My fingers are smeared crab-like against the tinted perspex of my front window, my gut assuring me that either I’ve ingested too much Low Sodium Mealshake or I’ve made the wrong decision. I can see that other parents in residential pod 59 are feeling the same way, watching their spawn gallop off into the morning, their rangy limbs swinging, smiles spread wide over the lunar surfaces of their skin. The young and smiling are moving in large, ropey clouds towards STEREOFUTURE, the self-proclaimed “Most Expensive Music-Type Even in the Southern Hemisphere”. I can feel my bowels loosen as I picture these kids slouching through gleaming aluminum conductors, ticket-hands raised skyward, emerging in lightly irradiated cordons before spilling back into pack formation. They call this the ‘Entrance Gate’. I can picture rippling seas of teenagers, rolling at the steel shore of the main stage, swarming with bacterial speed to the 6 bands that verify the kind of kid that they 'Are’, while the other 112 bands (that fill the gelatinous bulk of STEROFUTURE’S 13 lineup announcements) play to wet grass and howling silence. They call this 'good playing times this year’. I can imagine the sun stroked lines of older kids mazed behind electrified fencing and wall-mounted Digital Body Mapping equipment, every body leaning towards a narrow counter serving 55% water called 'Extra Dry’. They call this the 'Beer Tent’. And I’ll never forget the black and blue gangs of masked thugs, oozing sweat beneath 3 layers of Kevlar and industrial plastic. Ready, waiting and hoping to unleash storms of vulcanized rubber (from their sidearms), debilitating noise (from their personal audio cannons) and beatings (from their armoured fists) over any transgressors of STEREOFUTURE Law. They call these 'Health and Safety Officers’. I want my own sons to realise that it wasn’t always this way. I can’t put my finger on exactly where the slippery slope began, but there was one thing that happened all the way back in 2014, that certainly contributed. That one thing was the end of Camp A Low Hum, the greatest music festival the world had never seen. 

 

Even back in 2014, finding a decent music festival that didn’t require winning a ballot was proving difficult. Most of the one day festivals that rumbled in and out of Australia’s major cities were different colours of the same drunken juggernaut, annually collapsing under their own weight. I had to go farther afield. Watching the pale scar of Australia’s east coast disappear into the Tasman Sea, I knew I had, for the third time, made the right decision—my gut felt just fine. 

 

In previous years, my attendance at Camp A Low Hum coincided with it’s relocation from Wainuiomata to an abandoned agricultural college sunk into the rolling pastures behind Bulls, a town 160 km north of Wellington so quaint, that the Police station was signed 'Consta-Bull’. The college, or 'Flockhouse’ as it was still called, was in such an advanced state of decay that certain buildings were altogether out of bounds, just in case they chose to voluntarily condemn themselves mid-festival. Nestled between the sun drenched elysian hills of New Zealand’s west coast, and the murmuring, pine-forested surrounds, Camp was a wonderland. Lineups were never officially released, no media passes existed and bands and audience mingled freely. Late one February morning I shambled out of my dorm room and almost tripped over a broken circle of bodies outside my door. It was Chad from Toro Y Moi and members of Tame Impala (playing as POND) smoking a joint on the grass outside, adjacent to a food vendor, silent and hirsute behind a steaming cart of corn. Some of the corn was three dollars. Some of it, more ominously, went for fifteen.

 

But Wainuiomata claimed back Camp in 2012, and there it stayed, wrapped in the fog of a forest valley at Camp Wainui, Homedale. It’s always been hard to convey the nature of Camp to my sons. I tell them stories when government blackouts shut down our Wallscreens and Voiceweb, but my descriptions always take on something of the mythic and in a way, condemn it to history. But it’s hard not to capture something utopic when talking about a festival where I maintained various states inebriation for four straight days in the New Zealand mud, hastily built lasting friendships, listened to beautiful and strange music, and most of all, felt almost completely unsupervised.  

