moon starting covering the sun – the air was palpably cooler, and there was a haze that seemed to descend, a translucent curtain of darkness that spread across the countryside. Dragonflies came out in abundance, and the birds were flying all around. Fortunately, the organizers had made the tasteful decision to have the music turned off during all phases of the eclipse.

We donned our official eclipse glasses and watched as the spectacle approached…the irony was not lost on me that I was watching the total eclipse with Total Eclipse. And to think that just two weeks before, I had not been sure if I would be able to make it…

A shift in energy

Well, after the spectacular eclipse, the entire mood of the party shifted. Whereas there had been a really frenetic, scattered vibe beforehand, afterwards there was more cohesiveness, the cosmic event having seemingly cleansed the energy and allowed the party to reach more of its potential. There was still confusion and a good deal of disruption: schedules were changing, people had trouble getting what they needed…Mr. Fish even found himself in a fistfight, apparently. However, a good deal of problem-solving was well managed, in particular by a fellow who had been one of the main organizers for Voov (a very nice guy he was, too). But the vibe of the whole party did change after the eclipse and it was marvelous – from my point of view, anyway, and I was going into it expecting the worst given what I had seen the first night.

And the winners are…

Highlights? Well, Total Eclipse’s live was great, natch. I was exhausted and coming down with a cold at that point – I was seriously unprepared for the cold weather at night – but the gig was fabulous. Afterwards, we were driven back in an open pick-up truck through the back field and the driver got lost, so that was an extra 45 minutes I was in the cold. That pushed me over the edge and led me to miss the following night’s performances, which included X-Dream and Mark Allen.

I did catch Olli’s set one morning – I was determined to be there – and that was blinding. He has always been one of my favourites, and I was thrilled to hear him for what was only the fourth time. He started out with X-Dream’s ‘Coming Soon’ and moved into a whole different slew of tracks. One highlight for me was the first performance I had heard of ‘So Deep’, which really got people going at that point in the morning. Tsuyoshi was also dancing up a storm, particularly when Olli put on his last track, one by Underworld (as he was doing all that year, apparently). Unfortunately, I missed Tristan’s set which followed, one that a great many say was the best thing they had heard in eons.

There were inconsistencies. Why is it that Jorg played about three times – and long sets of dark music, often in the blazing sun – but Olli only once, given the latter’s preference for long sets? Fishy Shakespeare seemed not to have much knowledge of trance and designing the line-up to match artists’ strengths and styles. This seems to be one of the major challenges with large festivals.

The last night of the festival, the weather went back and forth, and there was talk about a series of open slots and it was put to me to play. I heard just a little too late, and the positions were taken, and while it was suggested that I go anyway, I bowed out, and my intuition served me well. It apparently turned into an ego-fest, with a number of others trying to take control of slots that had been officially granted lesser-known DJs (such as Stella Nutella, who fortunately ended up making a big impact). That is an energy framework I can do without, so I hung with the Bordeaux crowd at our house and recuperated from the week of festivities.

Time out

While Etnica Max was throwing his own party in the countryside not far away in the following days – Serge would be playing and extended an invitation – I opted to re-enter the real world before continuing my travels through Europe. Stef joined me for the bus ride back to Budapest – I would hook up with him later in Bordeaux – and I spent a few days in Budapest with a relative before going on to Switzerland.

A shift in energy

I took a night train to Switzerland and went down to near Lausanne to visit a Swiss opera singer (he was 97 years old – he’s 105 at the time of this writing) whom I had met a few times previously. One of his homes is a gorgeous chateau with wine property in the back. We had a wonderful chat, with tea and cakes in the garden, and when naptime came, I had a doze on what was likely a 100+-year-old divan in the drawing room, next to a 200-year-old harpsichord.

I later that day took a train to Zurich and connected with a Swiss DJ I had met in London while DJ’ing at Daniel Poole’s shop in Soho. She had a club called Up-Space and invited me to play that night. Talk about shifting worlds in one day! Well, I’m used to it and had a great time in both settings. I hung out with Dede (not DJ Dede, but DJ Amphiptere) for a few days. It was at this time, with her and her husband Thom, that I saw The Matrix, having been told about it in an e-mail message by David from Hikari. We were among the very few people in the cinema, and there was a tunnel with black light and a painted space-scape on the walls. Walking out in intermission we certainly felt the effects of that setting and the movie!

The Bordeaux Boys

Off to Paris next to connect with a former girlfriend of Tsuyoshi’s – he had just started dating her when I first got to know him well, so we had a friendly relationship. I stayed with her for a few days before going down to Bordeaux to visit Stef and Miyuki. I was the first visitor to their new place – they had recently moved from Tokyo, where we had spent a lot of time together – and we had a great time, though Stef had to spend a bit of time exterminating fleas from the shed in the garden left from the previous tenant’s multitude of cats. 

