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Call this a music festival?
7 May 2001

You're a long way from hippy-dippy California at Coachella, the state's techno hoedown.

The Empire Polo Club is a very nice place. A palm-encrusted retreat in the Californian desert for suntanned tycoons and their hair-do'd wives, it is not the sort of place you would expect to find 35,000 scantily-attired ravers dancing to music loud enough to be heard in the next valley and puncturing the immaculate lawns with pick-up trucks and discarded pizza. Yet on a sizzling Saturday in late April, the Coachella Valley-based club transformed itself into a Mecca for California's growing hordes of dance music lovers.

From the hand lotion dispensers in the ladies' toilets, to the sparkling fountains, it couldn't look less like Glastonbury if it tried. "The yanks don't know how to put on a music festival," quips Pip Betteridge, tour manager to Roni Size Reprazent, one of the many British acts on the roster. "There's no mud, there's no rain and everything works."

As the home of hip-hop and melting-pot of international culture, New York has long been regarded as the centre of the US dance music scene. However, America's West Coast is fast becoming a destination both for clubbers nationwide and for many top UK artists. The first Coachella Festival, held in October 1999, featured, among others, Underworld, The Chemical Brothers, Roni Size Reprazent and Morrissey; this year's follow-up had Paul Oakenfold, Tricky, The Orb and Fatboy Slim. The locals can't seem to get enough of British sounds. "There is indeed something curious about the intense amount of talent that comes out of that single part of the world," says Brian Behlendorf, a San Francisco-based technologist and DJ. One of the most memorable, if baffling scenes from Coachella 1999, was the sight of several thousand young Latino men in baggy jeans singing feverishly along with Morrissey as he yodelled about Mancunian teenage angst while the sun set behind the palms.

In the 1960s and 1970s, California grooved to a very different beat, with San Francisco serving as the emotional and artistic hub of a growing rock scene. Fragrant memories of "If you're goin' to San Francisco, be sure to wear a flower in your hair," still perfumed the air when Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead all put the city on to the rock music map. With its low-rents and laid-back attitude, San Francisco attracted misfits of all kinds from rockstars and beats to gays and geeks.

San Francisco's alternative scene changed direction in the 1990s, with the rise of the technology industry. In the early 1990s, raves were a San Francisco speciality. Ex-pat British DJs such as Jeno and Doc Martin organised "Full Moon" beach parties, impromptu events in abandoned warehouses, and "Wicked" nights, fondly described as "two thousand people in a sweaty basement" by James Presley, electronica buyer at the popular San Francisco music store, Amoeba Records. When wealthy outsiders with high-tech jobs flooded into town, clubs like 1015 Folsom, which had been quietly dishing-up dance music to small crowds of hard-core fans, were suddenly pressed for space. "In the beginning it was a party, but now it's a business," says Clay Wilson, 1015's general manager.

For local DJs, the technology boom has not been totally positive. The influx of expensive British DJs is one issue. For Presley, Silicon Valley's networking culture is to blame: "It's not about the music anymore; these days people go clubbing to schmooze." Schmoozing has become increasingly prevalent since the collapse of the hi-tech economy over the last year, with dancing taking a back seat to networking. "People are looking for work; they are not ready to start partying right now," says Patty Beron, founder of SFGirl, a web-based resource for the local technology community. Yet electronica music remains an obsession in the lives of San Francisco geeks.

"I work better to music," says computer programmer Mauricio Aristizabal, 26. "I code twice as fast when I get into the vibe." Even the recent demise of digital music-lovers' goldmine Napster, hasn't affected the dissemination of music amongst the digerati. Many electronica artists are geeks at heart. The Chemical Brothers' kitschy-robotic "Music: Response" was originally entitled "Do The Funky Computer".

"Hopefully the spirit of a funky, sticky, microcomputerchip shines through," say the brothers. Members of Reprazent use laptop computers loaded with Protools and Logic software to create their sound. "The laptops mean we can make music wherever we go; we don't have to be in a studio any more," says Roni Sizewho recently told a reporter for The Face, "I don't read magazines, I read manuals."

"There is a superficial relationship between programming computers and making electronica music," says Behlendorf, founder of the Burning Man Music Festival and the creator of Apache web server technology. "Music-making and programming are two only slightly different ways of accomplishing the same thing: feeding instructions to a machine to create something new, perhaps even a work of art." For a generation of musicians who wouldn't recognise a guitar if it punched them in the face, digital technology is ultimately a means to an end. "Technology isn't everything; it's just a way of getting from A to B," says Size."It helps me paint a picture."

As the Coachella ravers groove on into the night, the message is clear: art remains the goal even in these technological times.