swimming elephants: Nylon Music Festival

So last Saturday (May 7), Swimming Elephants played in Nylon Music Festival. It was our first experience having a stage that big. We were excited and nervous at the same time.

Anyway, this is what Gilar thought about the event:

The Nylon gig was quite disastrous, in a way. First of all, our Omnichord died on our first song (even though it came back to life again). Secondly, the volume levels for everything were all messed up. And finally, eventhough sometimes we like them, but we got unwanted feedbacks when it was supposed to be gentle. We were told that the nature of the venue was a bit difficult to tame, not to mention that we have like an acoustic guitar, 3 keyboards and 5 mics that were all drenched in reverb. So we thought; okay we’re gonna have some serious feedback problem on the stage, we can live with that, but it turned out that we got more than just that. It was a battlefield, and we were massacred.

There’s a little story about the playlist as well. We were supposed to play At The Zoo that night, but at the last minute we decided to play Battle to open our set. It worried us cause the song needed an electric guitar and I didn’t try mine during soundcheck - and last minute changes might lead to a technical catastrophe. Anyway, the song is one of our oldest, and we rarely got the chance to play it live. So I guess when we saw the size of the venue and when we found out that the sound system was one of the best in town, we knew that we had to play it. Nobody knows when we’ll ever encounter a venue that big again - so we took the risk, and it turned out that it was the right decision afterall.

The most important thing was, we got to share the stage with 10 great bands, and that was quite a something for us. For us who are not musicians (except Ranggi perhaps), to take part in a music festival and surrounded by all these talented people are not something that can happen at least twice in our lifetime, so it was kinda unbelieveable. There’s also this sense of togetherness, it’s cheesy I know, but it was quite overwhelming and we won’t ever forget it. It felt like we were taking part in the beginning of a new wave, and the line ups were just the tip of the iceberg.

We made some new friends too; the guys and girls from Nylon, Ken (Jirapah) and Dinda from Whiteboardjournal, Eric from Deathrockstar and many more, and we had some fun. All in all, setting aside all of the technical issues, we felt so honored to be part of festival, and at the same time we also felt dwarfed, and in the context of what that night meant to the local music industry in general, it's actually a real good thing. – Gilar Di Aria