Week in Review: moe.down 7

Writing this from textedit since I'm supposed to be net-free for this week of vacation I took. It's been refreshing to not be refreshing my RSS reader every half hour for new blog posts on the sorry state of world affairs.

At any rate, the beginning of the vacation was taken in Turin, NY - the site of moe.down, a three day music festival at the Snow Ridge ski area. The weather was wet enough to get some of that good festival mud generated, but not too much as to ruin the overall event. Our neighbors were a bus full of amateur musicians who set up a pretty extensive camp with stage and kitchen. On a rainy, cool Sunday morning, they started a fire on the front lawn, which was eventually nixed by an eager security dude cruising in on a golf cart.






Here's a pic of a sculpture made with the remnants of the fire:










Our camp was a much simpler affair, but still quite functional:











As for the music, it was a good time to catch onto some new bands, moe. has a good ear for new talent. Cool acts on the second stage were Toubab Krewe, U Melt, and Moonshine Still. On the main stage, pieces of Phish were present; Paige McConnell and Fishman had their own band, and Mike Gordon played with a honky tonk band that has a regular gig at the Radio Bean, a tiny Burlington coffeeshop. The best show, in my opinion was the Umphrey's McGee set on Saturday night. Exercising their musical background, they played Zep's "Fool in the Rain" to pay tribute to the showers that happened throughout the set (with great timing with the music).

moe. themselves played a Friday, 2 Saturday and a Sunday set. I haven't listened much to them since I saw them last, a SUNY Potsdam spring concert event some time ago, where I was probably not in a condition to objectively evaluate them. I tried to do a little crash course in moe. tunes by listening to the one live show I had of theirs. Surprisingly, they hit tunes I knew at least once a set, which always helps a show. They brought out other guests frequently, including Paige, Gordon Stone, Jake Cinniger, and some dumb trumpet player who spent more time jumping up and down like that Bosstone.

Getting out was pretty easy, thanks to the power of my Golf's diesel engine. We booked it on Sunday night, beat the crowd, and had a great night drive through the North Country back to Malone, where we regrouped and headed back out into the rain for a few days of camping in the St. Regis Canoe Area. More on that later. Now, it's time to head out to the Burlington South End Art Hop.