Friend of the Radar Sam Jacobs from creative agency Jellymon went to the inaugural Zoo Festival in the Haidian Exhibition Halls in Beijing, and was kind enough to review it for us. This was Modern Sky’s first attempt at a purely electronic festival. Presumably as an after effect of the October holiday confusion, Zoo was poorly promoted and under-attended despite a very strong lineup. It seems strange what with the success of Intro and the continued successes of Beijing’s clubs promoting DJ’s and producers that Modern Sky failed to attract people. Perhaps this demonstrates what happens when a promoter steps out of its sphere of influence. Clubs have their regular following and promotion channels and Acupuncture had come off the back of a year of heavy activity and were riding a minimal wave. Modern Sky is predominantly known for the music of their major bands (Queen Sea, Re-Tros, Hedgehog etc.) and their major festival (Modern Sky Festival), which specialises in guitar rock and indie. However, we digress. Over to Sam:
This weekend a small group of us travelled down to Beijing to attend the Zoo festival in Haidian Park. The lineup included Pet Conspiracy, Classixx, Drop The Lime and DJ Spooky, also playing were our friends R3 and Kidplastik. In theory a great line up. Unfortunately it seemed that Modern Sky had forgotten to tell anyone about the festival and therefore the venue, which looked like it could hold about 5000 people, was almost empty.
The music on the other hand was great. Pet Conspiracy played a really fun set and all the DJ’s we saw, Sulumi, Drop The Lime, Classixx and Kidplastik were great. After Kidplastik played we decided to call it quits (couldn’t face seeing DJ Spooky play to a spookily empty room) and head down to Punk to check out Eli Smith, who is playing this Saturday at Not Me in Shanghai. Punk was packed for it’s 1 year anniversary and we danced and drank into the small hours of the night.