- In the days subsequent to Mystery Land, I found myself at a loss for words when attempting to describe it. There are the facts: 16 years of history, 20 stages of music and 60,000 mostly Dutch ravers. But they don't go very far in conveying to you what it's like to be at an event where you've never heard of 60% of the performers, there are actors paid to dress up in Alice in Wonderland-esque garb and Ricardo Villalobos can't fill out a medium-sized tent. Quite simply, Mystery Land is a parallel universe.
It's also a lot of fun. In talking to friends from Amsterdam the night before the festival, they warned me about the music policy. And, generally, they were correct. Having to cobble together a day of music that seemed relevant despite the fact that there were more than 20 stages is—on the face of it—frustrating. That said, it ended up perfectly. Who wants to be forced to make choices at a festival anyway? If you can find acts that you want to see for every minute of its 12 hours—and never have to sacrifice one thing for another—then you're doing well.
Photo credit: ID&T
And when one of those performances isn't up to par, you can go explore the rest of the festival. I found myself doing that quite often as it happens. I climbed up an enormous grassy pyramid to a small building at the top, and was greeted by the hardest and fastest techno of the festival being pumped out by a DJ in a cage. I looked over a stage helmed by a DJ named Technoboy that was enveloped by an enormous demon that may or may not have breathed fire at some point. I heard Steve Aoki scream into a microphone, even though I couldn't find him on a timetable. And I saw a dancer on a stripper pole performing on a stage that bore the image of Kurt Cobain. (I also slept in the biggest bed I've ever seen at the hotel they put us up in, but that's another story.)
Of the few things that I did understand, Speedy J was the easiest to comprehend. His set was one of the best I saw, simultaneously appealing to the clear predilection of the largely Dutch crowd for hard techno and the muso trying to figure out his confusing live set-up which now sees him putting together pieces of tracks on the fly. The key to all of this isn't that Jochem Papp is doing something new. But that it's rather refreshing—something that often gets lost in the race to embrace new technology.
Photo credit: ID&T
Also on form was Daniel Stefanik, who played to a comically small tent of people late in the evening. (It should be said that the organizers were almost universally correct in their estimates of audience interest. I rarely saw a stage that was terribly overcrowded or—by late afternoon, at least—undercrowded.) He was clearly enjoying himself, playing Precious System's "Voice from Planet Love" and ending with an exultant rendition of Anita Ward's "Ring My Bell."
Ricardo was Ricardo, playing to a smaller audience than I would have expected going into the festival. After spending six hours among hard techno aficionados, it became clear that the medium-sized tent named after Michel De Hey, who performed after Villalobos, was not a main attraction. His set was as varied as any I've seen, pulling the ravers who were there along with him to the furthest reaches of minimal and into electro and IDM from years gone by. In a different environment, it might've been rapturous. At Mystery Land, it was just another strange attraction in a festival full of them.