 

In the final Camp 2014 there was, again, almost no security. Just 5 faces to beam at you and throw their arms towards the carpark. By the main camping area (aka The CBD), a green Kolbelco digger was beached in a small mud pit, bordered by a sagging length of orange tape. A few hundred metres up the wide gravel road you’d find a gap in the foliage at the roadside. A small bridge was knotted over a small, rabid section of creek, the bridge composed of a thin chain and a few hunks of carpet. After picking your way raggedly across the bridge, you could walk back towards the CBD and reach the Lagoon stage. This stage was set up next to a swaying body of brown water, generously titled 'the Lagoon’. The Lagoon had a narrow concrete walkway hanging off it’s right side—opaque turbid dam on one side, and a full meter drop into a concrete drain (replete with small torrent of gushing water) on the other. And if you were truly in the mood for adventure, you could walk away from the CBD towards the Journey stage, following the buckling lines of increasingly damp humans into the forest. This small hike involved fording two creeks, navigating an increasing number of slippery banks and creeping through the spindly mud tracks of Camp Wainui’s fern gullies. When you could spy a yellow power cord snaking naked through the undergrowth, you were almost there. Finally you’d reach a small clearing littered with fallen logs and lateral ferns, covered in pelts of moss. A huddle of kids would be nodding around a small table in the middle of the glade, covered in a tangled nest of electronics. 

Everyone navigated these (very) possible agents of catastrophic injury while profoundly fucked up, in the inky black of the country dark, and with—to be best of my knowledge—no major incidents. There were no major warnings, no restricted access. In fact the only real safety information I was given was this: 

 

It was gratefully received. It was clear, even in 2014, that Camp A Low Hum summoned a different sort of crowd. They were the immaculately disheveled, the carefully unravelled. They were the easy-going kids with perfectly dated jumpers and talismans of the early internet adorning their gaunt frames. They were the army jackets with beard, the whorls of hair with black jeans. And they had been going to Camp since 2008, with a devotion that could only be described as 'near holy’. Every year encampments were augmented, re-designed and relocated to either capture or repel sun or expanded to envelop a new cluster of allies.

But most utopic of all—and indeed fundamental to the mythic in general— was how Camp A Low Hum gathered the unknown around it like some mesmeric cloud. The badge I found in the mud outside the Renegade Room (a rustic portable with a separate timetable, partly preloaded with bands in varying degrees of rehearsal and even formation, and partly filled in as the weekend rambled on) proclaimed (almost) what captured the most precious part of Camp in a convenient maxim. It read: 

 

Camp 2014 had woven together a lineup of bands that had, for the most part, played previously. A sort of 'best of’ bill. Discounting the Renegade room, some of the best acts (chosen by title) were:

- Spermaids

- Microsoft Voices

- Viking Weed

- Tanned Christ

- Perfect Hair Forever

- Team Cat Food

In contrast, some of the best acts (chosen by performance) were:

- Beastwars (stoner/sludge/metal)

- Kangaroo Skull (industrial dance/EBM/techno)

- Liam Finn (ecstatic Rock and Roll)

- Making (tangled, aggressive math metal)

- DJ Douggpound (DJ/Comedy) *Not a widely held popular choice

In further contrast, some of the best acts (chosen by volume of recommendation/adulation) were:

- Trust Punks

- Glass Vaults

- Surf City

- Lawrence Arabia

- Orchestra of Spheres

Even with repeat sets, there was a lot of new music buried in that remote New Zealand valley, all small parts of a unique experience. And some of the acts of the A Low Hum bill rarely play regular venues, and were described in the winding mud avenues of the CBD as 'Camp Bands’. Camp, through chief curator and executor Blink, had created it’s own phantom scene. A function more vital than mainstream New Zealand seemed to credit it for.

