Discussion of the Doof: Earthcore’s Spiro Boursine

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Discussion of the Doof: Earthcore’s Spiro Boursine

We’ve gotten ourselves a little infatuated these days with the phenomena that is the ‘bush doof’. Recently discussing their rising popularity (read article here) as well as the announcements of a plethora of doof events – we wanted to know more about what goes into the organising and construction of a doof, as well as the discussion of forest raves – a passing trend or perpetual doofer’s delight?

Enter Spiro Boursine – the homey who pioneered Australia’s biggest doof event, Earthcore. Running Earthcore and related events since the early 90s, Earthcore has evolved from a few avid doofers going loco in the forest to one of Australia’s most important musical institutions.

As someone who has recently been introduced to the world of doof (yes, I threw my white girl cautions to the winds and shaked booty as it should never be shaken), I was curious to press Spiro about what makes a doof experience possible, ask why people are turning away from the popular festival format and the paranoia involved in organising an event considering our current munt-enthusiast culture.

What I didn’t expect was a profoundly candid conversation that made me laugh, question and shake my head at big festivals. This motherfucker’s straight up about the state of dance music events in Australia.

Need to know more? Read on doof fiends…

IC: So my first question for you is what’s your fondest memory of the Earthcore archives?

 

SB: Well my fondest memory was in 2000 at the seven day millennium party, it went for seven days and I had a house boat on Lake Eildon in Victoria and we had all the international acts on house boats and I was on a house boat as well. I was on a houseboat next to this guy called Jason midro who’s an Australian dj and he still dj’s n stuff like that and I woke up to all this yelling and screaming and drama and I come out and his houseboat was capsizing like the titanic and I remember jason’s girlfriend was hanging on the side of the rails sinking on the ship. All of jason’s vinyls and music stuff was submerging into the water with his decks and mixers and everything. It was a pretty tragic affair.

 

IC: Did he go for a dive? Did anything survive?

 

SB: Nup, we viewed the sinking from a safe distance – we had condolences ready to go after the sinking.

 

IC: So Earthcore has been going for a long time before 2000, I read today that the first one in 92’ had around 200 attendees. How have the attitudes and mentalities of attendees changed since the early 90s?

 

SB: Um, I don’t think that the mentality has changed at all, it’s just that it’s become more well known. Bush doofs have become more – what do you call it – ‘popular’, and because of the popularity of it people who come to these things have a lot broader demographic and profile. They’re not just hippies anymore – from a grassroots sort of crowd you’ve got a bit of everybody. From the hippie to the corporate guy to the blue collar working guy or girl to people in different ethnic groups and a lot of travellers it’s become a lot broader sort of crowd. No particular one person goes to these events anymore so there’s no real hierarchy or scene as such which makes everyone more comfortable. So if you walk into a trendy nightclub or whatever, where are you from, Sydney?

 

IC: Yeah, yeah, yeah, up in Sydney.

 

SB: So if you’re going to like, what do you call it, Ministry of Sound’s club, what do you call it?

 

IC: You mean Pacha?

 

SB: Well if you’re going to Pacha you’ve got all the girls who are like short skirts, high heels and tits up and all of that it’s kind of like a scene where that is the look and that is the demographic – the profile of the kind of person who goes to pacha. You wouldn’t see a guy walking in there with thongs on and a singlet, or a guy with dreadlocks walking in there – I mean you might but…

 

IC: But probably not.

 

SB: So there’s more scenes and more clubs and a lot of festivals like Stereosonic for example where the cool thing is to be shredded and muscley and that’s the scene and that’s not what earthcore is about. Even though it’s got a hippy name and sounds all in the bush with nature and love – in reality it’s a little bit of everybody from all these other scenes just congregating outside. It’s not hippie at all really, it’s just a lot of people getting amongst it once a year. So yeah (laughs) bit of a rant really but yeah.

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IC: (laughs) Well do you ever get concerned that the growing popularity and growing amount of ‘in scenes’ attendees might compromise the integrity of the event?

 

SB: Nah not really because you think about it before like in 2004, ten years ago, we were getting about 18,000 people. So it’s not that we’re getting more people as such, it’s not that we’ve really become more popular it’s more we’re just closing the social scene. Y’know ten years ago a lot more people were going to alternative music festivals and then it started to become the mainstream festivals that gained more traction for young people – it was kind of the ‘Paris Hilton’ generation where looking sexy and expensive was the cool for the youth of the day thing to do. But now as is with the generational movements, young people again are going back more to that trashy, alternative counter culture – it’s back in vogue now and the Paris Hilton thing is passé and the minority.

