| Event | S-R 2024 |
| Date | September 12 – 15, 2024 |
| Location | Secret Location, Catskills, NY |
| Attended | 9pm Thursday – 1:30pm Sunday |
Catching Light: Ten Years of S-R
I did not come here to make friends. I did not come to glide down the water slide. I did not come to read short stories in the dappled shadows of hemlock trees. I came here for art. I came to weigh the worth of my soul in decibels upon vibrating ground. I came to kneel at the gates of paradise and declare, “I am no one.” It’s the ten year anniversary of S-R, which Resident Advisor has dubbed “the best music festival on American soil.” Since Aurora Halal and Zara Wladawski co-founded it a decade ago, Jupiter orbited the sun, and a summer camp in the Catskills has hosted the world’s best dance music on a yearly basis.
The lore has constituted an oral history at this point. The year Juliana Huxtable played that "Carmina Barana" track that went viral on TikTok, and at least six people flocked to trash cans and the lawn and started vomiting. The year it rained so hard over the basketball courts that steam wafted out of the Main stage at daybreak. The year a butterfly landed on Eris Drew during her closing set, and she carried it outside before returning to the decks. Or when the cops shut down Main, and Ron Like Hell resurrected the party at The Grove until close. This is hallowed ground, but at this moment, I’m wasting time watching normies play basketball. I buy a $17 burger and sit on a bench, seething, as across from me hundreds of people in sunglasses thaw out on beach towels, lazily gazing as if live sports deserve a relevant place in contemporary culture. How can these people smile so frivolously—jaw hanging down, lip covering the lower teeth—like good private citizens? As if devoting one’s life to experiencing aesthetic bliss is in any way casual? Do they not know about The Door? My teeth rip apart two beef patties, saliva stringing with shallot-breath, as the dribbling on pavement echoes like a stutter.
Friday, I start my night at The Grove, a round outdoor clearing ringed with pines. Bloops scatter across easy major chords. Laurel Halo is playing and she’s not off to a good start and she knows it. The crowd has spoken: a line of about thirty people are waiting to cross the drawbridge over the canal to the other two dance floors. This crowd is one of the hardest to impress on American soil. I feel my age in these moments. I’m approaching forty, and I wonder if I am simply entering my curmudgeon era. At my cabin, I lay out all my amber-tinted prescription bottles on the shelf, and it’s giving mental illness.
“Yo, do you have any Adderall?” a bunkmate asks.
I float him a pill. “Just swallow it.”
“How much is it?”
“Don’t ask, just swallow.”
I make it to Main, and x3butterfly is on the decks. For the first time on Friday I feel like dancing. The set flits between genres, going for the candy in the sound, until a pop edit of “You’re Not Alone,” comes on, and everybody’s giddy.
Then Simo Cell comes on live. It’s pressing all my happy buttons. A harsh, gatling loop comes on, and I’m transported back to high school, when I read that M.I.A. danced on stage at Coachella with a Tamil Tiger, thinking that meant an actual tiger. Abruptly, the machine guns switch to a hand-clap, demonstrating that sound can be funny (it’s all about timing). Rhythm unfolds like math. Half time, double time, jump rope, hopscotch. I feel the undeniable satisfaction of rhythm locking into place. Then comes that synth that sounds like an elephant’s roar, which always makes me lose my shit. “Hey baby,” the vocal flirts. Keep it cute. Make it soft. Be your own grumpy.
By the time Skee Mask comes on, techno bares its naked face. J has gone blonde—buzzed, bleached—and is dancing stage center wearing a furry jacket that’s channeling Monsters Inc. Textured, lo-fi rhythms slide beneath each other like tectonic plates before an earthquake. A glacial and elegiac melody ghosts over the beats. I am dancing in slow motion. My surroundings gyrate. The earthquake comes. Rhythm rises up like heat, as percussion body-slams onto the pavement like the week’s recycling on a Wednesday night. I gnash my teeth at total strangers. In my mind, I’m trying my hand at Hemingway’s infamous challenge of writing a short story in a single sentence: For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
The sentence that’s been jangling in my mind all night: She ashed her cigarette in the uneaten birthday cake.