 

Half an hour south of Camp, was Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand. Most people I’d spoken to who lived there agree that it’s a generous term. An older resident who made their fortune in the city confided that if the Beehive (Wellington’s House of Parliament) was to move to Auckland with the other of the New Zealand population, “they’d just turn the lights off, that’d be it”. Cupped between distant, thundering hills and a sweeping coast, Wellington, particularly to the oversea(s) visitor, was a beautiful city. Lights filled the boughs of it’s trees along the esplanade, cable cars rolled slowly over it’s San Franciscan hills and the days there seemed to glow, like they’d been polished by the wind. But the entertainment infrastructure in Wellington, despite the demographic lean towards the artisan, was fractured and gaunt. Two of the chief live music venues, the San Francisco Bath House and Mighty Mighty were, while I was there, closed and on the cusp of closure respectively. Dirtier clubs like Sandwiches or the Big Kumera were already gone for good. Even Wellington’s newest live music venue ‘Puppies’ (the club run by Blink, CALH’s Festival Director) was rumored to be only partly new, as it filled the space of yet another closed venue. Wellington needed Camp A Low Hum. Or at very least something like it. While Camp was unfolding invisibly half an hour away, Wellington was wrapped in the throes of the 'Sevens’ rugby final, where the crowd would dress up and drink their collective weight in booze before even entering the stadium. Last year around 40 people were ejected from the Sevens, this year it was over 200. The morning papers would fill with photos of haggard Roman gods and Wonder Women fully prostrate on the footpath outside the game. During Camp we made a small supply run into Wellington, and witnessed the semi-naked tide draining towards the Westpac stadium. We were asked at a coffee shop “Are you guys going to the Sevens?” Our answer, firmly planted in the negative, inspired another coffee shop worker to ask furtively: “How’s Camp guys?”

 

I pull on my white, cotton Sunsuit over my clothes, coating my hands and face in zinc before unlatching the door. Most of the other residents of pod 59 are indoors. Only five houses are without digital garden beds and have to bully their roses into life amid the aggressive excess of ultra violet light. I remember what it used to be like. When a downpour could last for days…  

 

After the first night, the surrounding valley of Camp Wainui became a forested bowl, rapidly filling with water. At first it fell in a mute mist, licking stage roofs and thinning the crowd at the back of the hollow fire truck which was vending the festival’s coffee. But gradually the rain summoned a new volume, a new speed, hissing against tent walls and spraying lines of cowering kids from the forest stages. As stages closed and Camp drew itself into a tightening ball against the weather, the weekend continued to expound the qualities of the mythic. Blink wandered deliberately between Camp’s remaining venues, an invisible Noah, Deucalion of a fast submerging valley. His calm would’ve seemed misplaced at any regular festival. Timetable changes, stage closures and constant rain spelled a quiet doom for any outdoor festival in 2014. But Camp was different. People knotted tightly together and partied in the sideways rain that sheeted through Camp Wainui on day 3. Some pushed their limbs through garbage bags, some swung between the Noisey Stage and the Renegade Room (the only places left that could simultaneously provide both music and shelter). Others simply raged as hard as their vital organs would allow, lathered in mud and weather, lurching chemically vertical through their personal trials of stamina. Then there were the people who piked early. People like me. 

 

There was a moment that had splintered itself into my memory from Camp 2014. It was on Thursday night, before Camp had officially started. DJ Douggpound (the touring DJ with cult comedy duo Tim and Eric) was inflicting himself (gloriously) on a relatively fresh (if wholly inebriated) crowd. At the end of his set Douggpound played the musical jewel in the Tim and Eric crown, a song called 'Sports’ and Blink, festival organiser, walked onto the stage (cabin veranda) and started scratching and beat mashing with Douggpound. It was a unique moment. But what I remember liking most about it was that almost every time I told someone, the response was: “holy shit, really?” There was always a degree of hearsay in what transpired at Camp A Low Hum that at once made the experience incomplete, and the myth whole. Leaving early saw me miss Circle Jerk’s colossal audience group hug (allegedly) as well Daedalus and Astronautilus improvising during a last night split set in the Noisey stage. The room was (supposedly) a breathless mass of slick bodies hanging off balconies and rafters while Astronautilus freestyled about how Truly Fucking Amazing Camp was. And I had it from numerous reliable sources that despite the words 'freestyle’, 'rap’ and 'amazing’ being almost linguistically repellent, this was, true to Astronautilus’ own message (and against all odds), Truly Fucking Amazing. Only at Camp.