Colossal Clowns, Majestic Magicians & Creepy Carnies – This Was Intents Festival 2015!

On the 5th, 6th and 7th of June it was all about colossal clowns, majestic magicians and creepy carnies as tens of thousands of free spirits gathered in Oisterwijk for Intents Festival.
For me, after that weekend the meaning of the word ‘funfair’ changed forever… Traditionally, I always associated funfairs with hyperactive children eating their body weight in fairy floss and begging their parents to let them go on every single ride until they throw their guts up in a bush somewhere. Let me begin by just saying that this funfair was definitely not one that was appropriate for 7 year olds and to put it plainly, fairy floss stalls were replaced with cocktail bars and the annoying majestic carnival music was replaced by hardstyle, EDM, deep house freestyle and hardcore. Intents Festival was an event where adults could re-live memories and unleash their inner child.

It was Sunday the 7th of June when I stepped foot onto the festival grounds and after hearing a plethora of positive statements about Intents Festival, I thought that I’d suss out what these guys brought to the table this year. After seeing last year’s mainstage spamming my Facebook timeline for three days straight, I had high expectations for the design of the mainstage and the entire festival as a whole.

It was sometime around 1:30PM when I arrived to the festival grounds and as I looked around I saw many people who were ridiculously sunburnt from the previous days at the festival. I had a quick giggle and thought to myself “It really sucks to be them.” Before I had the chance to check out the mainstage, I went and brought myself some tokens, followed by a very healthy breakfast consisting of fries and mayonnaise which were cooked fresh on location. After being fueled up and ready for some good ole’ Sunday partying, I pulled out my voice recorder and started walking around the festival.

1:45PM: “The mainstage is this HUGE FUCKING CLOWN. I mean, I’m not one of those retards who are scared of clowns, but it doesn’t mean that I’m a huge fan of them. It reminds me a little bit of that freaky entrance at Sydney’s Luna Park.”
I giggled to myself and felt mildly sorry for everyone who had consumed hallucinogens and was stuck in a trip thinking that the stage was going to eat them or something. To be quite honest, the stage wasn’t that aesthetically beautiful in the light as opposed to some other stages I’ve seen in the past, but with the whole ‘carnival’ theme, making the huge evil clown as the mainstage seemed like a straight forward choice. However, I loved the size of the stage and later on when the darkness crept up, the stage illuminated in neon coloured lights and looked really beautiful.

I had a quick squiz at the hardcore area, the freestyle area and the beloved deep house area before kicking into dance-mode and making my way to watch Da Tweekaz & Neilio. Both MC Villain and MC Da Syndrome were up on stage kicking off todays festivities with style! One thing I realised is that Da Tweekaz and Neilio were two very unsuited artists to match together for a b2b set. Neilio could have been suited playing b2b with Wasted Penguinz or another artist who shares the easy going and melodic sound. Da Tweekaz are obviously more upbeat, jumpy and would have matched Coone or even Dr. Rude a lot better. However the mismatch did work to an advantage; during tracks that Da Tweekaz played, the audience danced madly and they swayed, sung along and embraced life when Neilio played his music. It did balance things out but I would have much more preferred seeing both artists playing solo sets.

2:10PM: “I fucking love when there’s like a whole group of Minus Militia fans all dancing in the front to Da Tweekaz and Neilio… It really makes a lot of sense (not).” I started observing people around me and suddenly remember my “11 species of ravers you’ll find in the front-row” article. I put on my observation glasses and began ticking off those good ole’ stereotypes from the list.
“The Militiant, the Radical Redemption lookalike, the ‘I’m just here for the munt’ person, the token hipster and oh my god, there’s even Grandma and Grandpa here!” I shouted into my voice recorder hoping that no one was becoming offended. I was very impressed with how accurate my descriptions were, however the person holding the Spanish flag and the aftermovie sluts were nowhere to be seen… yet…

For the first half of Neilio and Da Tweekaz set, the mainstage was a little empty, however the second half really cranked things up. Da Tweekaz unleashed some of their most renowned material including the notorious “STAY AWAY FROM MY VODKA,” their remix of “Rest Of Your Life,” “Bad Habit” and “Frozen” which saw the crowd suddenly turning into a choir and singing “let it gooooo, let it goooooo!”

