Electric Picnic Almost Avoids Irish Summer

After a long weekend of festival absorption, I think I’ll take the easy blog option today and just post a few photos from the Electric Picnic. For those of you not familiar with it, this is a music and arts festival in the Irish midlands, where this year the odds were defied and the rain held off until the very last minute…

Picnic Photo Picks

Even by Irish standards, this summer has been remarkably wet, so everyone was pretty much resigned to a weekend of wading through mud and sending up emergency flares. As it turned out, all three days of the festival stayed dry, and the rain only came along a few minutes before the burning of the wooden tower – effectively the festival’s closing ceremony.

The headline act of Friday night (if not the whole event), Sigur Ros unleashed waves of pleasant light and sound across the gathered masses.

The entrance to the Body & Soul section – white cloth structures upon which intricate moving patterns were projected.

Trumpet-shaped cloth formations, again given the projector pattern treatment.

The Body & Soul area boasted many of the festival’s most interesting visual treats, and was particularly enticing at night. The trees were beautifully illuminated with colorful lights and objects, such as these jellyfish and octopus.

Outside the Body & Soul area, there was plenty more audio/visual stimulation to be had – the fiery Arcadia stage with its twisted metal architecture and large-buttocked guardian robots being a fine example.

The lightbulb cube was a very striking addition to the landscape – it consists of a grid of coloured lightbulbs supported within a sort of scaffold structure. The bulbs themselves are controlled by a computerised system which creates psychedelic patterns moving within a three-dimensional space. The effect is quite captivating, and cannot be really appreciated in a still photo…