In the Aftermath

So.

For the last few years, there's been this big, awesome industrial music festival in Montreal called "Kinetik". It's been falling on Wiscon weekend, so I've been passing on it, with my duties there coordinating the fiction writing workshop.

Every so often, though, I'll take a year off from Wiscon, just to shake things up. And this year, the lineup at Kinetik was amazing. Old favorite of mine, Front Line Assembly, awesome Belgian techno-pagans This Morn' Omina, new favorite Ivardesphere (who put out a beautiful and amazing album last year), and more. No way I was going to miss this one, so I bought me some tickets, got my flight set up, got in on the festival's block rate at a hotel. Yay!, right?

Seven weeks before the festival, it was cancelled due to circumstances beyond the promoter's control. He refunded everybody for their tickets (so he probably took a pretty big bath on any deposits and all of the promotional work he'd already done). It would have been just a simple phone call to cancel the hotel reservation. I'd bought trip insurance for the plane tix, so probably could have gotten my money back there. So no big financial loss, but I was super-bummed.

You see, there's a huge DIY ethic with industrial music, especially the folks that are well known within the genre but not Big Names. I swear, half of the artists have been DJs or promoters themselves, have self-released their albums, or just plain old started their own record labels. Two weeks after the announcement that Kinetik was cancelled, Aftermath was announced. The organizers of the new event busted ass for five weeks, got new venues, managed to negotiate the same room block rates for the hotels, booked bands, all of that. The set up a festival that brought in 24 bands over 4 nights - something that can take the better part of a year to set up. They couldn't bring in a few of the big names that Kinetik had signed on, but still set up an amazing slate:

God Module, Die Sektor, Mordacious, Encephelon, Wychdoktor, Apriorism on the first night.

ivardensphere, Ayria, Malhavoc, Gothsicles, Antigen Shift, Promonium Jesters on the second.

FGFC820, Decoded Feedback, Caustic, Displacer, ESA, Volt 9000 on the third.

Aesthetic Perfection, DeVision, Panic Lift, Surgyn, Glass Apple Bonsai, For All the Emptiness on the last night.

And, people, they fucking nailed it.

Part of it is the simple fact that bands that really, really wanted this thing to happen were playing for fans that really, really wanted to see them. Part of it was that the organizers ran things well enough that there weren't a bunch of mundane things getting in the way of the music.

So from sudden, shocked disappointment to an absolutely awesome festival much like Madison's own Reverence back in the day, in less than two months.

Of course, while I was in Toronto, I poked the LJ peeps I know there. Which meant that I finally got to meet Ms.

green_eyed_view in person. She showed me around Toronto on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. We hit up the CN Tower together, Queen & King Streets, and just wandered around downtown within a few miles of my hotel.

Round about this time three years ago, we both had pretty rough upheavals in our lives. Her husband walked out, and Bandit torpedoed our relationship at about the same time. Over that summer, we both spent a lot of time chatting with each other over IRC, checking in on each other. So to finally spend some time with her in person for few gloriously beautiful afternoons in a new city was a wonderful addition to the trip.

Since the trip, I've also gotten more written on my novel-in-progress than I think I had in the entire month before.

Overall, I think this past weekend was just the recharge I'd been needing.