Way back in the early part of 2012, when I had only lived in San Antonio, Texas for a few months, I often went to shows at Club Rio (now out of business, but just to the left of Bowlero on 281 when it existed) to see DJs like Robbie Rivera and Morgan Page. Whenever I went back out to my car to drive back home, I'd always find flyers in the windshield for upcoming events. Usually it was local shows these flyers were advertising, but some were from big out-of-state festivals like UME in Miami and something called Electric Forest tucked away in Rothbury, Michigan. Great lineup, I thought, but I don't think I could work a trip that far into my budget this year. That was, again, 2012; after six years my situation was a little more flexible.
Electric Forest has been happening every year since 2008 (except 2020 and 2021 of course, stupid pandemic) in the small town of Rothbury, Michigan, which is on the shore of Lake Michigan. I'm not entirely sure who all organizes it but I think it's a joint venture between Insomniac and the local founders. Typically this happens in June; in the past there were always two weekends, and I went to the second weekend which was the last weekend of June. In 2019 I believe there was only one weekend.
When I went to Weekend 2 in 2018, it was the last weekend in June, just over a month had passed since Lightning in a Bottle, and the countdown was on for my moving to Germany in October. To get to the Forest from San Antonio I took a direct flight on Southwest, paid for with my Southwest Rapid Rewards points, from there to Chicago-Midway on Wednesday, June 27. After staying the night in a hotel, Thursday morning I rode the L Train, Chicago's public transit whose trains look identical to NYC's subway trains, except they're above ground, to O'Hare Airport where I caught a three-hour (plus one more hour thanks to crossing a time zone border going east) shuttle bus ride from there to Rothbury and the festival grounds. The first thing I did was find my way to GA camping and set my tent up.
Downtown Chicago as the bus was leaving.
The GA entrance.
The entire festival grounds. I like the names of the campgrounds, however I can't remember which one I was staying in.
The Camping Areas
I stayed in GA camping. So, I can't tell you what it was like for VIPs. But GA wasn't bad at all. The vast majority of GA camping was for people who arrived in their own vehicles. People who, like me, only had a tent and didn't bring a car could set up in a small section of GA camping where everyone got a little space, about the size of a car's parking space, in which to pitch their tent. Only problem was there was no shade at all, but that wasn't much of a big deal when you're spending most of the daylight hours outside of the tent.
GA camping had a large "commons" area called Main Street with food stands and gift shops. In the center were a couple of installations which must be mentioned. One was the Brainery, where guest speakers gave some interesting presentations. I only caught one of these, in which one of the members of Cherub (the group who gave us "Doses and Mimosas" and, with GRiZ "P.S. GFY") did a deep dive into the topic of modular synths.
Next to the Brainery was the Cereal Bar, which unexpectedly became a favorite hangout spot for me whenever I wasn't inside the festival, and was also where I found myself eating breakfast every morning. Most of the cereals available were a bit too sugary for my taste (Froot Loops, Lucky Charms, etc...I think this place was meant to push people's childhood nostalgia buttons) but I really enjoyed having a bowl of Golden Grahams every morning topped with generous helpings of peanuts and dried cranberries, and a little whipped cream in addition to the milk.
And while you're eating your cereal you can watch "adult" toons like "Rick and Morty" and "Bob's Burgers."
Inside the Festival
There were six stages, with the big ones being Tripolee, Ranch Arena, and Sherwood Court, and three smaller ones called Forest, Carousel, and Jubilee. The first three is where all the big-name headliners play, including the String Cheese Incident, whose multiple sets every day are on Ranch Arena. Forest was in the middle of the forest, which we're about to get to, and Carousel was part of the bigger Hangar complex. Jubilee I never stopped at, but it was on the way to the Hangar.
All of these stages surround Sherwood Forest, the massive forest which gives the festival its name...
Just look at it. Trying to find the right words to describe this, I don't know where to start. It's full of art installations and much more.
And the much more also occasionally includes performance artists like this.
There was a stage in the middle of Sherwood Forest, called...Forest, but I didn't spend a whole lot of time there. It was one of the smaller stages that hosted not-so-big-name artists during the daytime.
At night, the forest becomes an even crazier place as it fills with all kinds of colored lights and hypnotic music. There was one spot where I found a garishly painted piano where people who could play it were stopping by and banging out various tunes. So many of the people walking through the forest were wearing some of the most bizarre costumes, from someone dressed like a cup of ramen noodles, to another wearing the "shower" costume you might remember Ralph Macchio wearing in the first Karate Kid movie, to someone else with this shirt that said "This is a building." Just being there was an otherworldy experience.
