Tomorrowland day 7 - Train World and Last Fest Day

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As usual, the bus was leaving at noon, but I woke up much earlier with a few hours to spare. Today would be my last chance to check out Train World, which I did. I was able to get through it in an hour and a half, but if you take it slowly and make sure you see everything, you could easily spend two hours in it. I think the price of admission was 12€ or something close to that.

Train World is a huge museum dedicated to the history of rail travel in Europe. There are four huge halls dedicated to different eras, in which they have several authentic train cars which you can walk into and look around. I am a big rail fan so I knew I'd have to check this place out at some point during the trip.

You start out looking at locomotives from the late 1800s and early 1900s, and can even step into the control cabins of a couple steam engines from back then.


It may have been unintentional, but I thought this kind of fit with the vague steampunk theme one finds in parts of Tomorrowland.

You can also step aboard a Trans-Europe Express from 1974...

...learn a bit about how engines work at exhibits like this...

...and, probably the most memorable part, a driving simulator in which you can drive a modern high-speed train like a TGV or an ICE.

Looks a bit simpler than the cabin of the old steam locomotive, doesn't it? All you have to do is push and pull on that lever on the right, and occasionally push one of the lit-up buttons on the left. In this simulator you had to drive the train down a long route between a handful of stations in which you had to speed up, slow down, and stop at all the right points. What kept it interesting was that after leaving certain stations, you go through some kind of time warp and wind up a few decades in the future, with the scenery and information panels changing to match the designers' concept of what that era may look like. By the end of the game, you're rolling into a futuristic 23rd-century Brussels dominated by gleaming skyscrapers.

All in all, it was a nice diversion, and a nice refreshing pause from the madness of Tomorrowland.

And now we return to our regularly scheduled madness. As always, the bus left at noon. Today I had a bit of a goal. Saturday I had been frustrated by my constant failed attempts to meet up with any of the Belgian Journey crew, who were scattered throughout the festival all day. So today, on our WhatsApp group, I proposed we all meet somewhere at a specific time. Eventually we agreed on 4pm outside the Budweiser Freedom stage.

With a few hours to wander, I first found myself at the Atmosphere stage, one of the indoor venues. Now this felt like my kind of place: mostly dark inside, not at all empty but not jam-packed either so there's plenty of room to move, with laser lights moving around in various patterns all over the domed black ceiling. The DJ playing was named Onyvaa.

After lunch I had to go hit up the Moose Bar again and have another half-liter mug of Jupiler.


Seriously, the Moose Bar is awesome.

With the meetup time approaching, I started heading over toward the Freedom stage. On the way I ran into someone else from the Belgian Journey, one of the Houstonians, who had brought along some other party people he'd met in Dreamville, the camping area. He didn't know about the little reunion we were planning so this chance meeting was a bit of a happy accident.

So eventually a whole bunch of us who had done the Belgian Journey converged on a spot outside the entrance to the Freedom stage. Some of these people I hadn't seen since Antwerp. After a while of catching up, taking some group photos, and deciding what we were going to do the rest of this last day, we all went into Freedom and caught the last parts of Curtis Alto's set.

I'd never heard of Curtis Alto before this. Even though "Curtis Alto" sounds like a person's name, it's actually a duo. Like with so many other newly-discovered artists I only heard a little bit of, the most I can really say is they were pretty good, their set's on YouTube now, etc. etc...I admit I haven't listened to the set a whole lot since then.

After Curtis Alto, Bakermat took the stage. This was another artist I had wanted to see. Bakermat is a Dutch DJ/producer who also plays the sax (and always dresses like someone from a marching band), and I'll listen to nearly anything with a sax in it. I had first discovered him a couple years earlier at Euphoria 2017 in Austin. Here we were treated to most of the tunes I had heard at that set two years ago--"Teach Me," "Living," "One Day," and such--as well as newer stuff like "Don't Want You Back" that hadn't been released yet back then.


Unlike the last show I saw, at Euphoria, here he had a guest musician playing all the sax parts.

Around here the group started to split off. I went and had dinner somewhere. Unfortunately I don't remember where.

It was now getting to the point where I'd have to head over to the Rose Garden stage for one of the artists I was really looking forward to, Purple Disco Machine. This was an artist I first found out about early in 2018 while preparing myself for then-upcoming Lightning in a Bottle. Purple Disco Machine is a German DJ/producer whose music, and remixes of others' music, recalls the disco era. During the run-up to LIB, I had repeatedly listened, via YouTube, to a set he had recorded at The Lab LA, and had really wanted to check out his set at LIB but ended up missing most of it. I had to make up for that this time.