*
“The 4MMC is bunk. It’s just MDMA and some amphetamines,” G tells me. “I got a refund.”
4MMC is being astroturfed in New York. We had this in Berlin and it was like Witness by Katy Perry—nobody’s favorite, nobody’s mad about it. Now everyone in New York is clamoring to get “4” or “meow,” and my theory is purely because it’s hard to get. Now a bad batch is going around. We know this because, camped outside the Cantine, the nonprofit organization Grassroots Harm Reduction offers free drug testing, no questions asked. Tap a small sample of powder, or scrape some off a pill, place it onto a dish, and a technician will drop solutions that reveal the trace of a certain drug according to color. D has a gram of 4MMC, and to test if it’s real, we send a sample into a machine that’s larger than an espresso machine. The results come in: It’s legit.
Here’s my diet: Adderall as a base, with sprinkles of powders. I am present. I hold, in the chamber of my heart, a reserve of empathy for all the math ravers at this festival trading track IDs and precise quantities of rare research chemicals. Everybody tells me not to pop ecstasy until the final night, so I hold off, but by four or five in the morning I’m tired. My legs are destroyed. I’m kind of nauseous. I find a trash can and vomit. Know what did it? The nicotine gum.
D suggests we be degenerates at the Bossa stage, which, heretofore, I did not realize existed. Past the port-o-potties with no toilet paper, we turn down a pathway that leads to a half cabin, half open-air shed, with wooden slats in a pitched roof. Pure Immanence, who had curated the night, is playing an ambient set. Time slows. Sounds hover around a center of tension rather than progress along a linear narrative. On either side of the stage, LED beams are hung like rope ladders from the ceiling, each rung lit like a nineties glow stick, and dangle over reflecting pools, mirroring the ladders into infinity. At the center of the room, a padded structure forms a massive step pyramid, where bodies lounge across bean bag pillows, whispering curiously. We take off our shoes and join friends at the top of the pyramid, stepping over bodies half-asleep in this trance state. I feel as if I am approaching an ancient ritual. Something indecent thrills inside me. Fog blows over bowls of candles and incense, infusing the air with herbs and myrrh, potent enough that I feel dizzy. Drunk off the fumes, even. Melody and rhythm are desiccated from the music like a layer of water on pavement in the afternoon sun. Shifting textures of sound elongate my base urges, drawing them from within my ribs, as my thoughts cull to nil. The Door emerges. It is of my mind but it is also outside of me, its decisions are not up to me. It has no image, no sound, it is only knowledge. The Door is closed, but the knob is slowly turning. The Door opens. It is only ever slightly ajar, never enough so that I can see what’s beyond, but I acknowledge its truth in this room, this moment. J starts humming a tone that harmonizes with the sounds. I can’t see her, she’s behind me, I only hear her, sense her, as a voice. D cuts lines of K on neon crushers, then reclines on a pillow. He drifts his left hand up high and through the wrinkled air. I watch the silhouette of his hand trace secret shapes in the pensive smoke. The Door closes. Nick Bazzano takes a pull at his vape up by the DJ booth, next to Kiddo Sincere. Then it vanishes like the thickness it came from.
*
I sleep through the entire fucking pool party. Saturday afternoon, Rose Kourts was playing straight up gabber, right outside my cabin, and it still didn’t wake me. M said the line for jerk chicken dinner at the cafeteria had run up to two hours, but I slept through even that. It’s suddenly Saturday night already and the music is playing. No transition, no recalibration, rave mode on.
I’m up in my grumpy curmudgeon era again. Nothing is right. Opening sets were flat and confusing. My ecstasy hits by the time Hiroko Yamamura takes over Main, and it’s all drops and vocals, I’m ebullient, jumping up and down, and I feel disgusted with myself that my joy could be so cheap. I walk over to CCL, and the music is lit. The gays start clapping when she plays the new FKA Twigs track that dropped yesterday. It was produced by Eartheater, who, in 2021, had arranged to enter the Main stage for her S-R performance, wearing an NTS varsity hoodie while riding a horse, but security stopped her for safety reasons. “Plan, plan, plan, but be flexible,” she said on the mic as the horse waited outside in her trailer, like Julia Roberts on set. I’m seething, with my fists balled in my hoodie pouch, and annoyed I can’t dance because the dirt ground is uneven, I keep falling into people, and, sorry, unpopular opinion, I know, but I just hate The Grove.
