By now, I could normally expect to be neck-deep in news about the upcoming Fall festival season. Never mind that last weekend I’d have been at Maryland Doom Fest or the week before that I would’ve traveled to Germany for Freak Valley only about two months after my annual pilgrimage to the Netherlands for Roadburn Festival; my inbox and social media feed should be overflowing with updates, whether it’s Psycho Las Vegas unveiling whatever remainders or updates to its bill for August or the regular batch of European festivals — Keep it Low, Desertfest Belgium, Up in Smoke, Høstsabbat, and so on — unveiling their lineups one, two or three bands at a time.

Most of those are canceled. I’m keeping my fingers crossed at hitting Oslo in October for Høstsabbat, then maybe Stockholm for Truckfighters’ Fuzz Fest in November, but who the hell knows if European countries will even be letting potentially contagious Americans in their borders by then. I know if I was an agent working the arrivals at some EU airport I’d be asking US passport holders if they injected their bleach today. With how much America’s alliances have deteriorated over the last few years, who the hell is going to give US travelers the benefit of the doubt? Why take the risk?

But even apart from even the potentiality of going to one or more of these festivals in the course of the year that 2020 might’ve been, I miss posting about festivals. It’s not for lack of potential content — I still can’t keep up with news or reviews. But just the events themselves. SonicBlast in Portugal. Esbjerg Fuzztival — which is now scheduled for the beginning of September, just sold out and is still adding bands — in Denmark. The annual return of Colour Haze to Keep it Low in Munich. I miss seeing the tour routings take shape with successive weekend stops. The regulars showing up here and there, while maybe new bands from the US go abroad for the first time, like Geezer did for Freak Valley a few years ago, or like Forming the Void were set to do this Spring.

I know live music isn’t gone forever, and that in Europe, groups are starting to schedule events even in more than just the moving-this-2020-thing-to-2021 fashion, but not only do I miss live music, I miss the idea of live music. I’m trying not to get my hopes up for Maryland Doom Fest this October but it’s hard. I miss daydreaming about Duna Jam, or about Desertfest in London and Berlin — or New York, for that matter. This year I was going to melt my own brain with mushrooms at Psycho Las Vegas just to see what happened when I subsequently set fingers to keyboard. Stoned and Dusted. Monolith on the Mesa. Stoned From the Underground. Lake on Fire. Sonic Whip. Even Hellfest and those bigger ones that throw an occasional bone or stage up for heavy stuff. Is Muddy Roots going to happen in September in Tennessee? Is anything?

I miss losing myself in the thought of traveling to a place outside the norm of my day-to-day and seeing a special moment while it’s happening. The streams some bands are doing are cool. They give me something to write about. And I know the world has bigger concerns between America’s semi-reckoning with its ongoing systemic racism and the aforementioned pandemic, but everything feels that much harder without even that mental escape. God damn I miss festivals.

Tags: Days of Rona, The Obelisk

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2020 at 5:58 am and is filed under Whathaveyou. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.