Report: Movement Music Festival

Written by Mandy Harris

Just when I had thought I’d seen it all, I went to Movement. Unlike most other electronic music festivals that have an array of commercial house, techno, tech-house, acid-house, ambient, trance, and dubstep, the Movement Music Festival was strictly for die-hard techno fans. There was nothing mainstream about this festival musically except for the stereotypical rave wear that has forever graced the colorful dance music scene—and even that was taken to a new level of eccentricity. From the moment I walked through the gates at Hart Plaza, I felt witness to a new era; a funhouse of adventure and purity that I could only imagine my parents may have felt at Woodstock 35 years ago. Modern day hippies lay sprawled out on the lawns, free spirits danced liberally with pastel colored fabrics to the beat of the drums, and outcasts with purple hair and body piercing danced wildly in their own high-intensity, fuel-injected passion.

True fans with a knack for the underground, including many New Yorkers, flew in from all over the country to enjoy a weekend of rare sounds, including one DJ that has tried unsuccessfully to make his return to the US at Movement in past years—Ricardo Villalobos. The three-day festival kicked off with a killer lineup including Heartthrob, Visionquest, Richie Hawtin and show stealer, Gaiser. The weather was dark and dreary when it started raining mid-afternoon, but the energy during Gaiser’s minimal techno set was like nothing I have ever seen. The crowd had turned into a sea of wet robots. Each build up and breakdown unleashed a mechanical reaction from the fans in-sync with one another, impervious to the wind and rain. This is a DJ who works while he spins. There is no break to smoke a cigarette or flirt with the hot girl in the DJ booth. The entire set, Gaiser was working the knobs and reading the crowd to see what button he could push to make the party better…Movement was well underway.

And the parties didn’t stop when the festival ended. There were so many solid after party lineups that it was hard to chose just one. Circoloco, I Love You But I Choose Techno, Get Physical, Mindshake, and Minus to name a few. It was a difficult choice but Richie Hawtin and Magda were hard to resist—especially because Detroit is Richie’s home turf, hailing from across the river in Ontario, Canada. Walking in to City Club, Detroit’s largest techno club, was like walking in to a giant urban warehouse. When the blue and white light panels were not lit up, it was almost completely dark. It felt slightly illegal and just plain raw. Magda’s unfiltered, industrial sounds echoed through the wood rafters fortifying her status as the queen of techno. The eerie vibe set the stage for Richie who reminded us why he was one of the biggest influences in Detroit’s second wave of minimal techno artists in the 1990’s. The party was still going strong when we left at 5:30am…so on to day two.

Sunday morning was rough but nothing a little Gatorade, greasy food, and a Bloody Mary couldn’t fix. Arguably the best day of Movement, 12 hours of back-to-back madness included artists Livio and Roby, Ben Klock, Marcel Dettmann, Soul Clap, Tini, Loco Dice, Sven Vath, Guti, Martin Buttrich, and the dark knight we’ve all been waiting for (drum roll please)…the man who finally made it through customs, Ricardo Villalobos. In the words of a close friend, “the weather forecast for the day was for bombs to be dropped.” And bombs they were. Guti’s set was a surprise killer. If you closed your eyes during his live keyboarding, you just might be transported to an island somewhere of the Spanish Riviera. Livio and Roby started mellow and ended strong, Loco Dice played his usual music “with swag”, and Ricardo, oh Ricardo, surprisingly lived up to all the hype. It was a beautiful sight, thousands of people gathering at the main stage for the same reason—to indulge themselves in one guilty pleasure. Villalobos’ day set of twisted minimal was nice but it was later that night that his true colors came out…on a boat.

“I’m On A Boat 3” took place on The Detroit Princess directly after the festival ended. Captaining the ship was Dice and Villalobos with first mate’s Stacey Pullen and Sven Vath. It was hard to choose what floor to stay on until Ricardo came on. His Muppet-like appearance and free-flowing gestures are a conversation in itself. The fact that he can mix such explosive music using vinyl is another conversation. He is so absorbed in the scene that it is hard to even imagine him having a life outside of nightlife. He was born for this existence and after seeing him spin, it makes perfect sense why so many other DJs gather inspiration from him. Even though there was one more full day of festival fun to be had, this party was enough to end my Detroit experience—in a very fulfilling way. I looked around at the people that felt the way I felt. A secret society misunderstood by the rest of America. Looked at as a bunch of ecstasy loving freaks that listen to the “untz, untz, untz” music. They will never understand what they are missing—and it’s better that way. We are the square pegs in the round holes, we see things differently. We understand what it feels like to share the same emotion, at the same moment in time, with a perfect stranger—and it’s that feeling that is unexplainable.

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