The DJ collective promise a multi-hour extravaganza mixing music, immersive theatre and mind-melting strangeness
Just when you thought it was safe to go out into the mud … the forecast for tonight, traditionally the calm before the storm at Glastonbury, now promises a techno-tornado. Renowned four-headed DJ collective Visionquest have been granted an unprecedented seven-hour site takeover, which they've pledged to use to challenge the perceptions and dancing feet of Glastonbury's early birds. Don't be scared – the doubtlessly impeccably selected music will be a fluid and freewheeling mix of deep house, techno and dolphin noises. Not challenging in the Stockhausen Helicopter Quartet sense, but it's safe to say it would teach Disclosure a thing or two about both the history and future of dance music.
The event is technically a date on the Visionquest 13 tour, a series of individual site-specific performances mixing DJing, live music, high production values, immersive theatre and psychedelic primitive-futurist mind-sex.
Each stop on tour has seen the collective transform their chosen venue in different ways, to create a surreal, exploratory environment that encourages audiences to enjoy what Visionquest's nominal frontman, Seth Troxler, describes as a "kind of cultural adventure, to meet people in a surreal environment".
For Glastonbury, Visionquest are constructing a bespoke multi-level stage, with a vaguely Mayan theme. Or as Troxler explains: "The general brand identity of Visionquest is based on that new esoteric paradigm shift, neo-hippy sunlight-children type of vibe, but also being a bit tongue-in-cheek with it."
Beyond that, no one can be sure what's going to happen. The plans for each date are kept tightly under wraps until the night, and are likely to undergo last-second changes, anyway. What we do know – on the evidence of previous dates at Fabric and Manchester's Warehouse Project – is that it's going to be the most Glastonbury-esque experience you could hope for, outside of being married to Julian Cope by a druid.
It's a fitting psychic return to Visionquest 13's Avalonian birthing pool. The concept was partly inspired by the musical and performance-art delights of Shangri La, Glastonbury's bohemian all-night entertainment district. As Troxler explains, the tour was planned as a reaction to the increasing distance between DJs and audiences at dance events, where crowds routinely face front to watch a DJ spin, and ignore the party going on all around them.
"We're in a new age," Troxler says, "where electronic music, and electronic dance music, is getting so [he adopts a wrestling announcer voice] 'Whoah! Stage show! Skrillex for 25,000 people!' We thought, how can we scale that back and make actual real experiences for people with real music? And that's a turn on."
Skrillex is, of course, an easy target, but his big-budget arena shows are the very manifestation of dance music's commercial evolution. This, however, is the closest Glastonbury is going to get to a K Foundation Burn a Million Quid reunion tour. It's a financial gamble born solely out of a desire to do something different. While Troxler was voted best DJ of 2012 by the users of dance e-bible Resident Advisor, Visionquest were notable by their absence from Forbes' Electronic Cash Kings feature, making it all the more admirable that they'd blow their budget offering fans a package tour from Berlin to Detroit via ninth-century Mesoamerica. But, fundamentally, Visionquest see the whole endeavour as an investment in the future of a music, culture and fanbase they clearly love. Troxler looks forward to seeing where the concept eventually lands.
"Hopefully, some day, they'll start creating their own experiences that way," he says. "Kids starting their own cruise – 'That's really cool what Visionquest did, let's do something like that but make it better'. Then we could have a culture, and a new kind of aesthetic of what parties can be."
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by via Music: Electronic music | guardian.co.uk
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