Since my childhood, I remember that I was majorly influenced by beats in the music, may be it was because of the fact that I like to groove with dope beats. Later when I was in college, I learned that we have a new genre for this sort of music a.k.a. EDM (Electronic Dance music) and apparently there is a thing known as TomorrowLand-EDM festival in Belgium … sounds appealing, right?. So after trying my luck for two straight years with TomorrowLand, I was not lucky enough to get hold of tickets for the festival due to their rigorous ticketing system. Finally, I decided to go for TomorrowWorld in Atlanta-US, which is a sister EDM festival of TomorrowLand with almost same line up. Since I didn’t want to take any chance, I booked my tickets in February itself. When the line-up was announced in July, I was so damn excited as some of the top DJ’s like David Guetta, Hardwell, Afrojack, Tiesto, Armin Van Buuren etc were listed. I was sold at David Guetta but as they say the more the merrier and indeed it was the best weekend of my life till date.
Festival was for 3 days and on an average it had a gathering of 60,000 people at time. Officially it’s an EDM festival but from my perspective it is the biggest epic rave for 3 fucking days on this planet with all the profanity and obscenity. I mean don’t get me wrong it was a real treat for me to be around 60k people who were either sedated/stoned or were heavily drunk and not like some OD junkies which we usually see in movies or TV series. One was able to find any substance ever named like molly, ecstasy, coke, mushrooms, acid, weed, hash, meth, roofies etc and at one point people were under the impression that I was one of the peddlers. To sum it up, in this festival weed was like cigarettes and drugs were like weed, but for me, well I was high on the fact that I made it to TW and I’ll be able to see all my favorite DJ’s in one go. Apart from music, the best of the festival was over friendly people with their awesome and creative costumes or in some cases no costumes at all. There were people who have had attended woodstock 69 or people who have had been to TL, TW, EDC, Ultra, Burning Man or first timers like me … you name the kind and you will find somebody pertaining to that category. But as my friend rightly put it, it was awesomeness galore.
Anything in this world can’t be that perfect, yes TW had a major flip side, which was caused by lack of management, under staffing, security and may be lack of funds. People who were not camping in dreamville were supposed to be dropped back with shuttles to their respective destinations, but on day 2 after the final set around 1 AM guiding staff stranded ~3000 people in the middle of woods just by quoting that there are no more shuttles available for the night. Our only option was to take Uber which was available at the offsite parking lot, which we were told, was about a mile away. But in reality that 1 mile turned out to be 7 miles, without any food or water, surrounded by ~3000 people in the middle of the night. For me it was like being in one of slasher movies like wrong turn or cabin in the wood but only sanity check was that, I was surrounded with lot of people. For some people, that was also not an ideal case as most of those people were sedated or heavily stoned. With all the fiasco, I reached my hotel around 7 AM after paying $80. Next day turned out to be icing on the top of last night’s fiasco as everybody got a mail that due to so-called “weather conditions” which was 2 cm of rain, Day 3 will be only accessible to people of dreamville and rest will get their money back. I took my chance and went to commencing point of shuttle, met a guy who was also thinking about what to do. We decided to share a cab and go to the festival and with some luck we were inside the venue.
All in all highlights for me were sets of Guetta and Armin on Day 3. Guetta for obvious reasons; he is the most commercially successful DJ of all and most popular, if I may say so. His set was really stunning with expected set of songs but to my surprise Armin tore apart the whole festive ground with one of the most earth shattering sets I have ever heard in my life. Although it was a best weekend of my life till date but due to all hassle and lack of responsibility I don’t think that I’ll go again to TW. But will definitely plan for EDC, TL and who knows may be someday my profile will get selected for burning man. Apologies for the quality of pics as this time I didn’t have my camera. I wish someday there would be festival with line-up as:
- Daft Punk
- Deadmau5
- Skrillex
- Armin Van Burren
- David Guetta
- Calvin Harris
- Hardwell
- Avicii
- Tiesto
- Martin Garrix
