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The Playtime Live Music Festival took place last weekend, and I was clever enough to make sure I went to at least one of its two days. My husband (a music festival virgin) and I, drove down to Ulaanbaatar from Darkhan, and camped out for Saturday’s bands. What I learned: The Mongolian music scene is amazing.
This was the twelfth year of the annual music festival, and according to one friend who’s been attending on and off for over a decade, it keeps getting bigger and better. The bands are getting better, the festival organizers are running things with more efficiency, security is more civilized, and less fights break out. What I love is that it’s organized by music lovers; people trying to create opportunity for bands and fans to experience something spectacular.
As you can imagine, Ulaanbaatar doesn’t really show up on most international tour circuits, but Playtime organizers have managed to pull in international bands in recent years. This year’s international bands were Storm, an industrial/hip-hop/metal band from Russia that has played at Playtime previously, and Mono, a shoegaze band (heavy on the glockenspiel) from Japan. The rest of the bands that played (40 in all) were local talents. They ranged from singer songwriters, to cover bands, to indie rock superstars. Each day boasted an eclectic lineup that appealed to a wide range of genres.
The festival takes place on the furthest edge of Ulaanbaatar, at Mongol Shiltgeen’s (Hotel Mongolia) River Beach Resort in Gachuurt, on the banks of the Tuul River. Driving out to Gachuurt you pass by Naran Tuul, the country’s largest open air market, and you wind through the westernmost fringes of the city’s ger (traditional Mongolian nomadic home) districts. The ger districts are a maze of residential hashaas (fenced off lots). Sixty percent of the city’s residents reside in the capital’s ger districts. They lack direct access to the municipal water, sewage, and power networks, but the people there make due, patching in to power lines, and getting water from neighborhood wells. A good number of ger district residents are from Mongolia’s far flung provinces, where hashaas are the norm in the province centerss and smaller towns. Nomads don’t need fences, but when they congregate in permanent settlements, boundaries help make sense of the norms of more urban living.
Gachuurt is less cramped than UB’s ger districts encircling the city center. Many families build “summer homes” there to escape the pollution and traffic, but mostly to connect to nature. Mongolians hold traditional ties to their land dear. The literature, songs and iconic imagery of the nation praise the land, and even UB residents who’ve been city dwellers for decades, long to be connected to those traditions. Gachuurt has no new high rise apartments or business complexes on the horizon, it’s just a sleepy valley of brick and log houses.
The Tuul River is wider, deeper and less visibly polluted here. Trees grow along its banks, biding time before they’re illegally harvested, and small clusters of livestock led by patient herders on foot, drink from its quiet banks. Organic and non-organic farms operate here year round, supplying UB with produce in the late spring through early fall. In the summer, it’s a place of growth and rejuvenation. Mongol Shiltgeen, built as an homage to the sprawling monasteries of old, is a resort hotel popular for weddings, group getaways, and photo ops for tourists continuing on to Terelj National Park. Guests can sleep in “temple” rooms, traditionally sized Mongol gers, or opulent stone gers for $60-$180 a night. It offers the comforts of modern living in a setting that evokes the picturesque Mongolia of old, the one most tourists come here to see. It’s a bit weather beaten and rough around the edges, like most things in Mongolia, which adds to its charming authenticity. This is the setting for one of Mongolia’s most cutting edge, progressive cultural events. Playtime is set in Ulaanbaatar’s closest natural playground, furthest from the steel and cement testaments to its economic boom.
Playtime operates two stages. A mini stage for smaller, less renowned bands and all of the weekend’s DJs (16 in all), and a main stage for the main attractions. The stages were set up cleverly, with Playtime’s audio engineers taking care to keep one from drowning out the other.