Low-Life Does Tomorrowland | Boom, Belgium 2012

I know what your thinking; “what is Low-Life doing at a place noted for their unparallelled line-up of “the world’s biggest EDM artists,” (shudder); at what Dimitri Vegas and Like Mike (don’t ask) so eloquently predicted to be “one hell of a crazy weekend;” a place where names like Avicii and David Guetta are spoken with either a religious solemnity or with the volume and duration of one of those travel-sized air horns? Why, Low-Life? Why?”

[case in point...]

Why not? It may be all of those things, but it is also one the world’s largest dance music events, seeing more than 180,000 bodies over the course of the weekend, and besides the main-streamlined artists mentioned above, Tomorrowland is also host to a slew of artists whose names have graced this very URL amidst words of appraisal; Jamie Jones , Clockwork , The Others , Martyn , Jackmaster , Locked Groove , Ben Klock , Terence Fixmer , Green Velvet , Fake Blood , Surkin , Eats Everything , Dubfire , Hatcha , Emalkay , Plastician , and Sgt. Pokes , specifically. Between this, the purported millions of dollars flooded in to the aesthetic experience, and, lastly, the rumour that TL is something of an annual congregation of the most beautiful girls in Europe, why not, I ask you; why the hell not?

So we did.

You know when you’re faced with prospect of eating a bag of Doritos and your like, “nah, I’m not into that,” but you go for it anyway because “what the hell, everyone else is eating them,” and they’re fantastic, and cheesy, and you go for a few more, and your enjoying it even though your constantly making snide remarks about people who eat Doritos on the regular just to divert any possible notion that you do, in fact, love Doritos?… So there you are with the empty bag tilted over your palm to get those last few crumbs and you lick that radiating orange off your pinky finger and, just for a moment or two, you cringe because you know you liked it. Yeah, Tomorrowland was kind of like that bag of Doritos.

For instance, imagine 60,000 people belligerently spouting that incessant “Levels” melody (“da-da-dah-dah-duh-duh du-du-du-du-duh-duh-duh-dah-dah”) while a giant bookcase is breathing fire and tribes of goat-men are doing back flips through waterfalls. Now, this is a spectacle that is hard not to, at the very least, be impressed by. And yes, if you’re putting two and two together, I did see Avicii, and it wasn’t completely insufferable. Well, beer helped.

But aside from the musical lollipop that was the main stage, there was a number of truly phenomenal and accordingly innovative, albeit under-attended performances over the course of the weekend:

Jamie Jones ‘ very funky set was laced with nuances of new-wave, which was surprising to most but received with joviality nonetheless.

Carl Cox earned his title of legend, not that he needed to in any respect, as he hit the 1′s and 2′s with care into the wee-hours of his 50th birthday.

Eats Everything played Prodigy ‘s “Smack Your Bitch Up” under a giant mushroom. Enough said.

The whole experience was truly a dance-music feast. With 16 stages and over 400 Dj’s booked over the weekend, there was a style for every taste. If you don’t like David Guetta, which, if you’re reading this, I can assume that you do not, then you didn’t have to have anything to do with him because on the other side of the Tomorrowland playground, Martyn was mixing a subtle exhibition of We Play House Recordings ‘ releases along with his own; two very different worlds co-existing in one fantasy. This label, in fact, has an appropriate and thoughtful contemplation on this subject of taste:

“There is no such thing as tech house, there is no such thing as deep house, there is simply house music, good or bad. And even that depends on the ear of the beholder.”

[via WPH ]

It just so happened, though, that the majority of the ‘beholder[s]‘ at Tomorrowland preferred the music of Swedish House Mafia . But that’s okay, because I like the occasional bag of Doritos too.

sam.i.am