Ok, so I like electronic dance music, more specifically Trance. When I started in the 1990's, the US was a bit behind in that department.
Still, with San Francisco and San Jose nearby, I've had some opportunities to see some great EDM/Trance DJs. Back in the early 2000's, they sadly played club music in the US that was nowhere close to the hits they had composed and were known for, but over the years, as Trance started becoming more popular, those DJs finally started playing their good tunes in the US too, and maybe from 2004 on, it's only been getting better. Popsicle Halloween 2004 was really the beginning of great music parties in the San Francisco Area, and thankfully things have gotten even better since then
As a matter of fact, after another 10 years (2015 and beyond) the good news is that Trance has grown quite a following in the US, and places like the SF Bay Area, and while Trance has been declared dead a few times in the last 10 years, it's still going strong here.
Trance Family SF is definitely strong in the area, we've been getting more big trance parties every year, including many top DJs that come visit us what feels like every other week now (as of 2018-2019), and through those events, I made many friends in Trance Family SF. Thanks to you all.
Over those years, I got the chance to meet a few of my favourite DJs, including Armin more than once, and my last hobby has been to work on lights for my shirt and pants (version 3) and (version 4)
And if you wanted to compare with DS at QM vs DS at NOS, you can go read this Dreamstate Socal 2022.
If you like this report, and want to see others/future ones, you can go on these pages:
Passport (for insomniac event subscribers) was back:
they had meet and greets
Passport was actually the 6th stage with a secret lineup for both days
Dream VIP lost the covered area, but still had nice booths:
Lots of booths:
this time offered heli rides from not somewhere not that far. I'm not sure if they saved any time or were worth it. Please leave comments in the links at the top of this page if you used them
The Void: Still Across the a street, not that easy to get to
Getting to void was the same as last year (and by that I mean inconvenient and 'too far'), although the tunnel was prettier;
boring during the day
nice at night
tunnel to get back, people said it felt slippery and tough to climb when you were tired and altered
So, before people accuse of me #firstworldproblems, the tunel and bridge were a real mental "too far" thing that many reported to me, and that I felt myself.
Some different art this year:
Views from the boat, were great:
what it looks inside
And if you were wondering about sound inside the boat, it depends where your room is, but there you go:
Nice to see the venue late at night/early morning:
People
As always, a big part of what makes US insomniac events so much fun is the people who are part of the party.
it was nice and sunny during the day (until it got very cold just hours later)
Props to Jose, barefoot photographer for all his shots
and also Thorgodofbass, our favorite videographer
Ulrich!
TFSF crew
More fun at night, as always:
And of course, fun totems:
So, due to my LED outfit and the tech I carry/wear, things break but I'm also a McGuyver, so I carry spares and repair tools. Funny thing was a totem that got damaged, the owner asked me "I heard you have a soldering iron", and I had to reply "I'm sorry, I don't have one, I have two" :)
we got it fixed
woohoo, it's working again
We took some Trancefamily pictures:
Big props to the insomniac entertainers, always adding to the party:
oh no, they didn't have batteries for their lights this year ;)
Thanks for taking pictures with us:
Also shout out to ground control:
As always, it's a great opportunity to meet DJs:
JoC
Miyuki and Richard Durand
Astrix
Craig Connelly
Allen Watts
Armin!
RAM
first time meeting Darude!
Fadi after his wonderful set in the rain
Mark Sixma
Orjan Nilsen
Paul Oakenfold
OMG, got to meet Judge Jules from the Essential Mixes I used to listen to in early 2000s from napster
Sean Tyas, having such a great time
Also great to see Alex Morph again
Day 1
DS opened a bit late on the first day, Queen with Mr Brooks was a bit empty
Xijaro and Pitch
nice visuals at vision
Craig Connelly
Sequence was pretty packed
Because Astrix ;)
GO debuted Octagon at DS
Armnin was next (which sadly meant missing Blastoyx b2b Infected Mushroom, my biggest regret of the night)
thank you for adding the lasers
Day 1 Summary Video:
Day 1: Queen Mary Afterparty
TDJ!
And that was it for Day 1, headed back to hotel around 04:00
So if anyone wonders, lots of lights means lots of batteries and things to charge every night:
new bigger 1S lipo batteries for my hat
and more
Day 2
Back for Day #2, it was hard to be there at 13:00 ;)
thankfully made it to Khromata
it was early for most
Also got to see my friend Triode
Aly and Fila in the light rain, was majestic:
So much joy to enjoy Ferry Corsten - Gouryella, again:
the super tall flags were annoying, they messed up a lot of my pictures
finished the night with Above and Beyond
Above and Beyond:
Day 2: Queen Mary Afterparty
After 01:00, it was time to migrate to the boat:
Ruben again!
