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Once a year something special happens near the Portuguese-Spanish border. Set upon an oasis in the Portalegre steppeland, close to the medieval town of Crato, a year-round commune transforms into a festival of psychedelic revelry.
Celebrating its 9th rotation around the sun and 7th edition (c/o Covid), Waking Life continues to grow in notoriety and popularity.
The revered gathering proved once again that festivals can go beyond simple music programming, overpriced drinks, sub-par sound, and branded partnerships. Far, far beyond, recalibrating the festival-expectation bar for first-time visitors beyond recognition.
Kyle Toole at Outra Lado, O.Bee mixing a 15-minute orchestral flute record into dubby tech house (see below), the new Mimo stage keeping heavy heads soothed with a constant stream of ambient and experimental music: These moments and features are all worthy of an article in themselves, but Maayan Nidam at Floresta is the epitome of what makes this festival so special.
Four hours of minimal house and techno will always have the capacity to be boring, leaving punters waiting for a moment that never comes, or being wholly unimpressed by the moments that do. It’s music that’s all about layers, textures, and progression. Done poorly, it can be lethargic and dull; done well, it’s something ethereal. The Perlon stalwart took to Floresta as night turned to dawn on Sunday and, unsurprisingly, demonstrated just how magic the genre can be.
Maayan journeyed through a range of her own strange productions and obscure cuts as the warm morning sun peeked through the pines, evaporating the water and creating a thin mist across the lake. There’s a real instrumental feel to the electronic music Maayan writes and selects, subtle and heads-down, simultaneously sounding like you could peer over and see a five-piece band chugging away behind the decks.
Three hours of stripped-back after-hour sounds with shimmers of strings and horns led to a crescendo of deep house for the final 60 minutes, keeping an increasingly large crowd engaged. It’s one of those mornings that will stick with me for a very long time and a few people have earmarked it in the post-festival chinwag as something special, something that brought with it a feeling of total time collapse, a feeling of ineffability.
To an outsider looking inwards, I’m sure that sounds like the result of an overindulgence in substances. Ten thousand punters from a handful of Europe's major cities living like radicals for a week is an easy target for a bit of piss-taking, even if this ignores the underlying political essence of the festival and the genuinely radical organization behind it.
Whatever the case, Waking Life has a knack for evaporating time and shifting spaces into otherworldly environments that leave the door well open for profound experience. That’s deserving of a mention, regardless of how aloof it may sound.
Maybe it’s the year-round presence of the Waking Life team, who spend 365 days a year tending to the lake and its wildlife. Maybe it’s the set times, which range from two hours through to nine, nullifying any time pressure for artists who can shape things as they please. It could be the stages on which those artists play, seemingly built with a desire to take away focus from the individual and place it back on the dancers.
Maybe it’s the theme of growth, decay, and rebirth, omnipresent despite the festival's rising popularity.
The giant egg that has sat proud at the base of the site since inception, the new eco-conservation area giving renewed life to a once arid area of the festival site. Performances like ‘Songs for Departures,’ where an electronic harp is used to “echo the tremor of passing, the before and after melting when resonance outlives the flesh.”
It's what’s behind the festival, the spirit that props it up and creates a warping of time through the creation and curation of spaces void of brand logos or the other common trappings of festivals in the 21st century.
There’s no doubt that the secret is out on this heavenly little place. Although affirming experiences were served hot at the lakeside over the six days, the festival has evidently risen in notoriety. Unfortunately, that will always lead to people jumping on for the wrong reasons.
But as the festival approaches its tenth year, there’s every reason to trust the organizers will protect what makes this gathering so important - the focus on deep presence, the collective and, of course, really good tunes.
