By The marketing for Portola Festival is as hyper-targeted as I’ve ever seen. Memes of yesteryear that run through VHS filters plaster the event’s social media pages. It’s brazen and borderline pandering, but the recovering Tumblr addicts on the wrong side of 30 absolutely eat it up in the comments all the same. Merch flies off the shelves here, to the point where by the time I entered the festival two hours after gates on day one, there was nary a line of sight unpopulated by an attendee wearing this year’s collection. Portola Festival exists somewhere between a startup and a cult. In San Francisco, it can be hard to tell the difference.
(Doing a 180 so sick it makes your head spin)
Portola Festival, in just its second year, has established itself as the premier electronic festival on the West Coast. This is astounding, even considering it’s put on by the mammoth Goldenvoice. Stationed on Pier 80, stages sit beneath shipping cranes and festival goers are treated to views of Sutro Tower and the San Francisco skyline’s perma-growth spurt piercing through the fog. The intention is clear: come here and return to the unremembered 90s. You’re going to love it.
They’re right. For a sophomore festival, Portola was spectacularly run and designed. Last year’s Warehouse debacle, in which attendees were unable to enter the second largest stage due to flawed layout and a confused entry/exit system, was solved to the point that it’s pretty baffling that the space could’ve ever presented an issue. The other three stages (Pier, Crane, Ship) thread the needle of being tightly packed together with little to no sound bleed. I never had to wait in line for food and drinks, there’s plenty of bathrooms (though the Warehouse could use some more), and security was a breeze—one thing festivals have really nailed post-shutdown is doing away with the cavity searching. People are going to get high at your party no matter how hard you try to keep out the drugs; switching to metal detectors that only scan for weapons and forgoing the pat downs and intensive bag searches expedites the process and is a far friendlier vibe that doesn’t make you feel like you’re going to spend the next six hours on an airplane.
But what Portola really aced was the music. My weekend started with Two Shell in the Ship Tent and it was undoubtedly the weirdest set of the festival. The duo remains anonymous and makes more of a show of it than previous masked selectors; it’s tough to affix any genre or meaning to the group’s work but I would like to put forth the classification of Cyberwook. On Saturday, the pair set up a camping tent around their decks and wore large floppy hats with lace scarves further obscuring their faces. Their IRL three-factor authentication was far from the strangest thing about their hour allotment on the pier as they darted between a wide array of glitched-out cuts, oscillating between their own productions and bastardized remixes of major pop tunes like “All of the Lights,” “Speed Drive,” and “Better Off Alone.” Midway through the set, one of the Shells emerged from the tent for what couldn’t have been more than 45 seconds to “sing” along in a bafflingly ridiculous autotune that was 100% incomprehensible. Many up-and-coming acts would choose to close out one of their first US festival appearances with their biggest tune, but Two Shell made “Home” an afterthought by spinning out of it into a laugh out loud mashup of “Avril 14th” and a hardstyle edit of Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated.”
From there I ventured into the Warehouse, the festival’s heart and soul, for a fantastic run of Overmono into Jon Hopkins into DJ Koze. Overmono was what you’d expect: slick, designer techno/garage/bass/what-have-you set to striking processed images of Dobermans on the ribbon board behind them. It was a good time.
This was, I believe, my sixth time seeing Jon Hopkins and through no fault of his own will likely be my last. He always puts on a great show, but seeing him crush the LA Sports Arena at FYF 2015 will forever be one of the most beautiful moments of my life and I’ve been chasing that ever since. I think it’s time to stop chasing. If you’ve never seen him before I HIGHLY recommend catching him, especially if he’ll have a large video screen behind him. Hopkins’ visuals that night at FYF remain the most cinematic live music experience I’ve ever witnessed. Sorry for using cinematic; sometimes the shoe fits!
DJ Koze’s sets in the Warehouse and at the Ninja Tune after party were surprisingly straightforward. I’d never seen him before and wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I had a great time at both! It was a tremendous pleasure to hear his remix of Lapsley’s “Operator” on a massive sound system with festival scale light production! Not much else to say!
