New Year’s Memoir – 2024 Edition
August
Coming back to Prague, I really missed the 24/7 background bassline. I would like coworking spaces at the festival. At Fenix, some people were working in the restaurant on their laptops 🤩😎🤓. In my #RaveCity, I’d like to be able to easily go dance in good cheers among lovely people at any time of day. That’s a really lovely feature. Noise regulations and zoning laws are a logistical problem to figure out. #EverythingIsFIgureOutable!
Fortunately, thanks to Prague Pride, I got what I asked for: people dancing to DnB on the island a few blocks from my house :D.
And on the weekend, Letná was full of people dressed up with five stages for live music and DJs. Lines of free hugs to boot! Yes, please :D.
I stopped by the Temple of Unconditional Acceptance, which is quite aligned with my values. Cute brainstorming as to the nicest things we can say to one another 😌🚂.
Contemporaneously, I went inside the Bike Jesus club for the frist time for a more Acid Housey event1I think 😅.: LOVE & Pride. The few hundred people there felt very ‘small’ and ’empty’ in my post-Ozora cultureshock.. as if we’re just hanging out with close friends with hardly any room to roam around to vibe with people. I met a really cool new friend who sympathized 🤗🥳😃. It was all-in-all pretty good, still.
And we had a Mazurka Klandestina in Letná as well, dancing mazurkas and some other balfolk friends into the wee hours. Being able to go back and forth between balfolk and the edm music at Stalin was pretty cool. I’d like more of that 🙃😋.
Aaaaaand, at the same time I met Anna, a warm, open-minded, curious polyamorous girl who’s pretty good at dancing and plays the flute and sax in more bands than I can count. We met at balfolk where I do the usual routine of asking about her passion and senses of purpose in life. I remember some cute phrases and moments. Then shortly before Ozora, we matched on Facebook Dating, which helps speed up the process of getting together a lot. She can dance Lindy Hop, too, not just balfolk. The first time I saw her play was at Coffice‘s Gypsy Jazz sessions:
For me, being with someone who’s already polyamorous helps a lot in calibrating to being “actively poly”. Generally, when together, the existence of other partners doesn’t come to mind much 🙃. That is, unless they’re also at the same concert, dance, or event 😎. It helps to get along 🙂.
She’s helped me to get into going to some live concerts again, which I’ve fallen out of quite a bit after my underground hardcore metal days in Japan, prioritizing clubs with DJs. We went to see Faela, a cumbia-fusion band at Jazz Dock. They were quite fun had warped clarinet and saxophone shredding :D.
The next night I went to a free acid tekno Rivulet Rave, which was sooooooooooo nostalgic. I really, really bloody love me some good acid tekno 🤤. I love how when it gets really good, I can look around and see the sheer bliss on the faces of those around me: damn, they’re loving it, too! The following set was especially interesting:
After Ozora, I’d become pretty comfortable with the camping arrangement and yearned for more festive atmospheres, so I decided to go to the cozy Czech festival, Digital Forest. The atmosphere was really cool with a sort of spooky Forest Stage, a queer Groove Stage2Called ‘chillout’ but wasn’t chill, so I’ve posthumously changed its name., and a main stage. There was even a nursery area by the teahouse where parents could get help watching their kids! The teahouse was super chill and the organizers were really warm, lovely people to hang out with in-between dancing. You can visit them at Smokehill Ostrava if you’re in town 😊.
Curiously, I made a new friend who had seen me listening to Buckethead on a tram near Divoká Šárka. Atma’s set was super amazing. Often DJs build up the music in a cheesy manner and then drop it, which annoys me as it’s out of sync with my own enjoyment of the music. When Atma did similar, the timing worked just right. Thus teaching me that these crescendos are not necessarily a bad idea 😏. Magua played an especially good set. I’ve also uploaded a clip from True Detective, a friendly DJ who often mixes diverse genres together depending on the mood.
Digital Forest felt like a cozy place to relax in the woods, dance, read books, and to hang out with friends. I got to connect more deeply with some people I’d seen around the psytrance scene and overall had a pretty good time. The small festival is very, very different from the big one 🤓.
