Motion Notion

Well, it’s taken a while, but I finally have a few minutes to write.

I looked at the few photos I took while we were at Motion Notion and I’m sad to say that most of them are blurry or not too interesting. I was too busy having a good time to remember the camera, so unfortunately I only have a few photos from Saturday afternoon of the main stage and our campsite…doesn’t even begin to do it justice I’m afraid. But it’s all in my head, so I’ll just pull it out for you…

It’s been 3 years now since we heard about Motion Notion through our friend Ken and we went the first year not knowing what to expect and were totally overwhelmed. It has gotten better every year as a festival and we’ve had a better time each year, not imagining it to be possible until it happened. There is so much to say about it – the campsite is beautiful. It is set down in a valley next to a river, with lots of trees and grass and a farmer’s field of canola nearby, which this year was actually seeded with grass for people to tent on making for more space to spread out in. There is a large main stage in the centre of the valley and two smaller buildings, one for a “chill out area” with more ambient music and another area for a second small stage. There was even an interactive tent where everything you touched made a sound or triggered lights. The main stage always has fantastic abstract and bizarre art, some of it black light reactive (this year there was a huge 25foot long blacklight painted dragon suspended over the dance area!) with an absolutely top notch sound system…you know the kind you can stand right in front of and feel the base pulse through you and never have a sore ear afterwards – crystal clear sound. This year the festival outdid itself, as a group of people who’ve gone every year (calling themselves Fort Jag (i.e. Jagermeister)) built a second main stage for the event – full out stage and area with a complete light and sound system. And so there were two full main stages. Hooray. There was also a insanely bright laser spotlight thingy pointing up in the centre of the field. The nifty thing is that if you weren’t into the style of music at one stage you could just wander to another…or another…or over to an area with the food vendors and just relax…or swim in the river or hike in the woods...or go back to the tent or find a communal bonfire and meet new people.
That’s the other thing that makes Motion Notion so fantastic – the people. I’m used to large music festivals being full of loud drunken jerks fighting, stealing and ogling women. None of that here. At all. Zip. I’ve yet to encounter a rude or angry person, and everyone was friendly. Maybe it was the hippie quotient, but you could walk up to total strangers and have conversations, and complete strangers would come up and share food with you or just hang out and enjoy the sun or the fire. No fighting and no weirdness, just everyone respecting each other and having a great time. It was common to be sitting by a fire and see someone hear a tune or a style of music and see their eyes light up and they’d say “gotta go!” and run off and listen or dance. I know I did it more than a few times! I mean how often do you hear a techno remix of the Imperial March…you have to go and dance to that!
And the music. Oh the music. All manner of music – psytrance, funk, breaks, house, techno, drum and bass and even reggae and ambient depending on the time and place. J and I could wander and listen to what we liked. He’s more of a breaks guy and I’m more partial to the techno and trance stuff so we could wander and meet up every once in a while if we wanted to see different things. So many times we’d be so tired and think “oh let’s go sit for a while” and as we walked away the music would call us back: we’d hear bits of things we’d like: Adam Freeland, Prodigy, Fat Boy Slim, Bjork, Theivery Corporation, and so many other familiar things mixed in with so much new music…and it just kept playing!
This year we had the good fortune to camp in with the GOMP crew who were running one of the smaller stages (lots of funk, techno, chill out and reggae) as our friend Ken has been doing some work with them. We really got more of the community feel this year. Everyone was very welcoming and I met a lot of great new people. I’m pretty shy and I was able to just sit back and watch people, talk when I felt comfortable and just relax. Everyone was themselves and very happy to be that way. 3000 people all like that...it makes for a fantastic atmosphere. A lot of people wore costumes at night and over the weekend I met the Mario Brothers, a jedi, a few fairies, firedancers, stilt walkers and a grim reaper (who stood in the field occasionally and slowly nodded or waved at people as they walked by - my friend Ben ran up and hugged him). The best costume I saw was a guy who had shaved his head and glued pieces of bevelled glass to his head, wearing an outfit with pieces of glass in srategic places all over it - he was like a giant huge grinning mirrorball. There was even a Ghostbuster apparently, but I missed him. J brought his jedi robe I made for him a while back (a bonus when it was cold!) and on a few occasions he could be seen in the woods swinging the lightsaber around. I even mooched it for a brief quest through a campsite or two. (The look on someone's face when you skulk into their camping area wielding a lightsaber is really priceless!) I wore a few of my UV reactive masks and gave a few away. I also had a blast going around the last morning giving away about 5 dozen granola bars and meeting and saying goodbye to so many nice people. I came home with many gifts given to me from random nice people.
As a bonus, no mosquitoes and very little rain this year. Oh yes, it was a good time. It got very cold at night (I will bring long johns and wooly socks next year), but the view of the mist off the river in the mornings was beautiful. I’m kicking myself that I have no photos. I’m hoping others I know will have a few to send me – if they do I’ll post a few.
Well, I could go on and on, but I just would sound like a babbling fool I expect. I probably already do. Let’s just say we had such a great time that we got ourselves tickets to go to Shambhala music festival in August. It’s apparently even better (I can’t imagine) and about 8500 people in a ranch in Salmo BC, with 6 stages of music over 4 days…our tickets arrived in the mail last night. I can’t wait. There’ll be just enough time for me to make a silly amount of food before we’re off in the second week of August.
Here we go again…