Notes from Echoes (vol. i)
scenes from an antechamber
December is the weekend of the year. That’s what my friend, call him Vishal, told me on the second day of Echoes. It’s the month of holidays, celebrations, and events. To borrow a term from my friends, it’s the time for some “hard chilling”. It’s the time to visit family or rally friends together. It is also increasingly becoming a time of angst, of (winter) holiday season loneliness. The Postmodern condition weighs heavy on the collective consciousness; for loneliness is a Postmodern phenomenon, it did not exist in its current incarnation a couple of hundred years back. Neither did the commercial Christmas season.
Or the (contemporary) music festival.
The music festival signifies the opposite of isolation, it is supposed to be communitarian, it’s supposed to signify communion. Yet, today, it is suffering under the same conditions of Postmodernity. The big bad, viz. neoliberal capitalism, has co-opted what was in-essence counterculture. The very human need to let loose, party, play and goof around, and the need for human connection is now under a vice grip. It is increasingly demonstrated in festivals like Echoes. A festival where nonetheless I had tons of fun. Tons. Of. Fun.
A festival that exalts the organizers but condemns us all.
Echoes of Earth, a two-day art and music festival, has become one of Bangalore’s biggest events. Every year a December weekend bookends revelry and festivities at the Embassy International Riding School, a horse-riding school on the Northern outskirts. It’s India’s “greenest music festival”. The art installations are made up of recycled waste; they include murals, decorations, and the stages set up for the music performances. They also have a corner for flea market-popup stores. And the music always slaps, as I was told many a time by many a people.
So, there’s excitement going into it.
Our rented minibus stops at a red light. We are passing around a noxious brew of gin and tonic in a bottle of Bisleri; Chinese Man’s I’ve got that tune is blaring; the bass bleeding extra heavy as it does in minibus speakers; the adults in the BMTC bus next door doing their best to ignore the Dionysian energy leaking onto the streets, while the kids stare betwixt at the jukebox making all the racket. I exchange grins with my friend, Rudraksh, on the goofy to sheepish spectrum. Our minibus is the home of hype, we are on our way to Echoes.
Confession: I don’t know any of the acts. I’m there for the company, and because it’s a great opportunity for some Gonzo journalism, for some content mining.
My friends are the true connoisseurs, deep in dissection; about which day is of the superior pedigree. I gather that there’s a Drum n’ Bass and trumpet set we have to, HAVE TO, catch tomorrow; that Jitvam is performing twice tomorrow; and that Mansur Brown is a must tomorrow. But for today we decide on catching Yung Raja for one, and Tinariwen for sure. And also:
‘When in doubt just go to the techno stage’
I hear from the recesses of the backseats.
Moments later, we’ve cleared out of the city traffic; the driver guns the vehicle, and we finish the Bisleri G&T, and move to beers after convincing a belligerent Vishal off the idea of taking a round of shots, and the speakers still blare hedonistic beats. I hear someone say,
‘Whooo! I can listen to techno all night.”
Upon arrival, you’re greeted with the reality of the enterprise. The police and the private security outside the gate illustrate all that’s synthetic about all of it. Ofc, security is necessary to a certain degree. We’ve got large crowds, inebriation and excitement, and you need someone keeping a watch. A benevolent watch. But the boots on the ground, with their sniffing hounds make the gates appear like an airport terminal. They symbolize a movement from the communitarian to the corporate. From Coachella to NH7, and all around to Echoes, it is a trend that’s universal.
But so is rebellion.
Sections of the caravan of people ambling towards the gates stagger, stutter and then stop in their tracks. All to assess what’s in front of them. The dropouts call for a timeout and group huddles. You can see such packs in patches right in front of the security gates; shooting glances at the boots, and then breaking into discussion amongst themselves. We form one such conspiratorial circle ourselves. All the mules double-check their systems and safeguards for all their contrabands, and their will to power.
‘It’s all up to a person’s own risk appetite.’
Vijay declares as we down our beers, smoke and scope the situation.
Of course, my anguish still percolates while Vijay waits in line for the final security check. Rudraksh tells me he overheard a guy remark – “Oh, so easy dude. No checking at all!”. I point to the hyperactive German Shepard lawnmowing its snout up and down the aisle next to one Vijay is at. We’ve made it through, but will he?
He makes it just fine. His head is still reeling from being given a two-day wristband whence having bought just a one-day ticket. The serendipity. We’re all gripped by second-hand jubilation too. It feels like a “fuck you” to the system. Like a snatch and steal. But why?