Finished the night with Ferry Corsten, who even finished his set with some drum and bass ;)
f
Day 2 Summary Video:
Weather concerns with QM vs NOS
So, I am biased and I still prefer NOS once you're inside the venue (San Bernardino is not great, but once you're inside NOS, it's real wonderland), but the weather aspect is a concern for QM. Both years, QM had rain, NOS did not. NOS is inland in a somewhat arid area, QM is by the water, and even when it wasn't raining, everything was kind of wet due to dew (very high water concentration in the air that would condense on chairs and so forth).
this is what I meant, by dew, almost fog to the ground
So, the relentless light rain that fell mostly all day on day #2, made the lasers on dream look dreamy indeed, but at the same time I was soaked by the end of the day, and my gopro literally had water inside and was barely rescued after several days in rice. Water and electricity aren't friends, this can't be easy on all the gear (although I didn't see anything that failed due to water).
yes, it was pretty :)
The rain was manageable this year, but I need to state again that last year got pissing rain in the middle of the night while we were on the boat party, and if that rain had been just a few hours earlier, it would have ruined the event. This just makes me nervous, Interstellar was entirely cancelled for freak weather, I honestly would prefer for DS to be back at NOS, if only for the more reliable weather.
If DS is to stay at QM, I hope Insomniac plans for full covered spaces to deal with heavy rain if it happens. Of course, this is already present at NOS for 3 out of the 4 stages (2 with megastructures and one indoors)
Aftermath and Conclusion: Should this not be 3 days and with a bit more sleep?
Haha, I just realized this is the same thing I wrote last year. Since last year was too much music with 4 stages and music from 17:00 to 01:00 and then until 06:00 on the boat, Insomniac heard this, and fixed it by:
still two days
added a 5th stage, the art car, with very good trance :)
well, if you could passport, it was really 6 different stages. Insane!
now started at 13:00, making it 12H plus 5h afterparty, 17h per day, so there you go, it's fixed :)
like last year, the long days created casualties :)
So yeah, suck it up people and your FOMO, here's even more music you won't all be able to see and even less sleep, haha :)
It was literally 34h of music, which is usually what you get from a 3 day festival with 3 to 5 stages, a lot indeed. I would personally still prefer 3 shorter days to have more of a chance to see more artists and not miss as much (especially for all the sets that were not recorded), but it is #firstworldproblems :)
The afterparty on the boat helped seeing some artists if you had missed them during the day, but even then it was 3 stages that were not that close from one another, and honestly how stayed up until 06:00 both nights while having started at 13:00? I barely made it for the first sets on the 2nd day :)
For completeness, I did a survey, got 580 responses, and about half the people would like 3 days at QM instead of 2. That's a lot, but not the majority, just half
While I was at it, I also asked about QM vs NOS, and while many people like me prefer NOS for the better footprint, the megastructures, and so forth, more people prefered QM for being closer to them (traffic in LA), and feeling safer outside.
Notes / Thoughts for this year:
This year had more daylight hours, which was a bit rough on DJs who were opening, and made costumes/outfits a bit more challenging (it was pretty warm during the day, but got very chily at night, including wind chill). Sure, it would be nice to have more hours at night, but with a curfew of 01:00 on the venue (vs 02:00 for NOS), the options are limited outside of making this a 3 day festival, which I'm surely down, for ;)
Void unfortunately was still "so close but yet so far" across a bridge that was dicey for some, or an underground tunnel that was a bit of a detour when going from dream to void.
I didn't feel it was easier to get to Void, the venue is very challenging layout, only so much can be done with that location
I missed the animated burning man LED art from last year, there was still art this year though
Dream VIP was shrunk somewhat and lost the covered spaces, which was unfortunate given the rain
As stated above, if DS is to stay at QM, I hope insomniac adds covered spaces to deal with rain.
Sound at Vision was much improved despite the challenging location. Not sure how they did it, but it was better
I still miss the NOS megastructures, but dream got improved a fair bit this year. The added lasers were beautiful
Dream was just beautiful
beautiful front and back
I still wish we could use the passenger terminal dome, looks like a sweet venue:
Should you go? Would I go Back?
Don't let some of my observations/suggestions confuse you from the fact that this was another fantastic Dreamstate and I had so much fun, and so did everyone I talked to
I missed so many sets I wanted to see, I don't know how many sets were recorded, but I missed many I wanted to see and I was there almost every of hour
Insomniac improved some things at QM this year, not that last year was bad to start with ;) and continued to show that, within reason with layout issues (the street cutting off Void from the rest of the festival), they can do incredible things with a mere parking lot.
I'll repeat like each time, that the insomniac team has the most relentless overachievers I've ever seen. I'm thankful we have them.
Security continued to nice overall, they did ask for backpacks to be transparent this year, which is spreading and understandable. I guess we probably don't want people to walk around with big black backpacks that could have anything inside if somehow they made it past security
I'll continue to give the same answer to "Is it worth flying across the world for?" If you like trance and you want a better production value than many european shows (not counting Tomorrowland, but TMRL sucks for trance), yes, it is worth going to. Only 2 days, but it's really good and the night decors and costumes are much better than what you'll find in Europe.