2:35PM: “AWWWWWW Neilio is so sunburnt.” *followed by more aw’s* The poor guy clearly didn’t slip, slop and slap*.
*Slip, slop, slap: Australian sun campaign to promote the utilisation of three kinds of sun protection. A hat, sunscreen and shirt.
Later that day I saw Neilio applying sunscreen…

Back to the set! Neilio played a lot of easy-going, melodic music which really boosted the atmosphere with some good vibes. After releasing some amazing music in the past year, Neilio was able to showcase that on the mainstage at Intents which was a great opportunity to spread his tracks a little further and although the crowd was quite chilled out during his tracks, they fit really well with the shining sun.
The mainstage became more and more packed as the clock ticked towards 3:00PM and Frontliner and Coone appeared on stage opening their killer set with their collab “World Domination.” Let me tell you, their set kicked off to a crazy start so I decided to position myself right in the middle of the action.

3:10PM: “I’m dancing right in the middle and wow, this is fucking crazy! Coone and Frontliner are playing Never Come Down and even all of the kids wearing Warface merchandise are going crazy.” Other than the insane amount of merch, the special time of day was coming around; the time where the guys started taking their shirts off and also the time where I was becoming considerably drunker. There’s a certain responsibility attached to whoever decides to buy me drinks and that responsibility is to make sure that I do not become too #turnt under any circumstances.

3:30PM: “OH MY GOD IS FRONTLINER WEARING A TRACKSUIT?! WHAT THE HELL BARRY?!?! It’s probably organic.” From my prime position in the front, I noticed that Frontliner was rockin a pretty comfy combo – what looked like it was a tracksuit and a t-shirt. I mean, if I were a DJ I’d probably wear a tracksuit too, comfort comes first. My respect for Frontliner went up further if that was even possible.

Suddenly, Da Tweekaz emerged into the crowd and were joining in on the festivities and dancing around with fans, signing things and also capturing some material for their Tweekd project.

3:45PM: “Who needs eyes to see when you’re turnt?!” This was like the most insightful thing I had said all day. I was evidently feeling the white wine doin its thang and after I snuck into the VIP deck I was pretty keen for life in general.

Just as I had snuck into the VIP deck, I realised that my home-girl Mandy was playing and I wanted to show this female fatale some support! We weren’t really sure where to find the Boombox area until……
4:00PM: “OH MY GOD THIS THING IS SO CUTE!” is all I could say about the Boombox area is how cute it was. It was this huge crate, almost like a shipping container and could fit around 20 people in there. Surprisingly, the sound wasn’t too bad in there and although it wasn’t really classified as a ‘stage,’ Mandy still gave her 100% energy.

After I took a peek at Mandy’s set, I just kind of drunkenly wandered around for a while, exchanging awkward eye contact with people as I passed. I made my way back to the mainstage just in time to catch the opening of Ran-D and Outbreaks set. The crowd kicked into overdrive when Ran-D opened the set with his Defqon.1 anthem “No Guts No Glory” and from there, things stayed bearably raw for most of the set.

Something that I would have preferred is if there were 1 or 2 more mid-way acts before Ran-D and Outbreak. Hard Driver or Audiofreq would have been perfect options to place between Frontliner’s melodies and Outbreaks screeches. I just didn’t think it was fair for people who liked euphoric music that there were only two sets of melodic artists playing before the rest of the afternoon was pumped with raw hardstyle. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind raw music, but a mix of everything is way more appealing than listening to cheesy melodies on one end or a construction site on the other. I will stress – Intents could have created the line-up with a little more care and paid attention to the fact that the middle ground between raw and melodic is making a huge comeback.

Before I knew it, it was 5:00PM and Josh & Wesz were on, an act that I could not miss. At the beginning of the festival I saw the Bumper Car area and was thinking “This is so bizarre,” but when the area was more packed and I was actually inside dancing away, it seemed to make a little more sense. It was extremely loud in there but with that kind of area, it was hard to get the sound 100% right.

5:01PM: “Josh & Wesz open with Tunebeat and everyone’s going fucking CRAZY! This is like the hipsters congregation of the entire festival. Everyone in this tent is my hero, I love life.” As you can see I was really digging the old-school, especially after a few drinks. The guys played an absolutely amazing set, throwing in some old classics such as Headhunterz’ “Rock Civilization,” “A Complex Situation” by Wildstylez and the Frequencerz edit of “The Punishment.”