You really realise that the popularity of an event comes with the social trends of the time. Now that Earthcore is getting bigger again you see it comes with ebbs and flows. Like I said, 10 years ago we were lots bigger so although we’re growing again you have to ask are we really becoming more popular? Who knows, in a few years time we could be unpopular again and what have you, that’s the way culture operates. I’ve been doing it for 20 plus years so I’ve seen people rise and fall and moderate. I’m just happy that young people are pushing against commercial festivals – alternative and boutique festivals are gaining ground, due to no effort of their own just by the reality of the social counter-cultural scene that exists in society. So no, it’s not going to ‘lose it’s vibe’, not at all.

 

IC: I agree with you, I think there’s being a mass resistance against the gigantic EDM-type scene.

 

SB: But we have to realise it could easily switch and there could be a mass push-back against the alternative. Commercial could become back in vogue. If only you could master understand and forsee what societies fashion and movement and cultural patterns will be we’d be loaded…

 

IC: It’d be alright .

 

SB: You’d be the most popular person in the world!

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IC: So kind of growing on the culture of trends and societal attitudes towards the alternative – what do you think of the term ‘Bush Doofs’. Do you think it actually describes what Earthcore is?

 

SB: Well you know there was no term ‘bush doofs’ until we started doing parties in the bush.  Back then, back in the 90s when we started doing it there was not a lot of emphasis on ‘house’ music – everything was called techno. The word ‘techno’ covered everything, so if you were playing breaks or trance or drum and bass or anything like that you would call it ‘techno’. So by the early 90s those genres started to develop and now we have every single variation under the sun from trap to new disco to bloody chicken dance has come to fruition. But yes, before that ‘doof’ didn’t exist. I believe it came to be a word officially around 1996 when psytrance music started peaking and became a name and ‘bush doof’ was strongly associated with that name and that was Earthcore, y’know?

 

IC: Look at you, pioneering that shit.

 

SB: Well the competition was ourselves. There was a period of time, initially, where we were doing events against ourselves with different names. We did a three day doof called ‘Techno Fest’ and another one called ‘Protora’ and ‘Mystic Madness’. We just kept putting them out against ourselves because we were the only ones who were doing them. We almost got a bit bored so we used to compete against ourselves and see who would win (laughs).

 

IC: Well clearly there was a market for it. I feel like the market now is growing again?

 

SB: Well I feel like it was an accidental thing, there was nothing premeditated about it. All of it was an accidental market but clearly a prevalent one and one that we found amazing to cater for. It’s actually funny because before I was involved in events and I was at uni and I had to come up with a new product or service based industry – I came up with Earthcore and I failed the subject! My tutor said ‘this concept will never take off in Australia’.

 

IC: I bet he’s totally shitting himself now.

 

SB: Man I cried, I felt like a failure, I would go and sit by the lake and look at the deep water (laughs). Then four or five years I was guest lecturer at the same university teaching the subject that I had failed.

 

IC: And your tutor can officially suck a dick! So in there we’ve talked about the experience one has at Earthcore, how do you build the non-musical components of the festival to enhance the experience for your average doof-er? How important are the aesthetics of a festival to you?

 

SB: That for me is the most important part. Right now, I’ve been working for two or three months alone on everything that’s not music-related. It’s hardcore. What I do with these events is kind of reverse-engineer them in a way. I’ll book all of my internationals and whatever and then I just focus totally on non-musical aspects of the event, returning to music at the end. Everything else is about attention to detail. Because anyone can go ‘oh there’s a lineup, look it up on the internet, who’s playing at this festival’. I call the people who run those type of festivals the ‘McDonalds Promoters’. McDonald’s promoters, which are a whole lot of them and I’m not going to name names in Australia – even though I’d like to but I’m not going to.

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IC: I mean I’d like you to too but…

 

SB: Well the McDonald’s promoter runs events based on other people’s events and fleeting trends. So they’ll go ‘Oh shit look at that, Ultra Music Festival, look at the first two tiers of their lineup’ and they’ll just emulate it, they’ll just copy it. There’s no thought process or originality in just following what’s going on overseas and that’s exactly what the mainstream festivals do here. Originality factor is less than zero. The only thing that they’re creative on is deciding how high ticket prices are going to be.

