THE BIG CHILL CHANGED MY LIFE… says Armando St Valentinez
December 4th, 2003 by susanna
Continuing our series where you tell the world how The Big Chill changed your life, comes Armando St Valentinez with his story…
I still don’t know what house is.
When people try to tell me what house is I’m fine up until the point when they say… ″It came out of Florida in 1986, there was this deejay called Henry McCrankfire and he merged the Puerto-Rican sound with the Harold Melvin & The Redcoats remixes of…*I fall asleep*…*I wake up*…which Casper Kreunkenshaftel then developed into Aciiid House, which became A-House Trip-Hop, which was the basis of Trance-House-Acid-Formula-Profiling which is what the Cheeky Girls do so well, but in an ironic way″.
You see, I just don’t get how some lengthy drum-machine-dominated loop can be given its own micro-category within popular music when it’s so clearly lacking in a direct human personality. Yes, yes, I know. Old man syndrome. ″ That’s not music!″ But I just can’t feel it. Maybe because I wasn’t around when it first hit, when it first stirred a whole generation into simultaneous, edifying and exhausting euphoria in a tent just off the M25. I wasn’t there. I was busy having a family, having a career, having one of those pitiful repugnant things called ″a life with things other than music and assorted hypnotics ″. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.
So when I went to The Big Chill, the first one at Eastnor, I wasn’t expecting a huge deal. I loved the sound of Cinematic Orchestra and they were the prime reason for me going. Apart from them maybe there’d be just some dance music that went dum-chech dum-chech dum-chech for half an hour at a time, maybe some Hip Hop (which I love, love not being too strong a word here), maybe there’ll be a field where I can’t hear the drum machine slapping down its awful quantizised tedium.
Well it wasn’t just the Cinematic Orchestra. I heard, felt, tasted and lived through a whole carousel of beautiful surprises. Such space, and light and colour, spread equally between the setting, the people, the music, the ambience, everything funny and trusting and open. Brilliant. I didn’t trudge up and down those hills, I kind of moon-walked (Armstrong not Jackson). There was a moment when I looked down from the Art Trail into the central bowl of the valley, at the thousands of garlanded lights that framed the party, and I felt as if I had just arrived on the beautiful and strange coast of an undiscovered continent.
It changed me, how it changed me, I was culturally and spiritually re-invigorated, this ancient carcass was all-a-twitch to the swathe of new sounds, new ideas, new people. Along with the memories of Eastnor, I brought back the spirit of having shared the karmic freedom and aural meltdown of The Big Chill, and for a little while I measured everything against its uniqueness. That’s how it changed me.
Words: Armando St Valentinez
Pic: Armando St Valentinez. [″I think this picture sums up how invigorated I felt after The Big Chill, i.e. like a monkey-dog-cat thing that could take on the world″)