As parting words, I made a summary video of over 100 Instagram Stories I took during the event, enjoy:
π
2024-11-20 01:01
in Clubbing, Electronics, Festivals
Tech specs:
32x16 flexible LED rgbpanel (displaying scrolling Dreamstate Logo)
2 strings of Ray Wu P15 WS2812 both for layout reasons and for backup if one string breaks, the other one will keep working.
Lipo battery checker (but the lipos are protected, so they will self shut down)
flexible 16x32 RGBpanel
found a hat big enough that it mostly fits on it
of course, it needed a few LEDs :)
what it looked inside and it worked with a small 1S 700mAh lipo (although not long enough)
bigger battery upgrade, and BTW those batteries lie, they are only 1600mAh
testing battery draw, a bit over 0.5A which is a bit too much
So, why 3-4V lipos instead of USB battery packs with 5V that is expected by both the panels and neopixels/WS2812? Well, space is limited, USB battery packs are kind of big, and carry extra hardware to recharge that isn't needed inside the hat. There is also a side byproduct that powering both the panels and the LEDs with a lower voltage, limits their brightness and the amount of power (watts) they need, which means that a 16Wh lipo inside a USB battery pack stepped up to 5V, makes everyting brighter, but only lasts about half as long as powering directly from the lipo at lower voltage.
bigger 4Ah 1S lipo worked for 8H at full power and LEDs worked all the way down to 2.8V!
panel worked all the way down to 3.4A before colors went wrong, 16H on a 1.6Ah battery
of course now I had to find a buy a faster 1S lipo charger with the right connectors (had to get JST adapters)
quick test that a smaller 700mAh battery would last around 5H before things got dim
After testing, I was able to confirm that both the $7 amazon controller (SP002E from https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09Y8SWJ77 ) and the RGBpanels, work fine with lower voltages (which is not a given since both run a microcontroller that was originally meant to be powered from 5V).
The RGBPanel controller is a bit more picky about voltage and reboots around 3.5V, while the neopixels tend to drag the battery voltage down, causing the RGBPanel to crash and reboot when a single battery runs both, so I gave it its own lipo.
Pixels still take 0.3 to 0.5A (I use a potentiometer to dial them down as the cheap controller I put has no dimming control) and the RGBPanel takes less than 0.1A, so that's nice (it actually goes all the way down to 0.05A or just 50mA) when the voltage drops.
The combined tricks should give around 18H of runtime with the 2 batteries (4Ah and 1.5Ah 1S lipos), which is enough for 17 hours of dreamstate (they are not screwing around this time, 17H !!!)
About the neopixel controller, I used a cheap $7 amazon controller that only had 3 physical buttons but sadly no dimming control, mostly because I wanted something very small, and while pixelblaze micro is also small, it doesn't have the pattern I want, and I didn't see the point of programming a pattern I already had on the other controller, so I just put a potentiometer to lower the voltage. It's obviously the wrong way to do it, but it works :)
Here is the end result:
As far as trips back in memory lane, go, this was a winner. Orbital are OGs in the electronic music world. After Jean Michel Jarre and Vangelis, they were likely the 3rd electronic music act I listened to, way back when. It's very hard to define their genre, especially since they predate most EDM genres, but I've seen "industrial electro funk" although Halycon and on is definitely it's own genre still (more ambient).
The event was organized by Goldenvoice. The flier didn't have any info on whether they were going to be OTC, have openers, or until what time the event was running. The only piece of info was that it was supposed to start at 21:00. By the time I arrived at 22:00, wary of previous events announced at 21:00 but having so-so openers, or sometimes not even really opening doors until 22:00, but this time around they apparently did open at 21:00 and Orbital themselves did start at 21:00, go figure...
So, I missed the first hour, but they were going strong by the time I arrived:
not every time you see this
The somewhat weird thing is they stopped in the middle of the set after saying something I was unable to comprehend due to poor microphone sound, but they took a 20mn break where they just left the stage and everyone in the room, and came back 20mn later :)
The 2nd half of the show had more top tracks, including of course the Halcyon and on, but plenty more including "where times becomes a loop" that I had totally forgotten about:
the room was packed
one of them performed without shoes :)
The show ended at 00:40. Definitely good time were had:
It had been a while since I had seen Jason Ross, so it was good news when I heard he was coming back at Midway SF.
What wasn't expected, was that it would be in a side building which was mostly a hangar party, for some reason they were badly lacking bathrooms, so there was a 30mn bathroom line, which was not good.
The lineup felt a bit all over the place in that there was no real unity in the music style, and I found myself waiting for Jason to take over, which he did at 0:30. I had a good time for the remaining 90mn.