They spend so much time bidding and fighting for acts from international festivals that they don’t put any effort or time into the events themselves, everything else is dial-up. For example they wouldn’t design a stage – they just book the stage, so much is bland and generic and there’s no thought put into it. Then what happens to these promoters is the ongoing classic promoter stuff-up – they’ve spent all their money on competitive international acts and then they have no money left for production. That’s the fallacy of some of these promoters. Where as I, obviously don’t spend a fortune on international acts as an alternative music festival, and that gives me a good amount of money to spend on making the festival look sick and crazy and be an awesome experience. I understand the golden rule that is the bigger the act doesn’t make the better a festival. Find yourself at one of the big festival and the experience is shit – you’re watching Skrillex? Big deal.  The rest of the festival you’re cuing up for 6 hours and there’s rubbish everywhere, the stage is shit and you can’t even hear it properly and you’re thinking ‘there’s dickheads all around me’. People ending up going, ‘fuck that, I don’t wanna be here anymore. I don’t feel good, I don’t feel sexy with these people in this scene’ and then they try something else like Earthcore and realise that they’re not just going home with the memory of hearing the act play, there’s so much more.

 

IC: I’m assuming you’re also of the opinion that the bigger the act doesn’t necessarily mean the better the music.

 

SB: That’s right and it certainly doesn’t mean the better the event. I think the generation coming through is cottoning onto that. You could bring out the biggest act in the world but people don’t just go to festivals for that anymore – they realise there’s other reasons for going to a festival. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love the music, so much so I book my acts months in advance. Last year I finished Earthcore in November and had booked 14 acts for this year by January. I’ve got it all booked 6 months out.

 

IC: With every big scale event there’s risks but for me personally I fucking love doofs and I feel with that kind of event there’s more of a family-oriented vibe and people are more willing to help each other when somebody might be in danger. How do you guys go about managing the risks of your event?

 

SB: Seriously, we’re completely paranoid about people stuffing themselves up. To such a point the paranoia is so high that we’re doing everything we can to minimize harm. Sometimes measures are simple, for example stopping music at 3am on the Friday of the event. The reason that we do that is not because we cant play the music all the way through –  we have a 24 hour permit and can do whatever the hell we want – but we’ve realised over trial and error over many years that if you turn the music off at 3am Friday people have a sleep and actually get to relax. So when we turn the music back on at midday on Saturday they’re rested. There not some dance warrior out to pillage the earth – we’re not trying to provide that kind of environment or energy where people want to do that to themselves. That in itself, just that simple measure reduces overdoses and people hurting themselves.

Last year we had the least amount of medical emergencies at a festival like this ever – we had one ambulance for the whole festival. We had thousands of people and only one ambulance which is unheard of. It was so good that Ambulance Victoria commended us and told us that it was the best statistical event [in terms of injury] ever. We always have an extremely high amount of medical facilities on site and we’re ultra-vigilant. Authorities say they want ‘x’ amount of doctors and nurses and we double it. We know that if the worst thing were to happen it would not only effect the individual and their family, it would also effect us. If someone dies on a drug overdose as far as I’m concerned it’s a tragedy. We’ve only ever had one fatality at an event, over 21 years of Earthcore parties. Someone actually drowned down at the river because they went swimming at night. You can’t say the same for similar events and festivals where there are large numbers of drug-related deaths and injuries. For that I blame, obviously the person for doing it in the first place, but also the organisers for having music going non-stop and building a negative culture. If you’re going to operate that way then you’re going to have stresses to come, guaranteed.

 

IC: I can’t imagine the anxiety that organisers must feel knowing the prevalence of drug use…

 

SB: I don’t know, our crowd last year was really well behaved. I kept thinking, ‘wow, this is the best crowd I’ve ever worked with’. The crowds are much more well behaved now then I remember – I feel that behaviour was really bad around 2008 and now it’s just getting better and better.

 

IC: Do you think that what we’re actually experience is a media panic when it comes to young people and their behaviour at festivals?

 

SB: I think young people are much wiser. They’re looking after their friends and seeking our help to make their experience safer. I cant even believe that they’re so well behaved – it was amazing. We had one fight break out at the last festival last year and ejected one person which is nothing. We’ve been running club nights over the years too and I always find that there’s more chance of incidents in a club with 600 people than there is at a doof of thousands, it’s amazing.

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IC: So, looking to the future, what’s on the agenda for Earthcore? Like you said you cant really predict where the crowds are going to go but did you have anything in the think tank for what might be ahead in the next few years?

 

SB: Well yes, actually. We’re planning on going West and North. So by going West we’re thinking of going to Western Australia and doing Earthcore up there and going North we’re thinking of up in your direction (NSW).

 

IC: That’s amazing, I think it’s really important that we get acts and events out to Western Australia to make sure no one’s isolated from good times

 

SB: I’m actually going out to look at sites in Western Australia next week and then yeah, expanding to you as well so that’s what’s coming up next for us.

 

IC: We all look forward to it.

 

Catch the almost obnoxiously full lineup for Earthcore’s monster 2014 festival below.

As told to Izzy Combs @IsabelleComber

(right click image and open in a new tab for a bigger version)

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All photos with thanks to Earthcore Facebook.

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