DJ Jazzy Maise takes on Palomosa 2025

Friday

The first thing I noticed after getting through the lax security was the reorientation of the festival grounds. Last year, Palomosa’s premier, the smaller Jardin stage was under the Tois Disques sculpture by blahblah. Instead of dancing under this creative brutalist concrete being, we were in a muddy pit of AstroTurf surrounded by festival bars all selling the same expensive drinks ($10 for a blue PBR is crazy).

Food options: three food trucks, well, one was just a cart. Or vegan quesadillas you made at home that the lax security let you take in (thank you)

 

Isla Den

Kicking the whole festival off at the Jardin stage, Montreal’s ethereal pop musician, sort of a dreamy hyperpop along the lines of early Petal Supply, or, if Milk & Bone were more danceable and electronic (and cooler, in my opinion). The crowd started small but continuously grew. Everyone was very cool-looking and dancing around, and there was still enough space to comfortably smoke a cigarette. Isla Den’s set was half DJ, half live. I really enjoy it when artists mix their skills and creations in this way. They mixed SOPHIE, Charli XCX, and Drain Gang songs and performed some new releases. It was a beautiful performance with the wind making the fog machine dance in the lowering sun.

9/10

The background of the Jardin stage was an electrical box and a recycling bin. Who decided to put the stage there? Why didn’t they have any background? Did no one think it looked funny? 

 

 

MGNA CRRTA

This New Jersey girl duo opened up the main stage, and when I say opened, I really mean opened: five minutes before they were set to start, workers removed the gates to the other half of the festival grounds, people, mostly scene kids sporting neon and tails, literally ran to the stage. Their set was pretty baller; they played all their hits, nicely mixed into the rest of their set with some unreleased songs. The two baddies alternated between the mic and the mixing board, and relied heavily on the siren and ‘bew bew beeww’ (you know the one) sound effects, like, almost every 20 seconds there was some sound screaming at me. They made up for it with a giant bubble gun, shooting bubbles into the crowd at the peak of their 30-minute-long set. It was epic, I like them a lot. My favourite quote was “if you’re a girl make some noise, if you’re a boy make some noise, if you’re not a boy or a girl make some noise”, I think the nonbinaries were the loudest. 

9/10

So glad I have a raccoon tail on my backpack. Really blending in (not sarcastic).

I think I follow everyone here on Instagram.

 

 

The Hellp

The Los Angeles band opened up their set by announcing that one of their two members was Canadian, which the crowd responded with moans and groans that loosely translated to: ‘okay, well, we’re in Quebec..’. He kind of looks like Jared, my CJLO comrade, who was very pleased when I told him this. They played all their hits, of which there are many (I like them a lot), and about half of the crowd were really into it. The other half of the crowd was just yapping, and since this was still a daytime set, the music was not loud enough at all for me to really lock into it. Their stage presence was pretty much exactly what a toned-down LA version of The Dare would be: black suit and tie, ignoring the audience and often just looking at the floor of the stage. 

7/10 

You know that feeling when you’ve been generally overwhelmed, but you can’t tell which sense it is that needs a break till you take your sunglasses off and finally feel like you can see again? I felt a lot better once the sun started to set and I revealed my eyes to the public. The festival grounds started to fill up a lot, which relieved the grating sense of perception I feel in alt-queer-coded-cool-kid crowds. I could let my eyes glaze over the sea of normies that grew around me. 

 

 

Mechatok, Minna No Kimochi, MCR-T, TDJ

Back at the astro terf pit (the Jardin stage) was a lineup of DJs that all sort of blended together for me. There was no screen at the Jardin stage naming the artists, and I kept wandering off. I had little idea who was who and what time it was and what was going on. I would bop around in the crowd and get distracted by delivery trucks doing their business on the other side of the fence. Eventually, I’d go off into the woods to watch the moon peaking in and out of clouds, almost full. The crowd had shifted from weirdo-freaks with various types of tails incorporated in their outfits to a very alt.jpeg Pleateau-core vibe. Not a bad thing, as I enjoyed being able to fade into anonymity, just kind of boring. The DJs were good, but not enough to lock me into the music. 

5/10

Save me hammocks under the trees … save me… 

 

Fcukers

As the day waned to night and the artists’ names on the posters got larger, the audio got louder and clearer; I could actually hear and enjoy the music while not being in the thick of the crowd. I didn’t really know this band, but I knew I would love them. The sun was setting into dark, wet quick quick-moving clouds, the horizon pink. The music was good, the singer’s voice was sexy, and I was vibing.

8/10

 

 

M.I.A.

The crowd was huge. People were hyped. She had swagger, a stage full of dancers, and a live band with a steel drum. It sounded great. Her dancers were cranking that Soulja Boy. She's been in the game a long time, but a lot of her music is too left field for a festival audience to know her songs that came out 10 years ago. It felt a bit like that early Charli XCX clip: “I thought this song was big in Germany??!!”. That was her first fumble. The second fumble was her comment on the 1970s revolution vibes, something about if Bob Marley had a dance routine, our parents would’ve been too busy dancing to care about changing the world. Dancing should always have a place in revolutionary movements. About halfway through, she stopped her set to start talking. The mic was mixed for singing, not speaking, so it was difficult to understand what she was saying; it was difficult to make out and did not make any sense. She started off by saying she was okay being called a Trump supporter, that we can have “red pills and pills that are blue”. She's always been a bit on the weird politics side and has often been chastised for it, but since 2020, her anti-vax and tinfoil hat views have gone a bit viral. She’s probably somewhat right about 5G being bad for us, but I can’t stop myself from laughing when the foil blankets came out on stage. It felt like she was trying to start a dialogue with the audience, or at least urged us to consider more about the future of Palestine, that we shouldn’t always be reacting from a defensive place. The future of Palestine is not up to the audience of Palomosa, or Westerners in general; it’s up to the Palestinian people, of whom we are trying to defend, because they are under attack. I don’t know if she was getting responses from those in the front of the crowd, but it felt like she was just yelling at us about how disappointed she was with Trump, as if she had hopes he would do something good. Everyone was confused and annoyed. There was a brief “F Donald Trump” chant; eventually, she donned a kaffiyah and finished her set with her top three songs. Her annoyance with us was palpable, but what did you expect, trying to talk to a crowd of hundreds of inebriated festival goers?