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It all started with daylight filtering round the edges of the blackout blind covering the skylight in my attic, gently rousing me from my sleep and informing me that something had gone horribly, I mean really horribly, wrong. It was 7am on Friday morning, and my flight to Venice was scheduled to leave at - you guessed it - 7am on Friday morning. I sat bolt upright in bed, processed the anomaly for a moment, and then checked my phone: yes, my flight had just taken off, and yes, I was still in bed.
It was the first time this had ever happened, and a week later I still don’t know quite how I either failed to set my alarm properly, or, having set it, then ignored it going off for over three hours. I ran downstairs and had an explosive shit (to be honest, not hugely different from an average morning), and then returned to the internet to try and resolve the situation. After searching for flights to Venice, Trieste, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Zadar and, in sheer panic, Klagenfurt, I settled on two possible options: a 9.10am Ryanair flight to Venice (304€); or an afternoon TAP flight to Venice (an eyewatering 600€+). The latter flight would eat up my entire fee for the gig I was travelling to, and there was also no guarantee that the organising team of Lighthouse Festival would be able to shift my pick-up and 3-hour drive to that late in the evening. The Ryanair flight, however, would land only two hours after my original arrival time. There was a chance.
The flight was too soon for a ticket to be bought online, so I would have to rush to the airport and try my chances at the desk, assuming that a) the desk was open and b) there was not the customarily insane queue at said desk. What could I do? I rushed to the airport. And, for some reason unknown to me, whichever gods had determined I would miss my original flight decided now that they were in favour of my trip: desk open, no queue, friendly staff. I paid the 300€ plus check-in fee, breezed through security, and even had time to buy some pasteis de feijão before boarding the plane. Somehow I’d even lucked out on a window seat, so I could nap off the excess energy I’d accumulated thanks to the morning’s heightened level of stress. I landed at Venice not quite refreshed, but intensely relieved.
This is where my Lighthouse Festival experience converged with what had been planned. As I chatted to Florian the driver en route from Venice to Tar, the heart-in-mouth trauma of the morning’s mishap gave way to the familiar routine of travelling, socialising and performing. Since Flo was an affable, curious person, the 3.5-hour drive passed quickly and interestingly, and before long we had drawn up in front of a smart hotel in what turned out to be the slightly surreal but very comfortable Valamar Tamaris resort.
Lighthouse was not a festival I’d heard of before I was booked to play there, probably because it is an almost exclusively Austrian endeavour and, it seems, barely needs to engage in promotion thanks to its dedicated (Austrian) crowd. I had expected a small-scale event in a small-scale resort, but it turned out to be a multi-stage operation with high production values, comfortable lodgings and a disproportionately stacked line-up: over 100 artists across 7 stages that included a beach, a bumper car arena, and a hidden villa garden complete with swimming pool. I began to regret the brevity of my stay, which was less than 24 hours, but vowed to make the most of it nonetheless.
The main stage, home to acts like Jennifer Cardini and Anastasia Kristensen, was not huge but had an impressive setup surrounded on two sides by the Adriatic. The beach stage, slightly smaller, also faced side on to the sea, where every evening commissioned sculptures reflected the light from Croatia’s unfailingly romantic sunsets. Other stages were distributed between the woods and villas peppering the resort site, though in my short stay I didn’t have time to visit all of them. In my head, this was what Center Parcs must be like, at least from the childhood memories I had of their advertising campaigns, but - I guess - with more rave.
I had already missed a lot of fun on the Wednesday and Thursday, with Gideon, ISAbella, CC:Disco, Truly Madly, Ceephax and Sedef Adasi all already been and gone. That list alone was enough to have me ruing not coming a day or two earlier, and the roll call of people who would play after I’d left was also cause for some regret (Malika, Sugar Free, XDB, Radioactive Man, Roman Flügel). Never mind. Having dropped my stuff in the hotel I made a beeline for my stage, the Beach, where I knew I’d be able to meet up with Truly and - as Truly informed me he was hanging out with - Schatrax, who was going to be doing his liveset directly before me that night. I duly chewed the fat with the two of them while Finn Johannssen, DJ Pete and Soundstream did their Power House thing for an hour or so, before heading off to find something a bit more invigorating at the ‘Villa of Gaze’ stage.
This would be perhaps the most exciting moment of my time at Lighthouse: an unexpectedly pumping party in the garden of one of the resort’s many bungalow villas, organised by Vienna queer party Gaze. I only made it for the last hour or so, but this was enough to appreciate the unique energy and joy of the stage and production. I couldn’t help but notice that the crowd was in many respects quite homogeneous - that is, Austrian and white, and quite straight-feeling despite clearly being a queer party - but since the whole festival was like this I didn’t hold it against it. (A friend named the feeling pervading the festival: Spring Break for Austrians, but in really not that bad a way.)
