The music festival has come a long way in the last 50 years. What may have begun as an outlet for counter-culture activities and freedom of expression has now been commoditised by large organisations looking to secure some of the burgeoning market for outdoor frivolity and mass consumption. Ticket prices are on the rise, promoters are resorting to unimaginative big name bookings to pull punters in and advertising firms are picking up on the image of the happy-go-lucky festival-goer and attempting to associate their brands with an experience that has become a major part of youth culture.

A crew of dedicated producers, DJs and electronic music fans in Wales, however, are doing their best to fight against the tide. Held this year on the same weekend as Germany's Love Parade—which saw 21 people die and over 500 injured following the downright greedy and irresponsible behaviour of the promoters and organisers—Freerotation is a relatively small gathering. It began in 2004 at an outward bound centre in the Welsh mountains, but moved two years later to the Welsh village of Clyro. The brainchild of Mindtours label founder Suzybee, her partner Steevio (who himself produces on the imprint) and chillout specialist Earthdoctor, it welcomes just 900 people (including their crew and guests) to the stately home of Baskerville Hall each year.

Local artists Leif, Tom and Joe Ellis, Tom Demac, Grimes Adhesif, Jakooky, Reflektor, Sammystring and Suade are amongst the names playing sets and helping out, but the draw is in international guests that they pull: Shackleton, Soulphiction, Move D, Portable and Lakuti return each year to entertain the Freerotation crowd, with many others enjoying semi-regular appearances. Sud Electronic co-promoters Lakuti and Portable have been involved since the beginning. As Steevio explains: "It all started through Alan Portable. I just got an e-mail from him one day, and I didn't know who he was or anything. He said, 'Oh Steevio, I really like this track you put out.' He kept hassling me about it and invited me down to Sud night—that’s where I first met Lerato."

The dome replaced the cafe as the outdoor raving area in 2010 with Jus-Ed providing one of the venue's most memorable sets.

After inviting each other to play their respective parties, they struck up a friendship, and with Lakuti's role as booking agent, it was only natural for her to help out when it came to organizing artists for the first Freerotation. "There was all this talk of doing a festival, but to tell you the truth, I didn't think that he would do it," Lakuti explains. "The first year was quite small and low budget, so a lot of people that were contacted were asked to do a friendly fee, and I contacted people that I knew on his behalf and said that 'he's a good guy—let's try this out,' and they've played every year since."

The intimate nature of the event and the cherry-picked line-up of some of the hottest names in the underground house, techno and dubstep scenes ensure that it's not just the artists that return year upon year. The festival's membership scheme means that previous attendees are given the first opportunity to secure tickets, with an invitation system allowing current members to bring fresh blood into the Freerotation family. The difficulty for outsiders to obtain tickets quickly and easily means that the majority of people that end up attending are real enthusiasts for the music that is being put on.

This year's event was arguably the best Freerotation yet, with the new dome providing more of an opportunity for outdoor raving than the small cafe of previous incarnations. The first night was all about the indoor action, however, with Wbeeza warming the cockles of the main room with his live set of bumping US-flavoured house. After his well-received performance, it was time for Freerotation's dubstep contingent to take to the decks, beginning with the Hessle Audio crew. Ramadanman, Pangaea and Ben UFO all demonstrated their house bona fides during the first third of their two-hour set, eventually moving up into a mix of future garage and hyper-percussive styles.

Left: Lounging to trippy visuals. Right: October played plenty of dubplates and propulsive techno.

Rocking an amusingly bright Hawaiian shirt, Shackleton laid down a set that was surprisingly joyous, his African rhythms possessing a much lighter touch than when I've seen him previously. Andy Stott's live set, however, was undoubtedly the highlight of the first night's musical entertainment. Steadily moving up through techno and then more dubstep-oriented beats, the climax of his set came at the end when Stott shifted up into a section of his own frenetic and incredibly well-produced take on the modern juke sound.

Saturday was the first real chance for people to check out Freerotation's expanded outdoor area, with Tom Ellis' enthusiastically grooving laptop and bass guitar set kicking off the afternoon's house music session. Sven Weisemann's face-pulling and sporadic gyrations may have provided plenty of unintentional comedy, meanwhile, but his mix of deeper and bumping cuts suited the outdoor setting perfectly. The soothing tones of Marvin Belton's "Bleed to Be Free" and the majestically cascading pianos of Theo Parrish's "Falling Up" stood out as particular highlights, and by the time that he dropped Womack & Womack's jauntily euphoric "Teardrops" to close, there was nary a person on the floor who wasn't beaming from ear to ear.

Resident on rotation
Move D on why he loves Freerotation

It starts off with the place: this tree, this castle... but also the amount of people and the kind of people, and the kindness of people. It's pretty international even; you find French and Spanish, Greek... It's all happening! And at a large-scale festival, I sometimes feel like intimidated... I think that if I faint now, people will probably walk over me, and here I have a feeling that if you're feeling sick, about ten people will come and say "are you alright?" There's a real good spirit. The people—that's the nice thing about the amount of people here, you know? You spend three days, you get a feeling like you've seen most faces, they're all friendly. I love it!"

