La Mercé: Part 2

    I'm a huge fan of live music. I feel like the performance aspect of concerts really changes the paradigm between musician and listener, and it makes for a great time. My friends and I, being regular attendees of the punk rock festival "Warped Tour," consider ourselves decently seasoned veterans when it comes to live music. I thought I had seen alot. It turns out that I was very wrong, and I was completely unprepared for what I was about to see. The 'Forum' or the metro stop 'Maresme del Forum,' if you're interested, is a massive venue resting on the edge of Barcelona on the Barcelona/Badalona border. This venue, made up of three smaller venues, had three main stages set up for the "BAM Festival," a component of La Mercé consisting of a series of concerts situated around the city, featuring popular artists from Catalunya, Spain, and around the world. These three stages consisted of; the pop-rock ampitheater (in the picture below), the DJ/ electronic stage, and the alternative rock stage. There were easily tens of thousands of Barcelona's youth there, dancing, rocking out, and inebriated beyond belief. I was mesmerized, at first solely for  the size and scale of the venue in it's entirety, and later by the fact that it was all completely free. After swimming through the crowd to the rock stage, I heard a Les Paul growl out the first few notes of a rock song, causing the crowd to erupt. Who has two thumbs and had a GREAT time? This guy. Oh yeah, and we managed to get up pretty close.

 

    Like I've said before, Barcelona has a way of making time irrelevant. After seeing a few great shows put on by Spanish rock bands that I still unfortunately lack the names of, we danced over to the DJ set, which turned out to be more of a giant outdoor rave. We got real funky, to say the very least, and we may have very well spent the next 48 hours in that sweaty pit of rhythmic bass and turbo-charged synth. Do I need to remind you that this was all free?

     I'm going to pretend like I don't see the massage train in the lower right corner of that picture. While the massage trains and model-like poses from my friends Julian and Andy (in the picture above), were enough to make a great night legendary, the final DJ that came on towards the end of Saturday night, or should I say Sunday morning, damn-near made me cry tears of joy. I'll let the pictures of this electronic demi-god speak for themselves. Turn your speakers up, let's set the mood for the pictures.

To be continued....