Welcome to my attempt to paint you a picture. This one is not by numbers so bare with me. It’s fragmented, outside of the lines, inspired by grass roots, framed by my bias and filters, but it’s honest and in my mind the scene is beyond beautiful. This is a picture of Alberta’s three-day electronic music festival. This is a picture of Motion Notion 2009, held at the Bent River Ranch, 17km north of Drayton Valley, July 16-19.

In a decade, MoNo has established itself as Alberta’s biggest outdoor electronic music festival. Albertan through and through, games of "Beersbie" (with cans of Lucky Extra, Boxer, or TNT) were not hard to spot in the early hours of any given morning. One only need to peek outside their tent to find a number of bikini-clad girls loading up the beer-bong, complete with a plastic plumbing valve – another inherently Albertan rite of party passage.

How Albertans spend their down-time at Motion Notion is not unlike how Albertans spend their down-time at Big Valley Jamboree: cheap beer, drinking games, hooting, hollering, bikinis, getting to know your neighbors and cranking the car stereo.

Of course, at Motion Notion you will hear Bassnectar, Rusko, or Hallucinogen more frequently than, say, Toby Brooks, Clint Keith or Garth Black. It is electronic dance music, after all, that has infiltrated the psyche of thousands of people to the point that they are willing to drive hourless hours, dance an endless dance and try and sleep sleepless nights all the while braving mother nature's assault, just to groove on those sweet, sweet sounds.

They weren’t just any ol’ sounds coming out of the always-pristine pK sound systems. They were sounds of love, sounds of energy, sounds of protest and activism, sounds of sex and drugs and sounds of rock ‘n’ roll. Some of the sounds were sounds never heard before. Some of the sounds sounded alarms, some sounded sad, some sounded feverish, some sounds were farty, some sounds were like a Dr. Seuss book, but all sounds came to party.

Early Thursday morning, WAV Occupation played a chilling set to which only a handful of hardcores witnessed. The energy level was always at full throttle, despite the 5 a.m timeslot. One MoNo-er was shaking, flipping, flopping, convulsing, spazzing, interpretive dancing, leaping and head banging over every inch of the dance floor like it might very well be his last night on earth (even though he seemed to be on another planet already). His over-the-top antics awed the rest of us who were zombified from a long night. The WAV Occupation Spazz Man will sleep well tonight.

Throughout the festival you look for periods of ease, you look for moments of downtime and you take full advantage, otherwise you wear yourself out. That is why when the music shuts off around 6 a.m. you sleep your ass off, because you are going to have to get up in five hours if you don’t want to miss the start of the Day 2 beach party.

As a version of Good Vibrations echoed through the festival, the beautiful people (and that’s everyone) made their way to the beach stage, a quick stroll past the main road and down a few small but steep hills to the fast-paced, knee-deep Pembina River, begging for some hot bodies to take a dip. As Little Bo Beat provided a reggae-inspired set, the sexy beach party was in full tilt. Booby-tasseled hoola-hoopers, guys in short shorts, dreadlocked bare breasted babes, mud-covered nudists and freezy-slurping people-watchers all connected through the beat of the sun. The beach stage was small, intimate and ready to ignite. The Beach is a tease – a titillating bombardment of beats and bodies, a precursor to the overdrive only the chill of the night can provide.

The sounds were world-class and diverse on a dead calm Friday night. Amon Tobin was this writer’s hands-down highlight as he pulled a thread in our head and did what he wanted with it for what seemed like days, and will probably remain for the rest of the ones we have.

Homegrown heavy-hitters stepped to plate too. B.C.’s Excision twisted and tweaked his equipment as fluidly as Pete Townshend did his guitar, a treat to watch.

A lot happens in three days if you make it. Realties shift, priorities change, memory is lost and memory is gained. Friends are made and stories are told. Experience is the fuel for MoNo’s fire.

The Sunday morning driving back, you are now faced with the reintegration process. How will you begin to adjust to what people call the ‘normal’ life? How can you go back to your job and family and bills and problems, and blah blah blah; how can you do all that when you just want to dance?

As we all try and reintegrate and decompress, memories of the weekend come back. Little details that can seem trivial when they happen, but a week later you realize they were the memories that changed who you are.

Please share your stories with us. How are you adjusting to normal life? Was Motion Notion your first festival? Did you get out of it what you expected? Did it throw you a curveball? Post a blog or in the forums!

See the rest of our Motion Notion photos at our Flickr photoset.

       

Written by :

Johnny Elbow