And then there was the Hangar. It's this sprawling structure with various rooms that all together look like they're from the first half of the last century, such as the Pawn Shop full of antiques, the Game Hall with stuff like ping pong tables, and one room looking like the inside of a house straight out of a ‘50s sitcom.
There was a bar in the middle where you could not only get Bell's Oberon, but also Bud, Bud Light, Stella Artois, and Bell's Two Hearted Ale.
At the back of the Hangar is one of the six stages, Carousel. This place was meant to resemble a swanky '30s-'40s nightclub.
The Hangar is also where you start your journey to find all these hidden spaces you have to solve all kinds of riddles to access. The first of these was called the Speakeasy. Gaining access to this was a bit of a challenge. One of the rooms in the Hangar is the Time Travel Agency where you get issued a passport by "travel agents" who have accents that, in keeping with the Hangar's theme, sound like they're from New York City circa 1940. You have to get six stamps in this passport from different places after you solve puzzles in those places. Some are in the Hangar and some aren't. I don't remember everything exactly, but one was in one of the rooms in the Hangar which was dressed up to look like the set of a '50s sitcom and had a clue embedded in a picture hanging on the wall. At least one other clue was found in one of the art installations in the forest.
So I went through the hassle of getting those six stamps, and then went to the Time Travel Agency to turn the passport in, for which they gave me a pineapple pin that I put on my hat. Now armed with that pin, I went to another one of the Hangar's throwback rooms, the Garage, which looked like a '50s car mechanic shop, showed my pin to the grease monkeys there, and then stood on a platform next to a wall which then rotated, depositing me here...
I finally made it!
The Speakeasy was made to look like an illegal alcohol-serving establishment from the Prohibition 1920s. The bar here served the same stuff as any other bar in the festival, so I just had another Bell's Oberon.
The Sultry Stewardesses were the Speakeasy’s house band, playing 30s-40s staples like “I Want to be Loved by You” and other such tunes you’d expect to hear in a Humphrey Bogart movie.
There were other secret areas I could never gain access to. There was a place called the Poetry Brothel, as well as a giant pit filled with foam cubes which was behind the Time Travel Agency. Maybe next time I'll figure out how to get to these places.
The Music
As you probably guessed by now, most of the artists here fit somewhere under the "EDM" description, and that's what I mostly gravitated toward, but there was still much more there. I think Electric Forest was first started to bring together ravers and jam band fans. Every iteration of the festival, from its beginning in 2008, has always featured a jam band called the String Cheese Incident. They're very much in the same tradition as the Grateful Dead and Phish. They play multiple sets on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. Here I didn't experience too much of them, which was a mistake.
A little more than three years later, I went to another festival, Suwannee Hulaween in Florida, where "Cheese" similarly plays several sets every night. That's where I really discovered this band. From what I've heard, they started out as ski bums in Crested Butte, Colorado (I've been there!) back in the '90s where they played sets in exchange for free lift tickets.
This is the String Cheese Incident on the Ranch Arena stage early Saturday evening. They would be back again Sunday.
Not only was there the String Cheese Incident, there were also artists representing a wide array of genres, such as Natalie Cressman, who sings Brazilian jazz, Sunsquabi and GRiZ serving up funkier music, and the indie band MisterWives, who only played weekend 1 so I had to miss them. But looking through the massive lineup, most of Forest is a big rave.
The Tripolee stage on Thursday afternoon while Mija was on. I'd known about and listened to her since she'd played Euphoria in 2016 though I hadn't seen her set there.
Thursday night I saw Rüfüs Du Sol. I think they were at the Forest stage. They were just about to release their third album Solace and so had some new tracks like "Treat You Better" and "Underwater" which I hadn't heard the previous year at ACL.
CloZee, Friday evening at Tripolee, who can’t really be seen in this photo because I was so far back. I also saw her at Lightning in a Bottle a month earlier. It took awhile but her mostly slow, hypnotic music has grown on me the last couple months.
Here's the UK drum 'n bass duo Calyx & Teebee playing the Tripolee stage on Friday. I'd say this was my second favorite set of the weekend.
As the sun set on Friday night, after enjoying my last beer of the night at the craft beer pavilion, I got to take in the last set of the night at the neighboring Sherwood Court stage: Cut Copy. Just like Rüfüs, I'd seen them the year before at ACL. Since then I'd become more familiar with their material, especially since I'd been listening to their Free Your Mind album quite a bit since buying it at ACL's Waterloo Records. Unlike at ACL, where they were playing during the late daylight hours, here it was at night and there were some seriously mesmerizing lights accompanying the music. This was certainly my favorite set of the whole weekend.
