Attending El Sueno Existe feels like being at the beating heart of both the British and Latin American leftist communities. Hosting stalls from organisations including the Welsh branch of RMT, and featuring a speech by the one, the only Jeremy Corbyn, the festival has an obvious ideological bent, but despite, or perhaps because of this, the event is incredibly friendly and has a strong community feel.
Featuring three days of music, art, poetry and culture, El Sueno Existe took place at the Machynlleth Plas, in the incredibly beautiful Dovey valley, in Wales. While the festival is based in and around this building, which provides substantial sanitary facilities for the event, a lot of the action took place in a big top next door.
Campers meanwhile set up tents were set up in a field adjacent, while vans had access to a number of nearby car parks, which all offered plenty of room. Being set right next door to a town allows the festival to not need to worry about certain things— while food options at the festival are limited and busy, Machynlleth offers a Co-op supermarket, a kebab shop and loads of cafés and restaurants.
The ticketing system at El Sueno Existe is… interesting. Selling morning and evening tickets each day for £13, they let people attend the bits they were interested in, and skip when they were unavailable. This system wasn’t perfect however, and people who were late to an evening were unable to buy tickets and had to sneak in, which is thankfully easy, at least for the parts of the festival which are outside. This could have been mostly solved by selling tickets from a main entrance, rather than in the reception of the plas, and issuing wristbands to everyone who was supposed to be on site, including performers.
My personal musical highlights from the festival included Los Bullerengueros, a group playing traditional Latin American and indigenous instruments who amalgamated each others culture into beautiful danceable music. They played a number of songs which they described as “special revolutionary music made by runaway slaves”, and a genre of peoples which they said translated as “savage noise”. The crowd danced like crazy.
On Saturday, I started the day by seeing an Argentine women’s choir, which was absolutely charming. Following this, I caught the amazing Lokandes in the in the big top. Chaotic and wonderful, as I walked into the tent, it was crowded with people sitting on the floor. That soon changed, as two, then dozens of people started dancing their feet off.
Lokandes, who are from all the corners of Latin America, played an amazing fusion set, which played host to honey sweet guitar licks, tinkling chimes, evocative pan flutes, all backed up by solid and tight bass and percussion. They take inspiration from both the traditional and the modern and use rythym at its finest to play an incredible, fun, energetic set, turning a previously sedentary audience into a whirlwind of dance and song, which in turn inspired them to play on harder and more excitedly.
A particular high point was when they dropped a verse of the Pink Floyd anthem, the wall, getting the leftist boomer contingent of the crowd singing along like mad. If you ever get a chance to attend a Lokandes gig, drop everything and go. They are fantastic.
El Sueno Existe is an interesting festival, because it aims to fill a tiny niche, and then puts on stuff, at least in the headline slots, which would appeal to a much larger audience if it had the chance. While speaking Spanish is an advantage at this festival, if the music sounds like it’s your thing I’d definitely attend as its fantastic fun, although, if you feel uncomfortable being surrounded by self-described socialists including the arch leftist himself Jeremy Corbyn, I’d not suggest coming.
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