Why the juvenility? And the disdain for those organizing the event?
Perhaps, it’s because of the security checking, already putting you at odds with the organizers. Or the fact that you aren’t allowed to get any food, drinks or even water into the site (they’d confiscate chocolates and granola bars too). The rumour went that you couldn’t even take an open pack of cigarettes into the venue. Or maybe it’s the knowledge that we’d have to contend with the jacked-up prices Johnnie Walker and friends had set inside.
Perhaps, it’s just instinct.
But there lingers a sense of detachment between the attendees and the organizers. A lack of a sense of ownership; like we have rented the space and time to be there; the crowd makes the collective, the collective makes the festival, but the individual is disposable. Except that, this feeling bleeds into the collective. And festivals are innately collectivist, they entail sharing a moment in space, a position in time. They involve an affirmation, a celebration of values and culture among people coming together. So, with the ever-ascending commercialization and transactional trajectory of festivities, and top-down rules and regulations you don’t have a say in, perhaps detachment, with a dose of disdain even, is expected.
Festivals have existed since time immemorial. But the contemporary music festival is arguably the child of the Swinging Sixties. Monterey Pop Festival, Isle of Wight, Glastonbury, and of course, Woodstock. That’s where the (post)modern ethos of counterculture found assemblage; from sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll, to mantras of peace and love, all got codified. They were riding the crest of a wave of more fundamental change, of postcolonialism, civil rights, and second-wave feminism – changes reclaim ownership and agency historically pilfered. A wave swallowed by the currents of history, the currents of capital. Ultimately, it was a wave of empathy, will to power and spontaneity clashing with the forces of conservatism and control.
Woodstock Music and Art Fair: “3 Days of Peace and Music”, as it was formally named, is the archetypal music festival, despite being more mayhem than music. They estimated 50,000 attendees; at its peak, it had around 450,000 people jammed at the little farm in the town of Bethel. The tickets were cheap, but after a point who was counting? God knows how the sound system carried the show. They contemplated deploying the National Guard to the town given the apocalyptic influx of people into the small town, but somehow it remained a largely peaceful event. It was uncomfortable, there was rain and mud, there was food shortage and all other things, which by today’s standards make it a very poorly organized festival. Through pure spirit alone it remains iconic. And ofc, the legendary line-up.
Today, no music festival will fly like that. Rightly so. A well-organized show with logistical bliss is more enjoyable. But Woodstock had the raw spirit emblematic of counterculture, one that eschewed forms of control and regulation. It can still be experienced today in the underground. But the underground has always been a different story; they are intimate affairs. The mainstream music festival, the vanilla mass appeal spectacle, has been thoroughly commodified. The global music festival industry is a billion-dollar industry. It’s a complete transformation from counterculture to the establishment. Even rave culture, the prerogative of the underground, the last bastion of the spontaneous Dionysian, straddles the dichotomous dilemma of counterculture-culture. Even they face corporatization.
Given the circumstances, it’s to be expected I suppose.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer observed how capitalism co-opts culture and regurgitates out sanitized and polished copies for mass consumption. That was back in the 1940s; they observed how conformity could be bred through employing capital and reproducing radical and revolutionary art and ideas through a more diet-coke, empty-calories kind of imitation. They observed movies, radio, music and commercials all reproducing the hegemonic ideology of capitalism. Think “woke-washing” of commercials (think Kendall Jenner solving police brutality by offering a cop a can of Pepsi), think of the bland array of interchangeable formulaic blockbuster movies, reboots and sequels. Perhaps the most ironic example is that of the Che Guevarra T-shirts that are a symbol worldwide, enabled by the very global sociopolitical and economic system the man rebelled against.
Anything and everything will be swallowed up, digested and distorted by the Chthonic beast that is neoliberal capitalism. And Cthulhu’s flexibility cannot be understated, it bends reality to its will. And so, for the music festival to be submerged in this logic of commerce and consumption is but expected. I do not hold it against Swordfish Events and Entertainment, for they are just playing a rigged game. And everybody has to play it, nobody’s got a choice. I try to appreciate whatever I can. For who knows in the future, what else will become scarce.
Past the guards and the gates, the trail through the Eucalyptus trees decorated with posters and artwork opens up to what would be a vast expanse on other days. But on the first Saturday of the weekend of the year 2023, it stands positively carnivalesque. The array of tents (pop-up stores, and bars) opened up to a stage with a gigantic tusked elephant mural with serrated tusks – Tusker Stage. Some unidentified artist was on.
