#but i was mindblown seeing the graphics etc etc

[saturated-soul]

So I finally upgraded from a laptop to a pc, and got a new vr headset with it. I'm literally over the moon cause this has been my dream for years now and ahsksjsn it's amazing ??

[hundredbillionbottles]

Yusteece

I had never been so unsure as to what country I was in as on Thursday evening when I stepped out of an uber straight into a sludgy river of mud, hit by that thick smell which for whatever sciency reason happens whenever there is a particular excess of the stuff. Surely this type of wafting terrain only exists in the marshes and bogs of Glastonbury or Reading Festival? But as it turns out, having looked it up, mud occurs at festivals all over the world, and not just England (who knew?), especially at ones in cities with as high an annual rainfall as Bogotá. Hence, the scene at the carpark for Estéreo Picnic, Colombia’s biggest music festival, was a vast, squelchy brownness through which cars were revving their hearts out to conquer.

The inside of the festival was, however, a stark contrast to filthy floor. The place twinkled. Fairy lights threaded through the gaps between gazebos sheltering pop-up shops bursting with what Dom would call ‘wavey threads’, fantastically designed clothing unique to anything I’d seen before. Such gazebos stood in two long parallel lines, creating a wide path leading towards the food area, which was furnished with giant cushions designed as oversized Chocoramos (a Colombian chocolate bar/cake-type snack) and rubber dingies tied together and implanted with LEDs to make illuminated technicoloured igloos for people to crash out in. Watching over this area stood a proud tower displaying a clock counting down from 45 minutes. As the timer got closer to zero, the crowd around it got suspiciously bigger; with 5 minutes left on this now rather unnerving clock, the crowd exceeded that of the one watching the band playing in the tent opposite. Was this to commemorate some sort of event or special time of day? Was Judgment Day upon us? Was there a man inside the tower about to punch in the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42? The timer hit zero. Flares shot up into the murky night sky. Small packages started parachuting down from the tower, and the crowd viciously fought to grab them. I wondered what could possibly be so valuable to make humans this riled up, a question which was answered when I caught one of these mysterious descending packages myself, albeit by sitting on Dom’s shoulders. They were cheeseburgers. Cheeseburgers from Presto, one of the country’s leading fast food chains. Of course. What else? The last of the parachutes fell into the defiant claws of some maddened festival-goer and the clock reset itself to 1 hour.

Myself, George, Dom and Stephen wondered about the site for a bit and got some food from one of the numerous burger stands, and then from 7:30 to 2am we were non-stop hopping between the three stages. We saw Cage The Elephant on the main stage, whose new material surprisingly went down a lot better with the Colombian crowd than they’re older stuff, and then for the second time in my life I caught the only the very last song from a clashing Glass Animals set. We then went to go meet Andrew, a former teacher of Stephen’s from his IB school in Bosnia who was in Colombia trying to acquire funding for a new IB school in Medellín. He was a baritone Californian whose staggering height was ideal for a festival mostly attended by people from a country with a relatively low average height. With his silvery black hair, necklace and white button-up, he had the appearance of a wise man. This perceived wisdom was actualised with his first action: buying a bottle of whisky for everyone. With him, we caught The prettily gloomy XX set, in which the best song was the one Jamie XX song they played, followed by the funky house of Bob Moses in the Motorola Tent. We caught all the essentials of The Weeknd’s main stage headline set - The Hills, In The Night, I Feel It Coming, Can’t Feel My Face etc. – before embarking to a packed Budweiser Tent for Justice.

As the French duo didn’t come on until quarter to one, we were pretty knackered from the lateness and the business of the week at work not yet finished, and I didn’t think I would have the energy to enjoy the set. But how wrong I was. For little over 80 minutes I was, in every sense of the word, mindblown. Their show was a total masterclass of the live DJ show. From the moment they took to the stage, ingeniously mixing newer track Safe And Sound into the classic anthem D.A.N.C.E and then back into Safe And Sound, they did not speak, nor did they obnoxiously dance about the stage, they just calmly walked between their cubic decks putting care and focus into their craft, letting the music speak for itself. The stage design was correspondingly simple but incredibly effective, with two walls of LED cubes on either side of the stage which glittered and pulsated to perfection, and a screen behind them displayed elegantly choreographed graphics. I do not believe I have ever seen a show where the light-show so perfectly accompanied the music. I have also never, after seeing a band or artist, immediately felt the need to see them again as I did shuffling out of the tent that night to the sound of the chant “Yusteece! Yusteece!”. It was a faultless set, and the flooring noise of the crowd when the duo stood motionless and silent for almost 2 minutes, before dropping We Are Your Friends, was a true indicator that we were in the presence of greatness.

I was, however, certainly not in the presence of greatness when I studied my groggy reflection the next morning. I had managed to squeeze in 3 hours of sleep before work, which would have to sustain me for a day of rigorous prep for Monday’s ‘Alice In Wonderland’ experience slammed between taking four lessons on debating. By half 3 I was completely drained and searching for any smidgen of energy that would carry me through to The Strokes later that night, energy which I found at the very back of The Silversun Pickups set on the main stage. Agreeing that the band were mediocre, we went for a further explore of the festival site and discovered giant ball pit at the back of the field. We didn’t need a second invitation to dive in, and there was much rejoicing. People got tackled and buried and there was the occasional cascade of silver balls flying about the place. The childlike fun of it all launched me into the Flume set, the first few songs of Two Door Cinema Club, and then finally The Strokes, who played a charming and joyous set. They played for over an hour and a half, wheeling out almost every Strokes song you could possibly want to hear in that time. In our own little space to the left hand side of the main bulk of the crowd, I bopped along to Someday and 12:51 with Marce, who was ridiculously excited to finally see her ‘boyfriend’ Julian in the flesh, and then the whole place blew up for Reptilia and Last Nite. As the band’s momentum grew, so too did the hilarity of our surroundings, mostly due to ‘Messy’ Manuel, who was already too far gone before he bought his second bottle of whiskey. So over Casablancas’ growling vocals, Manuel gave Stephen and I completely illogical, nigh-on farcical, advice on how to talk to girls, which gradually developed into sentences which just made no sense at all, to the extent that even his mate couldn’t understand him when he tried to explain what he wanted to say in Spanish. It was a great show full of nostalgia and positivity; I loved how, despite their massive fame, The Strokes still played as if they were some band just starting out, playing in their social club down the road rather than performing to thousands of adoring people, seemingly improvising the setlist and strumming and fiddling with their instruments between songs. I’m so glad I can tick them off my list of bands to see, and so glad that I got to see them here with the people I did.

There weren’t really any acts on Saturday I was desperate to see. We met up with Andrew again and got some cocktails in, threw some serious shapes at Quantic, a Colombian band who mixed jazz and funk with the traditional music of the Pacific, and then vibed out at Deadmau5’s headline set. Between 11 and going to bed at 4, I cried with laughter 4 times at 4 separate things. For the second week running, I had a weekend that I don’t see myself forgetting any time soon, except this one ended with shovelling pringles into my mouth in front of The Revenge Of The Sith.

God dammit I need to see Justice again.