I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world.	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he's experimenting with federated platforms . He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance, and can found on the PlusPora diaspora pod. He hates cell-phones.

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Festival Matters I miss my bass. It's currently sitting in the guest bedroom of some friends in Lymington, since after our whirlwind mini-tour in July it didn't seem like it made sense to bring it back to the US just to ship it to the UK again two weeks later. (Shipping it, incidentally, would leave me bass-less even longer since it would travel by slow boat. This way, I'm only without it for a month or so.) The main purpose of our trip was to line up housing for the move which is coming up Real Soon Now, but the overseas touring line-up of the band (Mike on gtr/vox, Lorree on bongos, and me on bass) managed to squeeze in four gigs playing music around England: a radio show in Milton Keynes, a pub gig in Buxton, and two festivals. The first weekend we were at Tannerfest, a great little one-day festival, and the last weekend we were at Kozfest, an equally great, not quite so little, three-day festival. In the past three or four years, I've had the pleasure to play at four music festivals in the UK - the above-mentioned two, plus Hawkfest in 2010 on the Isle of Wight and The Sonic Rock Solstice in 2012 in Wales. Not bad for a band I auditioned for by email a decade ago. In my experience, which is admittedly pretty limited, there is something special about the UK festival scene, which you just don't get in the US. For one thing, there are a lot of them, and many of them are a lot smaller. I mean, sure, England has Glastonbury and Download with tens of thousands of people, but they've also got, well, TannerFest, KozFest, and SRS which have a maximum attendance of 500. (I believe that 500 is a magic number for permits.) The number and size means that there is a circuit of sorts. Two bands have played at all four of those festivals. One was us, of course, and the other was the fantastic Flutatious. But in addition to having a couple of the same bands on the lineup at both of the festivals this year, we saw quite a few of the same people and one of the same food vendors. The result is that there is very much a community feeling about these festivals, an It Takes a Village feel. No one is getting rich, everyone is having a good time doing something they enjoy, whether that's playing or listening, while hanging out in nice surroundings for a not terribly large amount of money. And there's usually a bar serving Real Ales. Is it any wonder that in my head the festivals map pretty closely onto some of the participatory re-enactment events that I have been attending pretty regularly for the last thirty-odd years? In both cases, there's a group of people who are all in more-or-less the same headspace, and it's a pretty groovy headspace, doing something which is a little eccentric, and contributing to keeping something they love alive. The music at one is louder and more modern than at the other - although one band at one of the festivals did play a Medieval/Renaissance dance piece that I recognized, and the costumes at one are a bit more tightly focused - the re-enactments often cover several thousand years while the festivals are restricted to a couple of hundred, but the vibe is the same. All of which means that I think we'll try to keep our hand in at least a few of the festivals. Mike is still based stateside, but that doesn't mean he won't try to line up a festival or two every year or so. However, Lorree and I may try our hand as a duo, and I'll see what I can find by the way of Yorkshire bands needing musicians or musicians needing bands. So if anyone near York is reading this and needs a bass player, drop me a line ... A couple of the songs from SRS have made it onto youtube ... Hymie the Winey - one of our pretty standard tunes, written by Mike: I Know You Rider - a last minute more-or-less unrehearsed addition, dropped into the set for a friend who's a Grateful Dead fan: Luddite'sLog, Around 25 August, 2013 © 2013 Jeff Berry

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