Last week, I was surprised to learn how unfamiliar I was with Underworld. I caught them in 2016 in Coachella and know I had a good time but do not have any real lasting memories of the set. And as it turns out, I’d never listened to any of their albums until I binged them in anticipation of catching them at The Shrine in LA on Thursday and again on Saturday to close out the night at the Crane Stage. It can be daunting to dive into a band whose discography is composed of hour plus long albums with tracks routinely clearing ten minutes, but I’m glad I did. They are absolutely massive. Their set at The Shrine is one of the best shows I have ever seen and they were incredible at Portola as well but were criminally only allotted an hour rather than the 90 minutes they had at The Shrine. “Born Slippy” live is obviously incredible but “King of Snake” is one of the absolute very best live songs ever. A torrential downpour of green lasers as Karl Hyde flails around stage frantically while spouting his signature chaotic vocals is a real treat. It’s shocking to see a man in his 60s with that much energy; he’s impossibly cool.
Sunday featured my two favorite sets of the weekend, one right after the other. Avalon Emerson’s hour in the Warehouse was magnificent, yet another reminder that she is one of the very best DJs in the world. Emerson wasted no time getting into it and it was stompers from start to finish—one of the only DJs who is actually fun to watch DJ as she puts some stank on knob turns and flings her arm up when she nails a particularly sweet transition but her selections are so good that your focus is better spent on the dance floor improvising and riffing out funny dance moves with your friends. One of the greatest joys in this world is coming up with a tremendously stupid dance move on the fly that makes your friends and the strangers around you laugh and join in on the choreography.
The men in suits are going to walk into your house and burn it down. The many-aliased Dewaele Brothers spent Sunday performing as 2manydjs. Their live setup entails them DJing their own edits of classics and deep cuts while manipulating animations of the accompanying tracks play on the screens behind them. Tremendously high energy from start to finish, it was easily the loudest set of the weekend—at one point while they played their remix of Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupil’s “Cliche,” I did a semi-involuntary move that was like if a Looney Tunes character got struck by lightning while doing the “why I oughta” boxing motion with their hands while somehow punching myself in the face. The hallmark of an incredible set is when you think “wow this is the best song I’ve heard this weekend” and then five minutes later you think that again and then ten minutes later you think that again and then 24 hours later when you’re writing this sentence and you remember you wrote a blog post two months ago about how nitpicking between the best of the best is a pointless navel-gazing exercise in pretension and also why am I never able to spell exercise correctly on the first try unless I use the word twice in quick succession… The hallmark of a good writer is constructing a run on sentence so structurally flawed it would collapse under the smallest earthquake in San Francisco history. The hallmark of a great writer is nuking the media lounge bathroom so bad that it probably ruined an actual journalist’s day. I understand if the hallmark of a great editor is cutting that last sentence.
I spent the rest of the night in the Warehouse for Bonobo into Charlotte de Witte into Carl Cox. These were all fun sets but not too much to write home about. I spent the entirety of the Carl Cox set living out an agenda I’ve been pushing which is that it sucks that everyone faces forward at DJ sets. I spent the set with my back to the booth so I could dance and chat with my friends and it also had the added benefit of watching the lasers splash against the roof of the Warehouse. It’s cool to see the unintended consequences of such a big light show; beautiful in its own way.
Is it slightly concerning that a festival in its second year is so indebted to nostalgia in both aesthetic and top line billing? I would say yes. The location is not ideal and basically necessitates taking rideshare in and out which was a bit of a nightmare especially upon exit, but San Francisco is not exactly conducive for efficient transportation and Portola was exponentially easier to get to and from than Outside Lands, which is truly a disaster. The foundation Goldenvoice has built here is solid and it is astonishing how quickly they’ve cultivated such a ravenously loyal fan base. The undercard bookings have been incredibly strong; their willingness to think outside the box with B2Bs and out of nowhere acts like Nelly Furtado speaks to the thought the group puts into a festival still in its infancy. The question from here is which path to take. Portola did not sell out this year, made abundantly clear by a last minute social media blitz offering package deals and payment plans even on the day of the festival. The cynical route would prioritize top line billings and sacrificing a more eclectic undercard to boost ticket sales, but the more prudent would be to continue carving out the niche they smartly targeted: left of center electronic that appeals to a fairly wide range of music fans. It is surprising how under-catered this market is in the festival scene as more and more posters meld into homogenized irrelevancy. Having already leapfrogged the bi-annual CRSSD festival (a festival that has a cultish of its own; many Portola attendees were wearing HOUSE X TECHNO bomber jackets sold at CRSSD) there is no reason not to stick with what they’re doing. With the logistical problems behind them, less people will be scared off for next year’s edition and barring a pretty dramatic change in the lineup. Portola 2024 promises to be a standout in next year’s festival circuit.
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