CHAISHOP - Boom Festival 2006

Boom Festival 2006

Author: Sam@Chaishop.com
Date: Aug 28, 2006
Views: 4655

From Psytrance Festival to Alternative Culture Gathering

Boom Festival 2006 –
From Psytrance Festival to Alternative Culture Gathering

Date: Aug 28, 2006
Text: Sam@Chaishop.com
Photos: Sam@Chaishop.com,
Erika (Baloon-Shots)

The lake of Idhana-a-nova, a small unimportant portuguise village close to the spanish border, is the scene for one of the major festivals of the trance scene: Boom Festival. But this year Boom managed to break out of the trance boundaries and established itself as a diverse alternative culture gathering - presenting not only dance culture but also environmental and educational ideas.

Boom Festival happens every two years. Maybe that’s one reason why every edition manages to suprise the guests with new ideas and changes. This year the news were the Boom radio, giant bamboo structures, the sacret fire area, ecological facilities, a two-point sound system, two more boom days and a barcode eticket system. All this sums up with the great ideas that are beeing perfectionized from the past Booms (the dancefloors, newspaper, liminal village, cybercafé, etc.) thus creating a festival that is hard to forget!

And what a festival! About 20,000 people gathered this year, more than half of them international visitors. Beautiful people that want to step out of their every-day-life for a week to experience something else – but what is it they are looking for?

The Boom team tries to make this experience as wealthy as possible. It’s not only about getting fucked on the dancefloor, it’s about experiencing an alternative lifestyle. The offers range from lectures through yoga though workshops through movies to ecological showers, toilets and waste-seperation. This doesn’t mean that everybody is using these “alternative” festival features, some surely merely have fun on the dancefloor. But the offers are there and one or the other will sooner or later bump into them.

With the integration of more or less independent groups Boom has managed to grow single areas to amazingly detailed and beautiful parties within the party. It seems that Boom provides an infrastrure where other projects can flourish. Maybe this is the reason why the Boom Chillout can be considered as one of the world’s most amazing chillouts and the liminal village (where lectures are beeing held and movies shown) is a thing not to be expected on most other trance festivals. Suddenly you find out that a chillout can work while other parties cut costs on the chillout because they see nobody visiting it. Hundereds of people constantly populate the Boom chillout to speak, listen to music or sleep. It turns out that such space must receive the same amount of love as the main dancefloor does to magnify people.

Two festivals came to my mind when I saw this year’s Boom: Fusion Festival in Germany and Burning Man in the US of A. Both manage to involve many small groups that make the offer vast and the experience unlimited. A festival should be a living organism and not just the mirror of the state of mind of two or three main organisers.

These two festivals have also something else in common: They are not limited to (psychedelic) trance culture. And also Boom suprisingly seems to open up in this regards. Never was the range of music so vast as I did experience it this year. The mainfloor ranged from the Boom-typical dark-psychedelic through full-on through progressive to even electro! The range of the music in the chillout has always been wide and also this year proved inspirational and diverse. The sacred fire area featured acoustic music only and the tropical beach bar provided minimal techno and electro accompanying the sunset. Besides of the music the vast offers attract also people that are not mainly electronic music freaks. Boom as a melange of rainbow gathering and a trance festival? And can psytrance music be a main content for anybody interested in alternative culture?

After all it was an unforgettable week out there in 40-degrees hot Portugal. Many people will still be wearing their wristband in in remembrance. If they turn it around they will see the words “We are one” - and that’s what it’s all about!

Sam@Chaishop.com

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