Back at Main, Blasha & Allatt’s techno set is so proficient and perfect that it feels like graphic design. That’s not a neg, I’m just feeling impossible to please. The rest of the night devolves into confusing B2Bs, a concept I love in theory—repeat after me: genius exists, if only relationally—but despise in practice. Nine out of ten times I see it, I hate it. Some of these DJs tonight I wonder if they’re just killing time on the decks. Everybody raves about DJ Fart In the Club (yes, I know about the legendary Hasenheide renegade in Berlin) but when I go to her set at The Grove, it just feels like business house, a genre I love in theory—queer and nonwhite, soulful—but despise in practice. Just kidding, I love house. Maybe not tonight. “I frankly do not think that fart understood the assignment,” Z says. “Slow wubby dubstep is not it.”
The questions roll in. Should I even go to S-R next year? Can I throw drugs at the problem? Why isn’t M texting me back, did his phone die? What should I get my boyfriend for his birthday? Should I change my outfit? How is the sun coming up already? I look across the green and see, on the water’s surface, a reflection of shimmering magenta from a looming, hi-tech light tower that probably cumulatively cost every person $4 each. Did we really need the light tower?
A dancer appears in front of me. I rub my eyes, because they’re getting dry. He’s older, gay, with a close-cropped, salt-and-pepper beard. We’re on the periphery of the dance floor, where the crowd is less dense. I watch him, hands up in front of him, snapping in sync. There’s a logic, or is it more like a line, that organizes his weight along the knuckles of his spine and his lightweight limbs. His head is tipped upward as if he is smelling flowers that grow from cracks in the sidewalk. There is a forgiveness to his movement. A light touch. When tracks get stuck in a muddy mix, he senses the awkwardness, and then absorbs it into his body, rippling out the motion radially. I read how he interprets sound. I hear new dimensions of the music that become reified in his movement. His sway, like the lithe body of a raccoon, stops short of a sense of humor, but seems itself humored, as if he knows that pleasure is always within reach. Movement is mood and I am lifted. As I watch the dancer, I feel his mien, his air, waft over to me, into me, rescuing me. All my emo vibes evaporate. I feel as if bad air is exhumed from my body and filling in the gaps of my hoodie like a fart. I turn over my shoulder and glance at the water. Yes, we needed the light tower.
On the bridge, I see N wave to me. I have never seen the delightful dragonfly tattoo on his ribs before.
“Are you going to Bossa?” he asks. “It’s tearing.”
Wait, Bossa’s still open? I thought it was just ambient?
The instant I clamber over to the Bossa stage, my vision is shocked. Chaos reigns. Music hurls over ravers’ heads with the conviction of Jesus overturning tables in the temple. The Door is wide open. Cousin and Priori are going B2B and the sound is alive, crawling with it. Ravers in sunglasses are dancing headless on every level of the step pyramid. TQ, who has witnessed the full arc from ambient to rave, has been dancing here for seven hours, and hasn’t left to piss. W, sitting on the trampoline, floats a baggie over to me. “Kill it,” she says. O is dancing like a rockstar, tits out and flips her brown curls over her head. I feel as if I have seen infinity and I must bear witness. I run back to the cabin, run through the cantine, and tell everyone I can find along the road that, “Bossa is tearing right now.” I take P back with me to the stage, and he immediately jumps on the trampoline. Yes, there is a trampoline.
Aurora Halal had played a vocal earlier that spoke the words “ex machina,” as in “deus ex machina.” God in the machine. Divinity from the CDJs. Aurora herself appears, in sunglasses, hair tied back in a tight braid, beaming. She joins Gareth near the DJ booth, who’s looking trim and doing the hover dance. Somehow, I can see everything clearly, but a single unbroken beam of light extends from the ceiling in a straight line. I put out my palm and watch it dazzle on my skin, like I’m catching light.