Over the last decade and a half a large component of my social life has revolved around electronic music, and over the last decade I’ve gone to several festivals in the New York area. These tend to not be the big corny arena shows that electronic music is associated with, but the marginally more intimate ones you’d associate with venues like Nowadays, Basement, and Bossa Nova Civic Club. The primary one is one known as Sustain Release, a festival which is thrown in on the grounds of an off-season Jewish summer camp, which I have been going to every year since the beginning. More recently one known as Dripping, which happens once every summer in New Jersey, has been happening. That festival coincided with game five of the Knicks vs. Spurs Finals, and nobody knew what the fuck to do.
This is not the first time that circumstances outside of the promoters’ control hit the festival. The very first year of Dripping coincided with historic fires happening in Canada, demolishing the AQI and causing the sky to turn the color of mustard. Dripping is an all-camping festival that takes place on a Ren faire ground, and the fires happened well after anyone could cancel. Everyone involved had to make the calculus about how to approach partying and living in those conditions. Even with masks, it was like suddenly taking up a pack-a-day smoking habit while partying hard.
Since then, the festival has evolved and survived a potentially disastrous first year. But this year coincided with game five of the NBA finals, Knicks vs. Spurs. I will fully cop to being a bandwaggoner here, but I am also a New Yorker with blood in my veins, and the sheer gravitational force of the playoffs was inescapable. Even to someone who does not regularly follow the team, the Knicks had had an incredible streak leading up to the finals. It was culturally inescapable, and parsable to basically anybody. The drama of Donald Trump infecting game three when the Knicks were ahead with absolutely rancid vibes only for the Knicks to come back from a historic deficit in game four was completely infectious, and the game that decided this all would happen while I was in New Jersey surrounded by other New Yorkers.
The game started around the same time as a live performance by artist Anna Homler as "Breadwoman". Afterwards, Ash Fure and the queer Latine DJ group "Maricón", whose name is a homophobic slur they have attempted to reclaim, would play during the duration of the game.
You could feel the anxiety in about half of the attendees in the lead-up to the entire event. Many half-hoped the Knicks would lose just so they would not have to deal with the calculus of missing their victory. Nobody knew how to plan for watching the game in the middle of the woods, or if the event itself was going to provide a contingency plan to watch. Many brought iPads and small projectors for their tents. Would the organizers project the game on to the side of a barn blasting gay latin club music, or do nothing? Is doing the former disrespectful to the performers who have spent months preparing sets, and is the latter depriving a huge portion of the partygoers from experiencing a once in a generation cultural event? This was made worse by the fact that the parking lot closed at a certain hour, so even if you wanted to watch the game in a nasty ass bar in Sparta, New Jersey, you would have to Uber both ways in the middle of prime party times.
In the end, the festival decided to do nothing. This ultimately turned out to be the correct call.
As the game commenced, people made do. If you listened closely you could hear the game being played in select tents all across the campground, with various “ohhs” and “ahhs” punctuating the sound of the woods and distant thumping techno, offset mildly by the speed of each viewing party’s connection. “It was like a rolling time-delayed group of cheers coming from three different places where people were watching it around my campsite,” Aftermath contributor Janus Rose, who was camping at the time, told me via Signal. “At first I thought someone’s set had just ended, but then I realized it wasn’t coming from any of the stages, and it kept happening every few minutes.”
At first I counted two laptops and two phone viewing situations at the tent and near the barn. Eventually, the laptop on the chair won.
In the big tent area where food and coffee were served, various ad-hoc setups quietly emerged on phones and laptops during Breadwoman’s set, a slow, haunted ambient performance piece that took place in a wooded grove involving a woman with a face of bread. Eventually these setups winnowed down to two laptops, and over time one laptop won out. The crowd grew and grew, which necessitated putting that laptop on a folding chair on top of the table so more people could see it.
In the adjacent building you could hear Ahse Fure, a teacher at Dartmouth, playing an incredibly good set that appeared to involve vibrating a large sheet of plastic over two free-standing speaker woofers on a table next to carefully placed microphones, causing a full body bass feedback that you could feel in your intestines. I have never seen anything like it in a club setting, it rocked, and I would go in and out of it while watching the Knicks.
By the end of the fourth, the crowd had gotten absurd, like a good third or half of the attendees all staring at one Macbook screen. The energy in the tent was electric, everyone exceedingly aware of the absurdity of the situation as it occurred. No laptop in history has ever served more people at once, and even if you could not make out the fine details of the game, basketball is shockingly easy to parse at a distance if you can check the score on your phone and read the reactions of people closer to the screen. When the Knicks won, the entire tent erupted in joy and screaming and shouts of “Let’s go Knicks!” To quote ernekid’s joke about the video, “This is like when people would gather round a wireless in 1945 to hear the news that Hitler was dead.” Though I’m loath to turn this into a corny acid story, it’s worth mentioning that the victory also coincided with the exact moment the tab of LSD I took peaked, and in my decades of taking recreational hallucinogens I do not think I have ever timed drugs better. Afterwards, everyone partied harder.
It can be nasty work to cover technology these days. The industry that produces computers does not give you valid reasons for enthusiasm, alongside increasingly fewer opportunities to purchase them. The old Obama-era bright future of computing as a transformational force has given way to the inescapable grotesquerie of AI colonizing every part of culture and life. But for one brief second, I saw something beautiful. I saw people making do in unforeseen circumstances with the technology they just had around. I felt that old corny optimism again, a sense of unity from someone’s laptop on a folding chair. I will try to hold on to that absurd joy in my heart, and to remember it when I am at my most cynical. Let’s go Knicks.