What this stage had in buckets that the other stages I saw didn’t, was a real sense of fantasy (helped by Alice in Wonderland themed decorations) and expressiveness, most visible in the stage dancers high up behind the DJ booth, but also embodied in much of the crowd, who seemed to be giving it their all as the light faded at 7pm on a festival Saturday. The outfits were fabulous, and I became intensely conscious of being the only person there in a pair of jeans.
Perhaps my favourite thing about the whole setup was the fact that the DJ booth itself was sunk into the ground, meaning that from my chosen spot quite far back I couldn’t even see the DJ - Ciel - at all. This led me to focus on her music, which was driving, dynamic and at times surprisingly reduced. I have limited patience for the 135+ bpm proggy/ravey house that so many DJs are playing right now, but when someone strips that sound back to a more functional loopy aesthetic and then deftly punctuates the rhythmic backbone with ecstatic and/or deeper moments - as Ciel did - I can be easily convinced. I felt like I was listening to proper DJing, a sensation that combined wonderfully with the otherwise over-the-top drama of the setting and crowd.
That drama was best captured by one particular moment when someone, presumably with authority, distributed a number of bottles of fizz in front of the booth. Corks were duly popped and fizz liberally sprayed, both falling happily on the crowd, which was all fine and dandy until some of the dancers on the stage threatened to do the same all over the booth itself. From my vantage point I couldn’t see either Ciel or her equipment, but what I did see was one of the organisers clocking in almost comical slow motion what was about to happen and forming a sort of human barrier between the expectant fizz sprayers and the sunken booth. Whether this manoeuvre was successful or not I don’t know, but the music didn’t stop and Ciel continued on her unwavering path to the finish. It was great.
The GAZE interlude over, I had enough time to return to the hotel, have a shower, collect my belongings and then head for a brief dinner at Delphine’s restaurant before Schatrax was due to start. His set kicked off with ‘Restless Nights’ in the same way I imagine Kylie may kick off her gigs with ‘Better The Devil You Know’, though we did notice that in its live reimagining the track’s cavernous bassline lost some of its depth. Other changes were noticeable, like in the funk of ‘Get It Right’, which sounded far more down-the-line in its live rendition. (I subsequently asked him about the vinyl version of this tune, which has an inexplicable fake-out silence about a minute from the end of its runtime. He said it was probably a mistake on the original DAT that was left in on the record for the lolz, an explanation I can fully get behind.)
My favourite parts of Schatrax’s set, aside from those revived classics, were the surprisingly modern-sounding, loopy and altogether (to my ears) un-Schatraxish tracks he played, which reminded me that of course a producer of his calibre would be progressing and experimenting with new things 25 years after his formative work. Even his use of ostensibly uncool gear, including an effects unit that looked like the controls for a combination boiler, to me ended up being kind of endearing: the mark of someone just using what suits him to get a sound out into the world. His set was thoroughly enjoyable and also established a reassuring tone for the beginning of mine: there didn’t seem to be a need for showiness or the production of big moments. It felt like music and flow was the focus.
Prone as I am to over-analysing things, not just afterwards but also in the moment as they are happening, I spent a good proportion of my three-hour set questioning myself over what I was doing and whether it was what was needed for the occasion. Following my experience at Dimensions last year, I am now much more familiar with the somewhat alienating feeling of playing for a big festival crowd who are separated from you physically (here by an unexpectedly high barrier as well as horizontal distance) and, in many ways, emotionally (I had arrived that afternoon and not really engaged with much of the festival life so far, while the majority of the crowd was two or three nights deep into a fully immersive experience). But that familiarity with a tonally odd situation didn’t necessarily make it a lot easier to deal with, and I still found it quite surreal, dissonant in places. Yet one difference from Dimensions - and this really only comes down to experience - was that I felt able to handle that dissonance through a concerted game plan and, I guess, brute optimism. I knew it had worked out in the past, and would probably work out again now.
(A run-through of my set appears below the line, but before that just to wrap up the story:)
After I finished I stayed for an hour or so of Jane’s set and then headed for bed, exactly 24 hours after my original missed wake-up call. The next day there were thunderstorms predicted, so I got in a late morning swim before the rains came and I had to head off again for my flight out. I heard later that the outdoor stages had to be cancelled due to the storm, but that many of those DJs were reprogrammed on to the indoor stages: Nassraum and Autodrome, the latter a bumper cars arena that I sadly didn’t manage to check out. From the pictures this definitely worked out, as everyone who wanted to party crammed into those rooms and, it looks like, raised the roof.
Running a festival must be stressful enough without having to deal with inclement weather and errant DJs, so as I said goodbye to Lighthouse I once again felt huge admiration for the people who dedicate themselves to these events. A big thank you to Leo and the whole team, including Flo the driver for taking the stress out of an otherwise nightmarish start to the weekend.
I’ll be taking the advice of another DJ who I told this story to after my set: always set two different alarms.