- The first few hours at Exit Festival are overwhelming. The scale of everything—the large, hilly outcrop the festival takes place upon, the promise of four days of music, the 20 stages, the 500+ artists performing to a quarter million people—is enormous. Large arenas are clustered at one end, while the other is a warren of cobbled paths and archways, each bringing you to another grassy pit or pathway, which looks exactly like one you've just passed, but is somehow never the one you were looking for.
On first impression, Exit Festival seems no different than other European booze-soaked-multi-day-giga-festivals. You have the omnipresent English and Australian accents of festival goers—in flip-flops and gripping cardboard carriers that accommodate six large cups of beer at a time—and there's little reference to the festival's political origins as a protest against Serbia's despotic then-leader Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. But as the days begin to blur together, and as attendance numbers swell to their weekend peak—directly in proportion, it has to be said, to the decreasing quality of the music on offer—the charm of Exit comes from discovering its less impersonal corners, like the old Serbian men selling shots of aged rakija for a euro, and the mute mania of the Silent Disco wedged into a rocky crevice.
Photo credit: Nik Torrens
The main stage proves to be the doing or undoing of several acts. James Murphy eats the bright-eyed Thursday crowd for breakfast, leading a nonstop charge through LCD Soundsystem's uptempo chant-along favourites ("Yeah," "Losing My Edge"), and new album tracks ("Pow-Pow-Pow," "Drunk Girls"), with a voice of surprising strength and clarity. The moody posturing of London band The Horrors is received mostly with stony silence the following night, before they're blasted off stage by Atari Teenage Riot.
Missy Elliott's hyped Saturday show is bells and whistles, smoke and mirrors, dancers and costume changes, miming guests and product placements—but even as pairs of autographed Missy Elliott Adidas shoes are flung into the crowd, it doesn't hide the fact that her actual performance time clocks in at around 15 minutes. The Chemical Brothers' closing night spectacular achieves new levels of sensory saturation, but after sound issues (imagine the kind of farty speaker sound you hear on a shitty club soundsystem, and times that by one thousand), they recover, and by the encore are receiving a frenzied, jacking crowd response for brash early favourites "Block Rockin' Beats" and "Leave Home."
Photo credit: Nik Torrens
At the Dance Arena Chromeo got off to a slinky start with their facsimile of '80s electro funk and synth pop replete with vocoders, lit-up lady legs, and well-received favourites like "Needy Girl." Two nights later, there isn't a spare square inch of wiggle room as people pour into the thronging, heaving crowd during Laidback Luke, which turns to hell as we attempt to escape the pop-rinsed electro house, leading to long period of jostling, pushing and unwelcome groping before we are finally ejected to safety. Busy P's buzz-saw melodies manage to wring out the last traces of our energy on Sunday, with a bracing mix of ghetto tech, dubstep and caustic electro, but without doubt Dance Arena's highlight is its Friday program.
Ida Engberg plays tough, hard-edged grooves directly to the crowd, coolly disregarding her gawping admirers on all sides. Moderat refuse to be overpowered by Pfadfinderei's dynamic visuals, using Apparat's live guitar and vocals, and the jovial interplay between all three to bring even their more downtempo tracks to life. After a total logjam prevents re-entry into the Arena for about an hour, we finally reach the stage as Ricardo Villalobos is hitting his peak. As the sun rises, he unleashes one of his best sets in recent years, impeccably mixed and deep without indulgence, with audacious selections like what sounds like a stateside cousin to "Fizheuer Zieheuer," constructed entirely of American marching band sounds.
Photo credit: Nik Torrens
Happy Novisad is a grittier option to the Dance Arena, located in a secluded corner of the festival site. The Warp opening night has a lively Tim Exile armed with headset, joystick and a purple suit jacket, beatboxing, singing and tweaking, distorting and leaping over the barriers into the crowd. Friday's dubstep lineup stars Joker, who delivers one of the festival's highlights, relentlessly ramping up the atmosphere throughout his high-octane set with classics like Benga's "Crunked Up" and his own "Digidesign." Sunday's programming of D-Bridge is genius, with the cooling, calming bass-heavy drum & bass soothing those hollow-eyed and weary from four days of partying.
With so much variety on offer at a festival the size of Exit there's an assumption that people will mill about with open ears and minds to new artists. In reality, more frequently than not, lesser known artists on smaller stages contend with just a handful of diehards and gaping grassy areas. Case in point: Gaslamp Killer and Gonjasufi deliver a blistering performance to crowd of no more than 20. Segueing directly into a solo Gaslamp DJ set, the spell is broken once a cup of beer is lobbed onto the stage, causing a power outage and a cussed-out rant from Gaslamp before he storms off, leaving Daedelus to make amends.
Photo credit: Nik Torrens
While there are so many things on a micro level that are charming and unique about Exit—the location, the local residents, and the attention to organizational detail in particular—it's inevitable that such a huge event would eventually face criticism about its amorous beer monster revelers and increasingly mainstream lineup. It feels a bit unjust to reduce a festival with so much variation to a sentence or a score, but even so, with the memory of warm Serbian hospitality, cheap beer, sunshine, happy faces and excellent performances from LCD Soundsystem, Ricardo and Joker, the pros most certainly outweigh the cons.
Photos: Exit Festival 2010, Day 1
Photos: Exit Festival 2010, Day 2
Photos: Exit Festival 2010, Day 3