5:30PM: I popped out during Josh & Wesz’s set to try one of the delicious mojitos from the cocktail bar and wow, there’s really nothing better than being at a festival and not being stuck drinking overly sweet white wine. My exact words were: “I just brought a mojito and I’m fucking happy.”

We did have a potential winner for the prestigious ‘set of the day’ title, but I had to suss out D-Block & S-te-Fan’s old-school set and also Radical Redemption – that guy is like a mass leader.

After Josh & Wesz I stood in to the first half an hour of Crypsis and Titan’s set. I got sick of waiting for Crypsis to drop “The Main MF” so I just left instead and decided that it was time for some deep house.

“7:15PM and I’m in the deep house area and HOLY SHIT THERE’S A LIVE SAXOPHONE. What the hell, this is mint as fuck. I’m just going to stay here forever and soak up all the hipsters.” I could not get past the fact that someone was playing the saxophone live. I chilled in the deep house area for a little while before my friend literally begged me to go and watch Radical Redemption.

8:00PM: Radical Redemption seriously is not THAT bad. If anything he’s one of the most entertaining people to watch on stage. Even if you hate raw hardstyle, watching him is actually quite the experience. Again, I thought it was a bit weird that he was teamed up with Digital Punk, their styles are considerably different. Maybe if Radical Redemption was to play b2b with Chain Reaction it would have worked a lot better and then B-Front should have been on stage with Digital Punk.
For the half an hour we watched, the crowd was going fucking mental and a large portion of people had flags flying through the air. People were absurdly munted for a Sunday and I really felt sorry for everybody who had to rock up to work on Monday with debris of leftover MDMA and other substances. Apart from that, Digital Punk and Radical Redemption played some great dancefloor oriented tracks like “Rebel To The Grave,” “The Black Demon,” “Firestorm” and “May God Be With You All.”

8:30PM: Before I was about to be blown away by D-Block & S-te-Fan, we grabbed some pasta (which was fucking awesome) and sat down for a few minutes. I was very impressed with the vast selection of food available, from the typical Dutch snacks to even pasta; there was a great variety which made my stomach very happy.
9:18PM: The next voice recording I made was some drunk banter with “Loop Machine” playing in the background. From what I could make out of my drunk mumbling, I think I did mention something about ‘set of the day’ and my nipples being very happy. Well thanks, DBSTF if you can make my nipples happy then I guess that you did something right. When they played “Rockin Your Mind,” like everyone else, I tried doing that high pitched vocal (but failed). It’s a tradition that you have to at least try to do the vocal when that track comes on. I didn’t record much during this set only because I was having so much fun and I definitely feel good about naming these guys the ‘set of the day’!

9:45PM: As the sun retreated into the horizon, the crisp breeze was colder than ever so we decided to grab our jackets and warm ourselves up. Just as I was about to check out how beautiful the mainstage looked now that it was getting dark, one of my friends decided to unleash her inner child and go on that ride where you pretty much get flung into the air a shitload of times. With a beer in her hand I just knew that she was going to throw up her entire stomach afterwards but surprisingly she was fine. I’m not sure how she would have trusted the guy who was controlling the ride, by the looks of his rapidly moving jaw I think it was safe to say that he enjoyed his day at work a little too much. Yes, I’m 99.9% sure that the guy who was working at the ride was off his chops.

10:00PM: Mental Theo was the last act of the night and it was time to get freaky! Although I wasn’t a fan of the stage design during the day, at night, the scary clown was illuminated in neon colours and it looked fantastic! Most of the other stages had finished by this time so everyone was packed into the vicinity of the mainstage to party as hard as they could for the last hour. It would have been nice for the festival to go another hour later mainly because I wanted to keep watching the amazing lightshow! However, all good things come to an end and when the fireworks started shooting into the sky, it signified the conclusion of yet another great edition of Intents Festival…

Although there were many critiques regarding the line-up, theme and design, I had no real major complains that weren’t solely opinion based. However, I do think that it’s important that promoters are more aware of how they create line-ups, because too much raw or too much euphoric will never work. All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed getting turnt on a Sunday and Intents Festival only made me more and more excited for the remainder of the season!