Tipper’s Sunrise Ambient Set Among Highlight-Filled Weekend At The Gorge

Coming back from the three-day Tipper & Friends festival, it is hard to find words to express the overwhelming gratitude I feel to have participated in such a special and historic event. Not only was this weekend Tipper’s first time headlining an event at The Gorge, but also his first time organizing an event of this magnitude on the West Coast.

While the moniker Tipper & Friends (“TnF”) is applied to any of the events curated by the beloved experimental bass DJ and his manager, it is most famously associated with the three-day music festival they typically host at the Spirit of Suwannee Music Park in Live Oak, Florida. The events, which feature hand-selected openers and visual artists meant to pair with the style of Tipper’s planned set for each night, are always lovingly curated, but it felt like an especially moving gift to get a full-blown festival on my side of the country.

One Last Sunrise

The event was historic not just for the reasons mentioned above, but also because the venue allowed the team a first-time ever exemption to their strict noise ordinance, allowing Tipper to play an ambient sunrise set in the main amphitheater on Sunday morning. This was his first time returning to the time-honored tradition since 2021, and the last such set he will play before his retirement from live performances in September of this year.

Witnessing such a beautiful set of music while the sun rose over the Columbia River is a memory I will treasure for the rest of my life. The set featured some of my all-time favorite songs including “Ever Decreasing Circles,” “Virga,” and my first time seeing “Algae Bloom in Seven” and “Ambergris,” the latter of which was the song I had most been hoping to see at least once before he retires. We were doubly blessed to have the spiral light of Venus shining over us for the duration of the set.

Friday Night Standouts

Friday night was the easiest night for me to pick a standout among the support acts, and the Japanese duo Herbalistek were the clear winners of that title for me. This was only their third time performing in the United States, having made their U.S. debut at the Tipper-curated Rendezvous festival last spring.

Their music is incredibly unique, and is a very different take on the kinds of intricate rhythms and high-fidelity sound design that Tipper is known for. Their set, which started at the tail end of a breathtaking sunset and went into the beginning of the night, gave me the impression of participating in some kind of ancient religious ritual. I deeply hope they will continue to return to the U.S. even after Tipper’s retirement.

The other big Friday night standout for me would have to be Schmoop. Despite being something of a regular on Tipper & Friends lineups, this was his first time playing direct support for Tipper and he absolutely met the moment with a set that was both deep and infectiously danceable. He was given the additional honor of having his set paired with the visual work of Fractaled Visions, one of Tipper’s go-to artists for his own sets, and the two of them created some serious magic in their work together.

Friday Night: Tipper

After Schmoop came the man himself, the focus of the whole event: Dave Tipper. His Friday night set was his only one scheduled for a conventional late-night headlining slot. While it followed his typical pattern of playing uptempo on the first night of his events, it was a bit less aggressive and more varied in style than many of his uptempo sets tend to be, but remained highly energetic.

His set was an excellent mix of new and old, with updated versions (also called VIPs or Variations In Production) of old-school classics like the uptempo tracks like “Distal,” “Flunked,” “Chrome Splat” and “Razor Back.” Further old-school songs came from the heavily hip-hop-inspired 2003 album, Tip Hop, with VIPs of “Covered In Lobsters” as well as the title track.

Far from simply sticking to the classics, his set showed off plenty of new material as well, with the second-ever appearances of several unreleased tracks he debuted at the Tipper & Friends festival in Suwannee earlier this year. “Knickerbocker” is currently the only one of the three with a known title.

His latest album, 2022’s Marble Hunting, was also well represented with plays of “Guilty Feet,” “Knee Pads,” and VIPs of “Low Battery Acid” and “Pillow Roulette,” the latter of which would reappear in a new deconstructed form during the Sunday morning sunrise set. “Low Battery Acid VIP” transitioned directly into “Knee Pads,” the first time it had ever appeared directly preceding the original album version of the song, providing a new and surprising piece of setlist construction.

Reflecting the decades-spanning song selection of Tipper’s set, the visual presentation saw Tipper’s long running collaborator Android Jones team up with first-timer Glass Crane to create a fittingly historic display. Android Jones, making his first appearance with Tipper in eight years, provided live paints on his Wacom tablet, which were then directly integrated into Glass Crane’s visuals.

Saturday: A Tale of Two Tipper Sets

My absolute favorite moment of the entire weekend came in the form of Tipper’s Twilight Set on Saturday. Starting at the Golden Hour and continuing through a majority of the sunset, the extended 90-minute downtempo set was overflowing with delightfully pretty and deeply emotional music. This music synergized perfectly with the picturesque setting to provide what was probably the most transcendent experience of my entire life. The whole set was masterful and patient, chock-full of extended intros and seamless segues which played to the sense of profound beauty that pervaded the entire set.

The opening sequence was perfect for the moment, opening with a stunning unreleased track fans have taken to calling “Summer In The City.” This transitioned into “Gulch VIP,” a personal favorite, and another unreleased track nicknamed “Egyptian Tea Time,” which gave me the feeling of being transported to a magical desert oasis. This was followed by a one-two punch from the 2019 Album Jettison Mind Hatch with “Vection VIP” and “Exit Chapel Perilous.” “Permatemp VIP” would also appear later in the set.

