[divider]Planning Your #dB2015 Experience[/divider]
When planning your Decibel Festival experience, a good question to ask yourself is, “What am I looking to get out of this festival?” Due to the open-ended nature of the festival, it’s possible to approach the festival from a multitude of angles. With almost 100 performers of varying levels of popularity, one could attend the festival with the intention to discover all sorts of new music they’re unfamiliar with. Or one can plan their schedule to only see the artists they’re familiar with. Some may just want to go to the nightclub performances and party ’til they drop, while others may want to want to see the sets that have the most engrossing visual accompaniment.
If you’re under the age of 21, it’s important to plan your schedule around the blocks that are available for you to attend. Out of the 30 blocks that are to take place during Decibel Festival 2015, only 9 are available to all ages, so be mindful of this when planning ahead. Days one and three only have one all-ages block each, so those in attendance under 21 should be aware of this beforehand (although both are absolutely worth attending whether you’re of-age or not.)
[divider]Festival Navigation[/divider]
To someone on the outside looking in, the multiple-venue layout of the Decibel Festival may sound a bit difficult to navigate, but with a bit of planning and awareness of the area, it’s not as confusing as it sounds. All venues that Decibel takes place in are in roughly the same stretch of downtown Seattle, and most are easy to walk between within about five to 20 minutes. Say you’ve just finished catching a set at the Triple Door, and there’s a set going on at the Showbox in 10 minutes that you want to see. It’s pretty doable to just walk there from the Triple Door and be good to make it there before it starts. Some venues are further away than others, but there’s nothing that’ll require too severe of a walk to get to.
Finding a place to park for the entirety of each day is recommended, as the cost incurred with driving from venue to venue and having to pay for parking at each new place will add up extremely quickly. For the venues whose walking distance is longer than 15 minutes, calling an Uber may be ideal, but is entirely optional. Aside from that, navigating Decibel Festival isn’t as scary as it appears, and you’ll likely figure out how everything works and what methods are ideal after the first day.
[divider]Familiarizing Yourself with the Lineup[/divider]
Decibel Festival was built on the foundation of annually booking the most exciting and progressive artists in electronic music, of varying degrees of popularity and mainstream relevancy. If you find you’re unfamiliar with a great majority of the lineup, don’t fret! There are two ways to approach this situation: you can either spend a couple days binging on the material of every artist performing and choose who to see from there, or go in completely blind, and choose sets based on which ones sound the most appealing. Either way, you’re bound to be satisfied.
If you’re in need of some pointers, Decibel Festival has a 15-track playlist on their SoundCloud page of their own artist recommendations, which you can listen to below. On the next page, you can find a list of set recommendations, curated by the Dance Music Northwest staff.
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