I got to see the Total Eclipse studio, a great space in a shed behind Serge’s beautiful house some 30 minutes out of the city. Stef and I had been threatening to write a tune, and so we got started on ‘Imagination’ – I supplied a sample from ‘Men in Black’ and added a trill in the opening sequence – which we didn’t have time to finish due to his schedule. He later wrapped it up with Loic, and it became ‘Ten Years of Trance’, named for the Distance compilation on which it was featured.

We did have time to copy lots of music, though. Man, as much as I love music, copying hours of stuff on DAT can do your head in if you do it all at once. A French DAT pirate came over and presented tape after tape after tape…I can’t remember the last time I found so much incredible unpublished music (a couple of killers still unreleased, as far as I can gather). While exhausted, I was definitely appreciative!

More flitting about

It was a great week: some good social stuff, a trip to the beach, nice dinners and all. Stef was starting to get busy, so I gave my sayonara and headed back to Paris for a couple of days and then hopped up to visit my cousins in Stockholm. I expected this to be another trance-free part of my trip, but walking through the old town I saw a neat looking shop and walked in to find a lot of Space Tribe clothes. I wandered around, and by the time I walked to the front again, there was Miki Wisdom, Olli’s brother, on the phone. Could hardly have been more surprised!

After a lovely week of laziness, I went back down to Paris, where I remembered that I should connect with Yayo from Trance Body Express. I had met him in the summer of 97 when I had gone to Paris for the Issey Miyake fashion show. He is a great character and I had a hoot driving around Paris with him in true French tradition (by the skin of our teeth) and looking around the trance shops. This really lovely guy is like a character out of a movie, a bald man with a totally Gallic sense of humour and hilarious approach to anything he does. His charm certainly works wonders, and he was always being approached b a bevy of young ladies whenever he played out, to the consternation of his very attractive girlfriend. More music exchanges here, and a great time.

Back to the UK

Funds were running low and I was realizing that my approximate self-imposed date to go to Canada was approaching, and so I scraped myself together and got my butt to London. I had phoned up Colin, a guy who I vaguely knew from parties in Tokyo who I had seen again at Solipse. He was willing to put me up, and I found myself at his abode in Seven Sisters (the Pleiadians ARE everywhere, aren’t they!). We had an absolute blast reminiscing and getting to know each other better than we had in the five years that we had seen each other around Tokyo.

The Hallucinogenius

The last leg of my journey was a visit down to the Hallucinogen labs. Simon had been conspicuously absent from both Solipse and the Lizard, but had been to an eclipse party with Ken Kesey and that whole Merry Pranksters crowd. He had moved into a new place and found himself a new girlfriend, and we hadn’t seen each other since his Tokyo visit that May. We stayed up late watching Bill Hicks videos and he gave me a preview of ‘Beautiful People’, with a donkey piss-take at Delta Skelter. I quite liked the ‘Hallucinogen goes minimal’ sound, and was happy when Ott remixed the track without the donkeys. I went through Simon’s DATs to find old material that he could use in his DJ set, and found a few old classics and consolidated them on a killer DAT for his use.

Welcome home!

A couple of days flew by and next thing I knew I was on my way to Canada. A couple of days in Toronto and then off to Montreal, where I got connected with Jeff MK Ultra via Yayo. We had phoned him up from Paris and Jeff booked me for Earthdance, though I was too late for the flyer. Taka from Solstice was there, and having not seen each other since meeting in Tokyo the previous year, we had a good laugh while we pigged out on Swedish chocolate to stay awake.

I must say that the crowd in Montreal was one of the best I’ve had the pleasure of playing for. One tune after another, they just went completely berserk. Of course, I think the music I played was pretty good – oldies but goodies combined with hot-off-the-press tunes from the French DAT mafia – but that reaction reminded me of what the parties in Japan were like when I started going in 94-95. I was chuffed when Taka told me that when he went back a few weeks later, several people asked him, ‘Where’s that other guy?’

A few more days and it was off to live and work in Vancouver for the first time. The start of a new adventure, one that would turn into a more low-key phase of my life. The summer of ‘99 was a special one, brought into manifestation with some metaphysics and determination. It serves me well to remember it now and again as evidence that we won’t know what we might be missing unless we make sure we don’t miss it, and that moving into our truth can allow others to do the same. Having not had a shift of this magnitude in a while, it might be time to do some more metaphysical journaling…