Woogie Weekend was a wet and wonderful So-Cal experience - - Mixmag

Woogie Weekend was a wet and wonderful So-Cal experience

Even a hurricane couldn't kill The Woogie

  • Jake Lubelski and Ross Gardiner
  • 21 July 2015

Photos: Jamie Rosenberg

At 5pm on Sunday the rain finally stopped lashing down on Woogie Weekend, and after an hour of silence due to the speakers short-circuiting some uplifting classic house started thumping out to a dejected, empty festival ground. Those that opted to stay slowly started skidding and sliding back towards the Hive from the canopies they'd been sheltering under for the last couple of hours, and after fifteen minutes a solid crowd had formed, drenched, caked in mud and stoked to get their tunes back.

Donning stark cleric robes like a 70s spiritualist guru, Lee Burridge walked from the campsite towards the The Hive with several hundred people buzzing behind him. The stage completely packed out as the rain kicked off again, and for the next six hours Burridge and Bedouin worked all those weary bodies long into the night with blistering spacey tech-house sets to a vibe pumping in state of carnal deliverance.

The Do LaB had returned to the beautiful Oak Canyon Park in Orange County for the first time since Lightning in a Bottle 2010, and it made for an excellent location for Woogie Weekend's inauguration. The concept was to take LiB's Woogie stage and develop it into a mini, three-day camping festival for about four thousand beautiful freaks from the nearby underground communities.

The Woogie is known for its eclectic blend of house and techno, building line-ups with scene legends, Do LaB regulars and rising local artists, and over the years it has become a staple of the underground scene in Southern California. For the festival they had split the Woogie into two stages; The Hive and The Beat Nest, as well as the Dusk and Dawn after-party rigs in the campsite.

We kicked off our friday with Lovelife founder Dadon going right in with some hulking, metallic techno at The Hive. Patricio followed with his stylistic deep techy sound that has become symbiotic with the Do LaB's taste in house. Our pick of the night however, was Playa legend Adam Freeland, whose switch-ups from acid and crispy 909 beats to worldly house tracks set an early tone for what would be a great weekend of music.

One of the best elements of Woogie was the rugged after-party set up on the campgrounds. The Dusk and Dawn stages kicked off as soon as the music at the festival stopped, with local favourite and poncho aficionado, Sabo, being the big draw on Friday night. The music was blaring across the campground so the options were to either bang some earplugs in and rest before morning yoga, or rage on until the sun appears.

Music at the main stages kicked off again at noon on Saturday with Pumpkin and Fred Everything playing to the dark clouds rolling in from over the mountains. By 4pm, Saturday's rain was moderate but pouring consistently over the entire festival. Brown puddles, ponds and rivers sprung up across the camp grounds, and drenched bodies kept torpedoing down the big slip 'n slide set up by The Beat Nest.

After catching Gigamesh's funky afternoon set, we swung over to the Hive to get into a ridiculous four hour set from LA's Tara Brooks. The house mystic went long on account for an absent Just Be (Bushwacka!) as she laid down her seamless and ethnically twined sounds like fabrics woven in a big desert trance machine.

It wasn't until J. Phlip arrived that things got really intense at the Hive. She wasn't afraid to play the weird ones which were at times cacophonic, but always unique and bold. Her selections, with their crisp classic percussion, and twisted, intriguing instrumentation, drew the most sizable crowd of the weekend.

Following the Dirtybird player was Miami's Danny Daze, who brought the Hive one shade darker by bouncing between crunchy techno thumpers and wet soulful jams before bringing his set in full circle with the only breaks track we heard all weekend.

We spent the Sunday morning grovelling to our bodies at the 10am yoga session, and then breezed around the site and investigated the utopian farmers' market vibes that the Do LaB gigs are well known for. Widely credited as being the purveyors of the lifestyle festival experience, the Woogie had the live art, the açaí bowls, and the beardy dude in the meditation tent rubbing lavender oil behind people's ears.

Mikey Lion was always going to draw one of the biggest crowds of the weekend. Despite being given the cooking hot 1pm Sunday slot, the peacocked Desert Hearts founder managed to pack The Beat Nest out and slam the festival awake with his funky-ass tech-house.

The coming of Hurricane Dolores at around 3pm fucked everything up for a while. The campsite was a swamp, the kids were shivering, and the music was completely off by about 4pm. It meant that we weren't going to catch Berghain monster Marcel Fengler or Italo tech house star Francesca Lombardo who were poised to close the Beat Nest.

After Lee Burridge and the All Day I Dream team had saved us from the brink with six hours of tribal Burner cuts, we trudged back to the campsite barefoot, picking up litter along the way and making sure that the Do LaB is still running the greenest festivals in America. Criminally, there were no after parties (every attempt to start one was promptly quashed by the otherwise-chill campsite fuzz) and so we drank and smoked whatever was left and passed out in our damp tents.

The clean up on Monday morning was pretty miserable, but that's usually a mark of success and didn't deter from the fact that Woogie Weekend was a wonderful experience. The Do LaB's impeccable eyes and ears for aesthetic, music and vibe was demonstrated by the fact that this couldn't have been orchestrated by anyone else.

The Do LaB will return to Oak Canyon Park in Irvine, California, for the inaugural DIRTYBIRD Campout this October.

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