I got to the Rose Garden a bit early, while another German producer, Tensnake, was behind the decks. Tensnake had made a few tracks I'd really enjoyed earlier in this decade, like "Coma Cat" (my favorite song of 2012), "Mainline," and "Love Sublime." What little I caught of his set was pretty good, though other than an unfamiliar remix of "Coma Cat" I didn't recognize anything.


Tensnake, in the white shirt, wrapping his set up while Purple Disco Machine, with the mustache and, as always, a Hawaiian shirt, prepares to take over.

PDM was on for an hour and a half. His remix of Weiss "Feel My Needs" was one of the first songs in the mix, along with his remixes of Shakedown "At Night" and Fatboy Slim "Praise You." "Body Funk" was in there too naturally, along with most everything else that's been playing in his recent sets. He also threw a few throwbacks in there, including New Order "Blue Monday," and something I certainly never expected to hear anywhere in Tomorrowland: ABBA "Gimme Gimme Gimme A Man After Midnight." Overall, great set, and I can say it definitely made up for last May.

Next I headed over to the Youphoria stage for another artist I'd wanted to see, Nervo. Nervo are a pair of Australian DJs--two sisters in fact, named Mim and Liv--who sing on their own tracks and had made a few songs like "We're All No One" and "Reason" I'd liked over this past decade. But for some reason, I just wasn't feeling it. I don't know why. The set wasn't bad at all, and they did play "Reason" which I did enjoy, but none of it was doing anything for me at that moment. So I wandered off in search of something that would.

It wasn't long before I meandered into L'Orangerie and found something that did.

Roni Size, backed up on the mic tonight by MC Dynamite, is a drum 'n bass producer who emerged from the same mid-90s scene in Bristol that produced Massive Attack. If you're not too familiar with this particular sub-genre, all you need to know is that it's all about deep bass and really fast beats, and it gave my legs and feet a second wind I never expected.

Even though I'd already had something good for dinner earlier, I had to stop and get me something else because I still had that long hike to the buses ahead of me and needed a little extra energy to get me through it. At one of the food stands I got something small: a couple big pieces of ravioli with creamy cheese (Ricotta?) and potato chunks on top. Now ready to take on what little was left of the festival, I walked into the Budweiser Freedom stage where Kungs was in the last third of his set.

Kungs is a French DJ-producer who quickly blew up back in 2016 with a remix of a song called "This Girl," originally made by an Australian retro-'50s band called Cookin' On 3 Burners. Besides two different remixes of "This Girl" I also heard Fisher's "Losing It" (the most played song at Tomorrowland this year?) and, of all things, Lil Nas X "Old Town Road." The full set, of course, is on YouTube and I've listened to it a few more times since then since it was pretty good.

Finally I found myself back at L'Orangerie, where I unexpectedly rejoined two of the Belgian Journey fam. This stage's final set was from three dubsteppers playing back-to-back sets: Barely Alive, Phaseone, and Virtual Riot. These guys played dubstep, which was quite different from everything else I'd experienced that evening, since it's more suited to banging your head than doing anything with your feet. There was at least one person there wearing an Excision "I'm a fucking headbanger" cap...but what was most memorable was that there was a rather enthusiastic fan who tried to climb over the fencing, and then got harshly pulled back and thrown out of the venue by security!

You know, I may not have noticed at the time, but I don't think I stopped at the Main Stage at all on Sunday. And that's OK with me. After nightfall that stage got so unbearably packed to the point where it was impossible to move. Between every stage I visited that night I experienced so many extreme edges of electronic music, letting my feet go wild with Roni Size and banging my head to the three dubsteppers at the end, it was totally worth missing out on Timmy Trumpet and Afrojack.

But when that last set wrapped, so did Tomorrowland (weekend one)...there was nothing left for us on the so-called Holy Grounds and so I started making my way toward the exit, while saying my goodbyes and "tschüss"es to the people I'd met on the Belgian Journey over the previous week. Another long hike back to the bus stop, but a little sad knowing it was the last time.

...but not the end of the trip! There was some cool stuff to see in Brussels the next day to cap off the adventure, which we'll see in tomorrow's entry.

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