The grounds are packed. Gangs of the key demographic of 18-40(?)years form a constellation of bodies, but also families with toddlers, and brats, and families with juveniles. People have brought their pet dogs with them. Echoes is family-friendly; murals of bears, spiders, chameleons, a tree house hanging over by the flea market, a row of static exercise bikes for the hyperactive to blow steam by the food court, nooks and crannies of the forest decorated with lights for the night, banners, and posters. I will say again…carnivalesque.
As for the key demos, they’ve come decked out with all the jazz and pizazz. Bright flowery flannel, pitch black threads, tank tops, slutty skirts and crop tops, kurtas, churidars, dresses, jeans and Ts, shorts and hoodies. Gender neutral too. Anybody could be wearing anything. Except for a suit, nobody wore a suit. People displaying their biceps, thighs, cleavages, and bare chests. Chokers and fishnets. Tattoos, piercings and hairdos.
I’d grabbed the opportunity to dawn a thrifted bright blue and gold maximalist flowery pattern jacket. I’d borrowed Rudraksh’s John Lennon glasses (trivia: apparently they are called “tea shades”).
‘I can see why you waited till now to debut in this’,
Esha had commented on my garb as we were entering the venue. There needed to be an occasion. Echoes provided the occasion. Amongst all the colourful, frilly and frivolous atmosphere the jacket could breathe.
The first performance we catch is at the Rhino-Beetle stage. A large crowd gathers, eager to witness Yung Raja. Yung Raja; little dude in frills and shades, with big energy; sweet-talking the crowd, telling us how this is his favourite town to perform in. The crowd’s eating it up. Pure gluttony.
You can be indifferent to the music, but not the energy. A Tamil rapper from Singapore, with dashes of English peppered in his raps. I didn’t care for the content. How could I? I don’t hablo. But I did listen. The delivery was appreciated. There’s a big difference between sounds coming off a speaker, and something coming out of a guy on stage, all acrobatic and animated irl. Stage presence Yung Raja had. The charisma. A brute kind.
It was the only time I was at the rhino-beetle stage.
I lose contact with my group soon after. I develop second-hand anxiety for the parents who have their kids running around in the crowd. But the moments pass, and I find two of my crew, Roshan and Esha, wandering the grounds. We decide to check out the Serpent Stage.
‘Bro…Serpent is going to siiickk! It’s gonna be a rager bro!’,
was the pedestrian howl, Vijay and I overheard when we entered the venue after the security check. We were forced to concede a smile, and the fact – that festival soundbites are gold. The uninhibited excitement and spirit that they are loaded with.
The Serpent Stage is loud but lacklustre. Too garish and maximalist, with no discernible change in texture or timbre. Just a constant blare. But perhaps the coolest thing is the marbling of the smoke from the cigarettes, joints and the smoke machine on stage, onto the light being spat out of the serpent’s mechanical mouth. Blue milky ways of smoke, rollicking like ocean waves tapped underneath the light beams above us. It’s a trip. I try hypnotizing myself gazing into it.
A lone Rudraksh finds his way to Esha, Roshan, and me. He’d stopped to say “hi” to Raka, a fellow artist of the Bangalore electronica underground, and in that split second, he’d lost Vishal and Vijay. Lost them to the crowd. We stand around trying to vibe with hype. The crowd around us appear to be swimming in it. But I can’t. It feels too generic and pandering.
‘Generic Martin Garrix unds unds shit’
Rudraksh would diagnose later on.
I bump into an old colleague, a friend, at Serpent. He’s definitely feeling it. He tells me he loves that we keep bumping into each other in events like this. Although the time he’s recalling, we didn’t actually bump into one another, we only happened to be in adjacent venues. But I appreciate the thought and the feeling he alludes to.
‘You on something?’, he asks
‘No. You?’, I respond.
The answer’s evident. It was evident from the smile, the shades, the swagger and the stagger he had while coming up to greet me. A few more gregarious exchanges later he indicates he wants to go dive into the thick of it.
He was the fourth familiar face I’d bumped into. The first two were the husband and toddler of my senior from school while in the queue for a drink. And then the senior herself a while later. And these were just the ones I approached and conversed with. I saw a neighbour of mine, I saw my cousin’s ex in the crowd. I saw faces that were common fixtures in the burgeoning catacombs of Indiranagar Socials; a scene that has been dishing out left-field electronica. And so, I saw, people I’d seen before in gigs and afterparties.
