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Unleash the sesh gremlins! Sunset Campout, California's clubbing paradise | Musique Non Stop

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Monday, August 12, 2019

Unleash the sesh gremlins! Sunset Campout, California's clubbing paradise

With its mix of hippies, techno heads and hikers, this party deep in California’s gold rush country has resisted creeping commercialisation

The narrow road to Belden Town, California (population: 22), careens through hairpin turns, down a thousand feet of craggy grey stone to the white-tipped rushes of the Feather River. The only other vehicle for miles is a train running parallel, barrelling through tunnels blown into the mountainside. During the gold rush of the 1800s, a few boomtowns sprang up in the area. Now they are lonely outposts. But for one weekend a year, they host one of the west coast’s most durable and cherished party institutions: Sunset Campout. It’s like an early 90s acid rave meets Westworld meets Oregon Trail, and its story goes back 25 years.

In 1994, a teenage Bay Area upstart named Galen Abbott traded in his dreams of Olympic swimming for a set of DJ decks. The son of hippies and a newfound resident of the famed alt-culture haven of Haight Street, he was activated by the still-nascent San Francisco acid house rave scene, the transplanted UK party crew Wicked, and Future Sound of London’s track Papua New Guinea. Despite his enthusiasm, Galen’s homemade mixtapes – still actually tapes back then – couldn’t get him booked at any parties, legal or otherwise. A “psychedelic epiphany” at the nearby Berkeley Marina inspired him to throw his own event at that very spot, and Sunset Sound System – a free, weekly, renegade daytime picnic rave – was born.

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by Jemayel Khawaja via Electronic music | The Guardian

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