News / / 24.06.13

FOUND

Haggerston Park, Shoreditch | June 15th

Found began in the autumn of 2011 as a cooperative effort between ten promoters. They built a decent fanbase, hosted names like Todd Edwards, Jimmy Edgar and Kyle Hall, and 18 months later, they organised a festival. 

Optimistically billed as ‘A day of sunshine fuelled electronic sounds in central Shoreditch’ – it was cloudy, it rained a bit, but there was some sun – Found festival ran the gamut between contemporary house and techno, bass music, and disco. So far, so Shoreditch. But this was an extremely slickly-run event: competent staff, zeitgeist-y bookings, good sound. The weather may have disappointed, but little else did.

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We arrived in time to catch Tim Sweeney play the Tief & Trouble Vision tent. The Beats in Space maestro played the kind of cosmic(-ish), balearic(-ish), italo/house/techno(-ish) set he’s known for, gently warming up a slowly filling space with genre-skirting music that defies snappy Music Journalism (and that’s probably why he’s so interesting to watch). From there we headed to the Magna Carta tent, where wAFF was commanding an already-full tent with elastic, Hot Creations-style house. Maybe he wasn’t as well known as some of the other bookings, but on the back of this performance, and the support of said label, you’ll see plenty more ‘wAFF’s on flyers over the coming months.

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We were then faced with a clash: back to T & TV for Session Victim, check out the Found Stage, or stick with Magna Carta. We dithered. A relatively short bar queue and some good-hearted punter-chuntering thereafter (“£5 a beer?!”, “London prices *rolls eyes*”), we opted for Session Victim. Their discoid, soulful house selections buoyed an increasingly receptive audience, and the boys’ unguarded glee animated even our surfeited limbs into something approaching dancing.

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From there we hopped from stage to tent, tent to stage, dropping in on the VIP area (obviously) for the always excellent Midland, but otherwise content to flit around. Special mention must go to Floating Points for delivering an exposition in how to balance entertainment and ‘education’ in a DJ set, and, of course, the three acts who played out the evening on the main stage: Todd Terry, Lee Foss B2B MK, and Maya Jane Coles. All are well-established acts and plenty praise has been lavished on them already; suffice to say, none rested on their reputations and each gave surprisingly visceral and enjoyable sets. Our group then splintered as each demi-group headed to a different after party, satisfied with their days’ ‘work’ reviewing an excellent festival, in a park, in East London, surrounded by generally nice strangers and above-par electronic music.

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One final note before we conclude. On checking social media to gauge how everyone else felt about Found, we saw some deeply unpleasant remarks which need addressing. We saw nasty classism (“horrendous chavvy crowd”), gross misogyny (“so many slutty girls!”), and sometimes combinations of the two (“fuckin Essex whore kept dancing in my space”). Women can wear whatever the fuck they want, you don’t ‘own’ a fucking ‘space’ at a festival, and people from Essex can come the fuck from Essex. Prissy moral judgements impress no one, and tell you more about the snobbish insecurities of the snide pricks spewing them than anything – at all – about their targets. Is the foregoing Political Correctness Gone Mad? No, it’s just us insisting on everyone not being dicks.

Thankfully, the vast majority of feedback was positive and those negative comments were forcefully repudiated by the rest of the Found hive-mind. It’s to the immense credit of Found’s organisers, then, that they attracted such a (generally) well-meaning and right-thinking bunch. We hope to see them next year.

 

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Words: Rob Bates

Photos: Marc Sethi

foundseries.co.uk

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