I even spot Dhp; an underground rapper I know only from Instagram, kicking it with Yung Raja and Co., sauntering around the food court as Rudraksh and I were in line to get some much-needed burgers for our nerves. It was like an easter egg.
I saw people.
People I needn’t necessarily interact with, but whose presence signified many things. An energy, a disposition, a temperament. It signified a tentative belonging, and sharing of space, time and culture. As your circle collides and meshes with the crowd, that tentativeness evaporates. Echoes, and festivals in general, draw eclectic crowds. But the eclectics are bound by a liminality. The contemporary music festival, especially in India, draws a bourgeoisie crowd.
The liminality is class. It’s capital.
‘It’s not a small world, it’s just small circles…’,
Vishal had remarked in an afterparty weeks prior.
Echoes of Earth curates an antechamber that brings together these overlapping and concentric circles to form the crowd. My crew too faced the overlap, with great glee; Vishal had a pack of his school friends roll up from out of state, all to experience India’s “greenest music festival”. There were the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) acquaintances of Vishal and Vijay. Rudraksh had his fellow musicians and artists of the Bangalore underground. Roshan and Esha had their spiderweb of networks pop up like whack-a-mole.
Despite being able to explain away such encounters, reasoning it with terms like “class”, “capital”, “bourgeoisie”, “habitus”, “social milieu” and “the culture industry”, it is enchanting to see familiar faces. The pure phenomenology of recognising an old friend or a new acquaintance unexpectedly arrests you, in the moment.
Feels a tad bit magical.
Because the enchantment is obscured on the day-to-day. The way life goes within the postmodern condition inundated with science, technology, and a workaholic grind, not many can escape it. Instrumental rationality, it’s the dominant logic of our times, so it cannot be ignored. Personal faith aside, the world feels Godless and cynical. Like Nietzsche lamented of Modernity – “God is Dead…We’ve killed him”.
But it still feels a tad bit magical when you see a familiar face in a crowd. And the music festival, over and above the music and art, is all about the crowd. The familiar crowd and the novel crowd. Always has been.
On ground zero of (Post)Modernity (the West) the hippies tried to find an authentic form of communion and enchantment together. In a society, essentially dictated by cold and calculating logic. Hence, the “sex, drugs, rock n’ roll”; hence “peace and love” and all that. The contemporary music festival was one such form of authentic expression, inches close to becoming religious. Organic, and cut from the cloth of the zeitgeist – secular but spiritual, leaning of technology, leaning on the Avant-Garde, but only to lean on the shoulders of one another. But then, the Culture Industry co-opted the whole movement.
Today, the Culture Industry is co-opting older (pre-scientific) religions. Cultures which have existed for millennia in the womb of the community are now being snatched up to belong to the corporations. Festivals and pilgrimage are now business opportunities; under the guise of promoting them to larger numbers of people, the local autonomy and occasions are usurped for top-down control of the culture by the government and big business. Increasingly, the bottom line and the rhetoric are about boosting economic productivity. Just look at this piece on the economic potential of the Kumbh Mela by Fortune magazine (surprise surprise).
And we know, there is plenty more where that comes from.
But ancient traditions have intricate existential systems, pre-dating the (Post)Modern. The first to go was the contemporary music festival, native to the elements of the postmodernity – of science, technology and secular nihilistic capitalism. Despite all this Echoes of Earth, and others of its ilk, remain enchanting. For they still bring together people, they still curate music, art and vibrations.
For now, that’s enchantment enough.
‘I love it! How we all knew that eventually... we’ll find ourselves at this stage. We all knew dude!... end of the night, we’ll all be here.’,
cackles Vishal.
Our group finally reunites at the Tusker Stage. It’s the closer of the night. And the crowd is surging and swelling. As the stage is being set up, amidst the chattering of people, the eternal hysterical beats from Serpent slices through to our ears. But the hype is all for Tinariwen about to rock out Tusker.
And then, the turban and robed collective begin. The guitars drone and the frontman starts to sing. It is simultaneously soporific and ecstatic. People begin to sway and spin. The dank smell of hydroponics being lit up proliferates the air. Reflexively, I comment to Rudraksh that someone is smoking that “good stuff”. The couple in front look at us and acknowledge the fact, with longing in their eyes
As the performance rolls on. I notice, let’s call her, Prasiddhi Addey. I recognize her as a patron of Indiranagar Social scene, and also from an afterparty about a year back. But she also happens to be an old college mate with Rudraksh. Such are the contours of the small concentric and the small overlapping circles.