Even today I can't help but be surprised when I look at the massive lineup on the back of the shirt I bought
there. There were so many artists playing this festival, and I only experienced a small smattering of them. Not only that, there were quite a few I wasn't aware of at that time but only discovered later. Every time I look at the back of that shirt I see yet another name and think [artist name] was there?? How did I not know that? The answer of course being that I didn't know that artist existed at that time. This would include Camelphat, CharlestheFirst, Claptone, Daily Bread, Elderbrook, Fisher, Get Real (Green Velvet and Claude VonStroke), Lane 8, Mersiv, MK, Netsky, and Sunsquabi. If I'd known about them then, I would've gone out of my way to see most of them.
Louis the Child was also there, but since the memory of their Middlelands and ACL sets was still fresh in my mind, I didn't see them here.
The music didn't end in the festival grounds, because there were several renegade stages set up in the camping area, mostly in RV camping.
I stayed here for a little while late Friday night/Saturday morning. I need to go to more of these renegade stages next time.
Monday morning as everyone was packing up and leaving, a DJ named Layer Cake was playing a set in GA camping.
Food and Drink
Just like any good festival, there was an amazing selection of food to be found here. What I remember the most is that this is where I first discovered tempeh. There was one place, a vegan food stand, where I got some kind of wrap with tempeh in it, and loved it. Tempeh is a kind of soy-based food which I think was invented in Indonesia, and ever since this weekend it's been a regular staple food for me.
So what was there to drink? Like most every other festival I've been to, there was what I call a house beer that was served at every drink stand, and at Forest that beer was Bell's Oberon. This was a pretty good wheat beer made by Bell's, a Michigan brewery. It's not the best wheat beer I've ever had, but compared to other festival house beers, I think I liked this one better than Fat Tire (Lightning in a Bottle), Jupiler (Tomorrowland), and certainly Lone Star (Austin City Limits).
Occasionally you can find Bell's Oberon as far south as Texas; I bought a six-pack from my local H-E-B and it was occasionally on tap at the Flying Saucer. This picture is from my San Antonio apartment back then. Notice the Forest flag on the wall.
There was more than just Bell's Oberon available; there was also a craft beer tent, really close to the Sherwood Court stage, which served quite a variety of brews. I can't remember what all I drank there, but I know I had a Breckenridge Vanilla Porter and a Blue Point Oatmeal Stout among many others.
The most memorable thing that happened on Sunday afternoon was the massive storm that moved in and totally battered the forest. The weather seemed so nice during the day, then the next thing I knew I was sitting on a shuttle bus, which I had run inside of to escape the hail, as it slowly did its circuit through the various VIP camping areas like the Back 40. This was, incidentally, the first and only look I ever got at the Back 40. The storm didn't last long and and before long the festival was restarted, but it did cause some lasting damage. There's a landfill somewhere in western Michigan that suddenly got a huge amount of wrecked pavilions dumped in it not long after that weekend.
An enormous line built up at the GA gate after it reopened. This line never abated, and so I gave up on ever getting back in. Thus I never had a chance to see Rezz or Bassnectar, though I could hear them from outside. I spent the rest of the evening hanging out at the Cereal Bar, and trying to get some early sleep since I would be catching an early bus out the next morning.
This was also the first festival I'd ever seen that had its own greeting associated with it. I guess it's such an institution that the regular festival-goers think of it as an annual holiday. At first hearing people say "Happy Forest" seemed a little weird but I grew to like it.
Oh yeah...I guess for the sake of completeness I should mention that some of my stuff got stolen the Monday morning I left. Usually I try not to leave stuff out where people can just take it, but I needed to hit the bathroom one last time, got distracted by the aforementioned Layer Cake on the way back, and when I got back to where I had camped my backpack was missing. That backpack contained, among other things, my Euphoria hoodie and Middlelands shirt.
Getting Home
I left the festival mostly the same way I got there only without the hotel stay. The shuttle bus left at 8am and got me to Chicago in time for lunch. With a few hours to kill before my flight left from Midway, I hung around the inner Chicago loop for a while and stopped at, of course, an Irish pub called Timothy O'Toole's.
Revolution Jamo-Nilla Nitro Imperial Oatmeal Stout. 13.2% IBV! I slowly sipped this while watching one of the 2018 World Cup games on TV.
Except for that unfortunate incident at the end, definitely one of the best festivals I've ever been to. So far, 2018 was the only Forest I've experienced; in 2019, being in Germany I was more interested in exploring Europe, and the 2020 and 2021 editions were both cancelled. I'm confirmed to go to the next Forest, this year in 2022, and I already know this is going to be an even better experience than last time.
