“A Beautiful, Slightly Weird - Maybe Wonky - Spectacle in the Woods.”
Just a few miles north from the Mississippi, if you swing a hard right off highway 151 you’ll find yourself on Airport Road in Platteville Wisconsin. If you keep going and take it slow as you curve through the hills and neighborhoods, you’ll eventually break out of the woods and into a clearing. On the weekend of September 3rd and 4th, 2021, the clearing was dotted with cars, multi colored tents, and hundreds of excited people.
Itching for activity after nearly two years in either lockdown or social distancing, a healthy crowd turned out for the fully-outdoor “Driftmore Arts and Music Festival 2021.” Held south of town on private land, the festival boasted 3 official stages and 2 “renegade stages” - that is - an unadvertised stage hidden in the woods featuring secret guest acts.
Once you parked and grabbed a wristband, you could enter the festival grounds and were immediately greeted by the Forest Stage. Featuring acts from all across America, highlights included Audeka, Molokai, and Circadian Riff. This was an intimate stage, close to the speakers and with a variety of tapestries, mirrors, and art hung from trees surrounding the dancefloor.
Leaving the woods, take a left and you have a fork in the road. Do you go up the hill and check out the Big Top stage? Hosting acts like Blookah, The Tripp Brothers, and Beak Nasty: the Big Top was the funkiest stage of the bunch.
Nearby were a variety of food vendors boasting a selection of grilled cheeses, taco and tamale platters, nachos, lemonades, and more. If you stay on the lower side of the hill, you’ll pass by a variety of vendors showing off various artworks, tapestries, hand-wrapped and hand-forged jewelry.
After making it through the pop-up bazaar you are greeted by a dichotomy of a stage: a large white tent, two big stacks of speakers in front of a stage, and a variety of classic CRT monitors and box-TVs set up around the stage.
From the top of The Ravine, VJs Fractalfucker and Dystopia Kid controlled the visuals displayed on the CRTs on stage, as well as the visuals projected onto the interior of the white tent.
This was the darkest stage of the festival, focusing deeply on the music and the visuals. Featured acts included Pheel, Repulsion, and Murkury. The crowd here was noticeably enthralled and enthusiastic about the bass response of the sound system, with some laying on the hill higher up, focusing more on the stars in the night sky combined with the spectacle of it all.
At first glance these folks may seem overwhelmed - but in fact they’ve discovered the best seat in the house. If you walk back a ways from The Ravine stage, between all of the stages and vendors, there lay a single classic fire ring, with a perpetual flame being stoked by staff as the night grew longer. If you plop down a folding chair and take a seat, you can begin to fully appreciate the scale of what is happening out there.
In the middle of the woods in rural Wisconsin, a group of determined friends, artists, music producers, sound technicians, and event coordinators pulled off another successful event drawing in hundreds of attendees and musicians from across the country. Driftmore gave a lot of people their first experience in the Driftless Region and I think it was healthily representative of the region itself: a beautiful, slightly weird - maybe wonky - spectacle in the woods.