She and her crew share their joint with Rudraksh. And after a bit, when they’ve smoked themselves silly, she tells Rudraksh to pass it on to the crowd. Naturally, bro passes it to me. And I pass it off to a bobbleheading Vijay, elated at the unexpected condiment. And on impulse, I tell him to pass it to the couple from earlier on. And so he does. They appear glad. They express their gratitude.
I suppose that’s how it ought to be. I feel like a Jane Austen protagonist. I feel like Emma.
And so, forms a momentary fragile chain of people bound by varying degrees of separation sharing a joint, the incense stick of music festivals, while being hypnotized by the musical voodoo of Tinariwen. Encapsulated in it: the distilled spirit of counter-culture, the ghost of the Swinging Sixties
Moments later, one half of the couple, the woman turns around to ask if I have more. I tell her it came from the crowd, not me. Her man looks a little embarrassed, for asking strangers like that perhaps. She tells him,
‘But my high is fading…’
And then she goes and gets her vape. She gives Rudraksh and me some drags from it.
The bartering of goodwill.
Tinariwen continued crooning into the night, very folks, very rock n’ roll, and very shamanic. Some of the crowd, like the very boisterous man 5 o’clock to me, appear to dissociate from their body. Or at least the beat, given how his thumping claps woefully miss the percussion’s timing, clumsily syncopating the beats. There were other pockets of off-beat claps, and shouts and moans too.
But that’s how it ought to be.
Outside the festival gates, at the parking lot:
Two women come to us with flyers for an afterparty. And Vishal asks ‘Isn’t it paid to enter?’ You can see the embarrassment in their eyes, and fall of their faces as they affirm. No afterparty ought to charge you to enter. But if sacred pilgrimages and festivals get swallowed up by commercialism, what chance does the afterparty stand?
A dude falls face flat trying to jump over a fence. It must’ve sobered him up. Hell, it may have opened his third eye. A few paces behind, we see, we laugh, and we learn, going through under the fence instead. Earlier we crossed a dude passed out on the grass; his friends plonked beside him, at their wit's end. There are throngs of autos in the parking lot now. Cutting through that, every so often an ambulance with the sirens blaring zips past.
We’re stuck in a traffic jam. A guy wasted out of his wits is circling round and round all discombobulated, with one of his shoes in his hand. The others are trying to get him to calm down. He seems to have a particular grievance with the pink-shirt guy. The man with the Palestinian scarf on his head, another couple of guys and the two women try to ignore the situation, hoping it will just go away.
From the ivory tower of our minibus, we, on the other hand, are in heavy speculation as to the predicament playing out. We conjecture that the pink-shirt guy was oppressing the poor drunk red-shirt guy. That he’d got him sloshed and now kidnapped him. Of course, our interest and excitement hit a fever pitch when the pink-shirt guy goes for a hug and our red-shirt hero pushes him away.
We all go, “Ooooooh!”.
Meanwhile, other cars were entertaining themselves by playing demonic psytrance. All of us waiting for the traffic sludge to move. The night for Embassy International Riding School was over. The spectre of the second day lingered. Way back when it started, in 2016, Echoes used to allow people to camp on the grounds overnight. But now all of us have to vacate the venue; the closing bell sounds the siren for the crowd to scramble and find shelter at other places to hang out. Or just go home.
It is the logic of efficiency and commerce. Why allow people to camp? All practicality dictates you send them home, and have them return the next day. It cuts the overnight logistical and security costs. And if some organizational wizard can find a way to charge extra rent for camping, making a neat profit on top of that, and get through the ordeal of getting sanctioned by law enforcement, they’d re-introduce it perhaps.
The loss of camping shows the fragility of the communitarian spirit. But like I’ve repeated, I don’t know whether Echoes is fully to blame. The game is like that, they are exalted by circumstance. They still gave us an antechamber of space and time bookended by a December weekend. An antechamber where we could dress up, gawk at art installations, submerge ourselves in music, be boisterous, and be juvenile. And experience a sense of connection and belonging with the proverbial crowd. The desire for which, as it became apparent on the second day of Echoes of Earth 2023, is what has us condemned. For we need it.
And it’s not necessarily a bad thing, for things that can be condoned can be ignored. All things important, thus, must be all things condemned, no? Anyway, that’s a story for another day. The second day. Of Echoes.