The set was heavy on the newer material with modern-day classics like the 2024 tracks “Preparations for Departure” and “Kites Couldn’t Even” plus VIPs of “Mason” off of Marble Hunting and “Uptrick” and “Sin Banshee” from 2021’s Insolito EP. The set featured debuts of two never-before-heard tracks and closed with one of the brand new songs debuted at his Bicycle Day set earlier this year. However the set was not entirely new songs, with “Sorus” from the 2015 EP Fathoms and VIPs of the 2000s classics “Whomi” and “Rare and Plentiful.”

Saturday Night

While Friday night had a clear standout for me, picking one from the support acts on Saturday is nearly impossible. All three of the sets sandwiched between Tipper’s Twilight and Sunrise sets were top-notch and the flow that their respective placements created was superb. The whole night felt like an ode to psychedelia, with the pre-sunrise music culminating in a headline set from Shpongle, a world-renowned titan of psychedelic electronic music.

The whole night featured visuals by the legendary artist Tas, a reprise of his “Bicycle Day Takeover” at the final Tipper & Friends Suwannee event this April, when he did all of the visuals on the world’s biggest psychedelic holiday. In a further reprisal of his work, The Gorge stage was adorned with a set piece Tas had custom designed for the Suwannee event, with visuals projection-mapped on to it all weekend.

The amazing flow between Tipper’s two sets kicked off with Supersillyus, whose set marked the final transition from the sunset into the night, a timing that created an excellent vibe with the psychedelic circus sounds of his music. Equal parts playful and exploratory, lighthearted and deep, Supersillyus felt like a perfect follow-up to the serene sounds and emotional weight of Tipper’s Twilight Set. It also served as some nice foreshadowing for Shpongle’s similarly whimsical set a couple hours later, the artist clearly being a big inspiration for him.

Up next was Somatoast, another regular within the extended Tipper scene and one of my favorite electronic artists. Known for his bubbly and psy-dub infused downtempo, he managed to both highlight some of his quintessential sound, and also showcase heavier sounds and styles that I have never heard from him before. This was my third time seeing him and easily my favorite of the sets I’ve ever heard him play.

It was so cool to see him do such a good job tackling new kinds of music and expanding his sonic palate. The heavier stuff, which largely occurred later in his set, was truly a treat. Like so many of the artists this weekend, he was clearly putting his all into his set for this historic festival.

Following Somatoast was the aforementioned Shpongle set, which took the traditional headlining slot from 11:30 p.m. to 1:00 am. Even in the context of an event with such a focus on booking experimental psychedelic electronic music, Shpongle managed to deliver in full force. Eschewing more traditional and fully composed approaches to performing live electronic music, Simon Posford (the one permanent member of Shpongle and sole musical artist performing under the name currently) uses deconstructed pieces of songs and a vast repertoire of sounds and loops to create improvised versions of his songs on the spot. As somebody who primarily comes from the improv-driven jam band scene, this was especially cool for me to witness in an electronic setting. This was first time seeing him and I was lucky to catch some of my favorite songs like “Brain in a Fishtank” and “Dorset Perception.”

In a true nod to the psychedelic theme of the evening, he closed his set with the classic track “Divine Moments of Truth” whose name functions as both an attempted description of the transcendental nature of those experiences, and as a “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”-esque acronym for one of the inspirations for this kind of music. His heartfelt thank-you at the end of the set was a sweet way to conclude that portion of the night, especially given the Tipper scene’s usual aversion to talking on the mic.

Movie Night

Outside of the momentous exception given to Tipper for his ambient Sunrise Set, the normal curfew of 1 a.m. for musical performances needed to be strictly observed. The venue, however, was generous enough to allow us to remain in the amphitheater while the Tipper Team presented a “Psychedelic Movie Night,” the likes of which often precede his ambient sets.

The first hour was a collection of surrealist short films, which set the mood for the rest of our night. Anchoring the screening was the 1973 cult-classic Fantastic Planet, a French-language animated film which uses its sci-fi setting as an allegory to address some of the darker themes and issues that face us as humans. Finally, the night ended with another foreign film, the hour-long 1980 Russian-language film That Very Same Munchhausen. This was a cool note to end on for me personally as I have been a years-long student of the language. By the time it ended at 4:30 a.m., the sun was beginning to come up and it was time for Tipper’s final sunrise set to start.

Side Stage Stand Outs

Despite my original intention to catch the majority of the side-stage daytime sets I only spent a significant amount of time there on Friday, Saturday I was laser focused on locking in as good of a spot as possible in the main amphitheater for the long night of music and Sunday I spent most of the day resting after staying up for the sunrise that morning. That being said, I was able to hear a majority of Cosmic Trigger's set and some of Thought Process and thoroughly enjoyed both of them.

The last two sets at the side-stage on Friday were for sure my highlights with Yoko and Ooga giving it a proper send off before we headed to mainstage.

Ooga has clearly been working hard at cooking up a lot of new stuff, playing several debuts and starting his set with a lot more downtempo than I have heard him play before. He was another act who impressed me with his willingness and skill to explore new directions. About two thirds of the way through his set he thanked the audience for their patience and told us it was “time for some bangers.” He wasn’t kidding, and a couple of the songs he played toward the end of his set are two of my favorites I’ve heard from him.

All in all this was my favorite festival I have ever attended and I could not be more grateful to everyone involved in putting it on and making the magic happen. It left me with memories I will cherish for the rest of my life, and I’m excited to see what the team has in store for the remaining months before Tipper’s retirement.