Not having been to an electronica festival in quite some time (since South Korea, in fact), a colleague said he was heading down to Wuhan for the weekend for the Vision & Color Festival 2019. Looking at the lineup I saw quite an array of DJs that I’d heard of before and thought it’d be a good idea to see what it’s all about.
I couldn’t help but be a little bit sceptical about the show taking place. It was only the third iteration of the event, following the Ultra Music Fest in Beijing last year and some other cancelled EDM fest in Beijing, too. Since China is notorious for cancelling shows last minute, I didn’t hold my breath that the show would go on, especially since the NBA had just ruffled some feathers amongst the ranks. It was a wait and see in regard who would get barred, drop out, or simply cancelled. In the end, only one performer, R3hab, dropped out due to family reasons.
The whole weekend cost about 4000 RMB. Tickets for both days was 1280 RMB, though had I bought further in advance I could’ve got them for 1080 RMB total. Train tickets were 500 RMB each way to and from Beijing for a total of around 1020 RMB (including service charge), and the hotel went for about 500 RMB per night, including breakfast.
And the show did go on with no trouble at all. So much so that I’d say it was a very orderly affair. Two stages, a smaller stage near the entrance and a much larger stage put further in the back of the Garden Expo Park in which the concert was held. There were only two beer dispensers sponsored by Budweiser at which they sold cups, plastic bottles or bags of beer. The plastic bottles and bags of beer were terrible since they were often poorly poured and, not to go on about the fact that it was a Budweiser-sponsored event, flat and warm. I tried to get a bit of a buzz going on but it just wasn’t happening. I switched to the energy drink / Jagermeister combo and that barely moved the needle, too. Oh well, I’m here for the music, right? Aside from the few drink options, the food options were rather paltry and, I have to say kind of dangerous, since they were serving full-length meat skewers on pointy sticks. Not something that should really be done at a place with a large crowd and alcohol, right?
But it was a music fest not a food event. Both stages played continuously, something I’ve always found interesting about EDM shows. To be sure, Wuhan’s own The Higher Brothers had their hit song “Made in China” sampled by a few of the DJs, which almost led me to believe that these DJs were just remixing the same sounds but in different order. I can’t criticize, however, because I was wondering how they were able to do it while also wondering why more DJs wouldn’t simply mix live rather than use pre-recorded samples. (It’s because finding and using pre-recorded samples can take time and permission from the other artists and, as per usual with the artistic crowd, each DJ has their own “style” and adds their own twist to the song being sampled.)
The smaller stage had more of a trip hop music going while the main stage had much more hardstyle, techno and drum n bass with hardstyle being played much more often. I was surprised at how much swearing there was, given that China is slightly conservative in that regard. But the DJs played the full, un-edited tracks.
I tried recording some of the show but the speakers were so loud and my camera’s little microphone was overloaded so, in the end, a lot of the videos I took have clipped audio. I looked into cleaning it up but the sound waves themselves are distorted so there’s no point trying to clean up what’s not there. In any event, I’ll post them for reference anyway.
The big highlight was to be DJ Snake, a DJ I first heard of with his “Bird Machine” way back when I was driving tractors in Australia. Later that same year his “Turn Down For What” song would be released and confuse everybody with its opening lines (“Fire up your loud, another round of shots”) and the rather absurd video that goes along with the track. He played both tracks, remixed The Higher Brothers’ “Made in China” song, as well as “Dharma,” an Indian-music-flavoured track, all to a receptive audience.
Overall, a decent weekend. Not the craziness that was South Korea in my younger days but a more civil affair indeed. Will there be a next year?