"When is the music going to start?"

The other night I attended perhaps my ideal event: an ambient performance on the elevated canopy walk at the Leach Botanical Garden. Four different artists (and a DJ to fill the space between sets) played to a ton of people sitting on the circular walkway, and it sounded good almost everywhere. There were entire families and groups of friends there posted up with picnics. A very old woman near me asked, two hours into the event, “when is the music going to start?”

Here is why it was my perfect event:

• It started at 4:30 PM and was over well before bedtime
• Could lay on the ground and watch the sky through the trees the entire time
• Trees
• You can bring a picnic! You can eat almost an entire cheese plate at the 4 hour long ambient show in the woods

Carly Barton was DJing between sets, and then there were four performances from Pete Swanson & Ilyas Ahmed, Patricia Wolf, Foote/Dickow, and The Cosmic Tones Research Trio. All of the artists were amazing, but I especially loved Patricia Wolf, a local field recorder and sound artist. I stood right by her while she did her set so I could feel it in my bones, and I had a lightly spiritual experience.

There was also a special smell created just for the event called Riparian. The dude giving out samples said that someone else described it as smelling like a “sexy frog”, so that is how I am describing it too. However, I will also say that it had notes of creek water, mosses, birch, fir, western red cedar, and sun warmed stones and truly smelled like the forest. I think it’s hard to get a true forest smell, like the loamy duff and wet and dirt. Sometimes if you put cedar in anything, the result is oops! all cedar but no, this is so lovely!

Anyways, very into a daytime concert experience with beautiful sounds, where I could wander through the trees between sets.