Sustain-Release 2019

  • A festival like no other, this year featuring standout sets from the likes of Powder, DJ Marcelle and J-Zbel.
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  • Like movies or long drives, festivals allow you the rental of another consciousness for an allotted period of time. After a few hours, the usual values of day-to-day life become sort of moot. Bodies reduce to vessels, brains obliterate to goop and the collective MO devolves to the act of seeking pleasure wherever it lives.   This past weekend, I witnessed a woman kiss the earth, remove her foam cowboy hat and horse-laugh her way into a wall of fog. I fell asleep against a tree stump to the throb of a hammering venue some 200 yards away, dreaming of entrapment in a washing machine. I stepped over a group of three dancers making out to the sounds of rattling sheet metal. I saw two of my favorite living DJs lick their CDJs. Ravers fed grapes to ravers, Greco-Roman-style, on the dance floor.   This was just a thin slice of the fantasia known as Sustain-Release, which held its sixth edition in the lush of Monticello, New York. The weekender summed up the best of what could loosely be called avant-dance music across 62 hours of mirth at our temporary home, Camp Kennybrook. (Portable toilet to boathouse, the place looks like a Hollywood lot reproduction of the 1983 slasher movie Sleepaway Camp.) Subtle adjustments over time have sharpened S-R into the slick operation it is today, but at the core of the event—aside from the depth of its curation, thoughtfulness of the space and the unfortunate but relative exclusivity of the crowd—remains one premise: strand a thousand dance music freaks in a campground with a lake.
    A basketball tourney on the first full day may as well have been an hours-long improv circuit. The team names were rich—"Double Salmon," "More Fog Please," "Fog Juice"—and attempts at actually playing basketball were honorable. DJ Python, in a Ween shirt, soundtracked it all by blending jock jams with an idiotic EDM mix of the "Macarena." (Less than 16 hours earlier, he'd left the audience muttering after an exquisite ambient set that showed him at his most romantic.) The crowd, clustered together as one mostly representational ecosystem of DJ, promoter and civilian, lounged courtside like a colony of happy lizards.   Raves proper took place at the main stage, the same indoor basketball court used for the past four years, which I'm told had been reconfigured to hugely better feng shui this time around, with acoustics and BPMs that smacked harder, wider and more tyrannical than the cushier sonics from the Bossa stage. The main stage worked for Akua and LSDXOXO, each of whom delivered devious sets that at points threatened the 170-BPM mark (the former before midnight), but even better for J-Zbel, two snapbacked guys from Lyon who may as well have set a drum of kerosene on fire on the dance floor. Cryptic and smoggy, they plumbed the inexhaustible reserves of Y2K-era fetishism for a few hours of gabber and acid rave.
    Back at Bossa that same night, Laurel Halo inspired rapture in her own right, shuttling down with hellfire from Agrippa, her boiling remix of Lyzza's "Sleeve," K-Lone's "Sine Language" and a bevy of unknowables sutured together with The X-Files theme. I was almost knocked in the head by Beta Librae's foot as she crowdsurfed. The following night, Librae would inspire her own legion of beloveds after a complex and oceanic live set that made the stage feel like nitrous.   The next day was helmed was dBridge, who locked the audience prisoner in the main stage with a paralyzing vox mix of this tune, which daisy-chained nicely with the galloping triple-threat of Hank Jackson, Halal & Relaxer and Dr. Rubinstein & Roi Perez, all of whom subtly warred for kinghood in the world of cosmic IDM and acid so sour it made my jaw ache. There was also a poolside session with the charming DJ Marcelle, who completely unselfconsciously, and entirely unbeholden to the usual pageantries of DJing, dolled out a wide-ranging vinyl set, moving from ghettotech to Dabke, from dub to dancehall, all during fits of cold rain.
    A half-acre of forest theatrically lit like a giallo film by the light artist Kip Davis made a thicket called The Grove, which was accessible only single file across a rickety bridge, a merciful palate cleanser for the brain in between otherwise intense sets. Quiet Time's showcase, the highlight of which were the graceful astral noodlings of newcomer Nadia Khan, and DJ Healthy's nocturnal fourth-world emissions from the night before, made flicking back and forth among the three spaces feel like a study in power dynamics.   There was no force more dynamic, though, than the return of Powder. Beginning at 4 AM on Sunday, she solemnly served up a seven-hour Olympiad of Italo and hi-NRG. By the end, the lovely springiness of the Bossa stage floor, adored and battered by every dancer, caved in at an extremely lucky point in the far corner. (Within seconds, a cloud of employees, who appeared to materialize out of thin air, had cordoned off the area with steel barricades.) Just after 11:30 AM, with e-cigarettes blinkering red, minds tanked and midday sunlight drooling through the open windows, Powder quashed her heroics on the fourth encore with International Music System's "Dancing Therapy," a gleaming maraschino cherry of a track whose mushy chorus rang on like an ethos long after we emptied the venue.
    As with all happy escapes, there was a looming sense of fleetingness tinting our time at Camp Kennybrook. On the final morning, as campgoers drained from the site with their brains and joints throbbing, eyes twitching with fatigue, the grounds gently reeking of sewage, cut a pretty, post-apocalpytic scene. A sage camper—who freaked me out when I realized he was lying on the earth feet from where I was tying my shoes, a leaf on each eyelid, unmoving and serene as a corpse—eulogized the weekend nicely. "If the role of dance is to destroy the ego," he said, smiling self-assuredly, clearing his throat, and speaking to no one in particular, "then I've got nothing left." Photo credits / Raul Coto-Batres - Lead, Basketball, DJ Python, Dorm, Pool Party, Forest Sean Schermerhorn - All others
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