Chill weekend? Ummmmmm... no.

So Friday night's gig was as fun as expected. Check out AJ Howard's photos of Lark and Yesterday's Pupil: And the super rad Vanessa Salamanca's snaps of Moe Joe and I getting our DJ battle on: My only real complaint with the evening was that Hotbox only let me out of it's awesome clutches sometime after 2. After the drive back to Joburg and hanging out in my lounge for a bit with Anthea, I landed up only getting into bed at around 4:30. This would have been a perfectly acceptable series of events for a Friday night, except the next morning I needed to be at Emmarentia Dam by 9 to to a video check for the Ramfest visuals.

I turned out the daylight screen I'd be playing on was being set set up and looked out for by Paul, a former house mate of Ri's. He had everything covered and was even able to save my desktop to the video switcher after we checked everything, allowing me to pack up my Macbook and work on setting up visuals while hanging backstage with Werner before Wretlerish went on stage. Although i was working, this would be one of the most relaxed parts of my day. Peter and I ran the lights and visuals for the stage for almost 10 straight hours. I took a brief break from the control tent thing to play a highly enjoyable DJ set before I needed to get back to start converting video clips from die Heuwels Fantasties before their show.

Standing alongside Peter and being able to play video to his lighting for the first time in almost 5 years of collaborating was just awesome. While to prepare for Ramfest we'd only had a fraction of the time we'd usually put into Kidofdoom show, i think by the end of the night we were pulling off some pretty powerful stuff and I wondered out of the arena with the hugest smile on my face. My only regret was leaving with the feeling that I hadn't really engaged with the festival itself, hadn't really gotten to rock out.

For a sense of what Ramfest JHB was like for someone just enjoying the festival, i'd like to share these photos by Jonathon Sudarkasa. You should also check out the coverage of Ramfest on his blog, Jozi's shiny new home for rock and roll enthusiasm, good vibes and flying robots controlled by brains in jars, Joyburg.