Last year, the hall's second room turned into quite the sauna, so it was good to see at least one fan fighting against the sweat being worked up by October's array of bass-heavy techno slammers. Tama Sumo and Lakuti were in a similarly jacking mood back in the main arena, pulling out plenty of Chicago house anthems to a suitably rowdy crowd during their back-to-back set. Having been more of a chill-out area during the festival's previous incarnations, the lounge took on a life of its own during this year's peak hours, with Move D and Jus-Ed both receiving a rapturous response to their deep and driving performances in the intimate space.

Back in the main room, DJ Bone was making up for missing last year's event due to immigration issues with a frenetic three-deck set, with the tempo verging on 140 BPM at times. It was obviously a bit much for many at that time in the morning, with plenty of space opening up at back of the room near the end of Bone's set, but those who hung on till the end were vocal in their appreciation, giving the Subject Detroit boss an ovation as he touched down in trademark fashion with the expansive chords of Joris Voorn's "Revelation." After Saturday’s dry but cloudy afternoon session, the sun had finally decided to rear its head on the
Sunday, with Jus-Ed’s Underground Quality showcase providing the perfect soundtrack for both
lounging around or limbering up for the final stretch.

Later in the day Move D took a slightly tougher direction for his second set of the weekend, uncharacteristically squeezing in DJ Deeon's ghetto-house anthem "Point Em Out" to great effect, before Michel Baumann slipped into his Jackmate guise for an assured hour of jacking house and techno. Steevio himself stepped in for the final half-hour, after his set on the previous day was cancelled, and he unleashed all manner of trippy modulations via his Eurorack modular set-up before making an impassioned speech that quashed supposed rumours of a move to a bigger site next year. We had a chat with him after this year's festival, discussing his electro beginnings, free party background, and what it is that makes Freerotation so special.

Steevio and Suzybee.

You were in Newcastle before you moved to Wales. Could you tell us a bit about your involvement in the music scene back then?

Basically I'd been in bands for years. Psychedelic Jimi Hendrix, acid rock kind of style stuff really. Then, in the early '80s, I started making electro, and I was in a band called Acid, which was basically an electro band with a singer. I used to run a breakdance club called The Sidewalk in Newcastle, and it was basically an electro and breakdance club. That was in about 1983, I think.

Did you do any breakdancing yourself?

Well no... I had a go, but I wasn't very good at it! [laughs] I was more the graffiti artist sort of thing. I used to do all the artwork and the posters for the club. But it was electro that really got me into electronic music. We did the Acid thing for a couple of years, and we sort of gradually drifted into more rock-based, funky, tripped-out music—Frank Zappa, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix—and we'd put it all together.

The band was called Dead Flowers. We started using synthesisers in that band. We had a Moog and a Yamaha CS80 and Juno 106 and we even used a 303 on some things. I was into that whole electronic angle on rock, and then I started hearing techno and it just blew me away. Around the early '90s or late '80s, I got into techno and the bands gradually dwindled away.

What brought you down to Wales?

It was about the new age traveller effect. I hate to use that term, but I was basically travelling and I had a bus and used to go down to Spain and travel around and go to festivals. It was just the kind of lifestyle that I lived for about twelve years, and the band was sort of part of it.

But with the Criminal Justice Act, it became really hard to be a traveller, so I sort of settled in Newcastle. I've been on-and-off there for a long time. I got really involved in the techno scene in Newcastle, started a few labels. When I moved to Wales it was more of a case that I got a bit sick of the city and was missing the whole travelling thing, and so decided I wanted to go out to the countryside. That was it really.

"We don't want to get bigger.
That's just not what it's about for us."

Were you throwing many techno parties when you were back in Newcastle?

Oh yeah, we were totally involved in the free warehouse party scene. We use to do stuff down at the quayside in old warehouses and stuff like that. There was a really big techno scene in Newcastle in the early '90s. It was massive really—every kind of techno you can think of was there I suppose. I think it was in the early '90s that the students got really into techno and it sort of became almost like mainstream amongst people in their early 20s, listening to electronic music, so the parties were really huge down there. There'd be like 3000 people in a warehouse and stuff like that, big 25k rigs... It was full on.

Then when I moved to Wales I sort of went really quiet, and I met up with Leif, Tom Ellis, Tom Demac and all those guys, and it was all a little bit more chilled what with being out in the country, and everyone was playing slower tempos, and I got more into that sort of thing.

Can you tell us a little bit about some smaller parties you were throwing? You were using your house for some of them, right?

Yeah, we had some pretty good parties at our house. We had people like Portable and Lakuti, [but eventually] the house just wasn't big enough for the parties anymore. We wanted to be able to afford to pay for artists who are a little bit harder to get hold of for your house party, you know? People have a living to make, so they can't afford to do it for nothing, but we give them as much as we can afford to give them—that's how it works.

There's no calculated, "We're battling against the big guns" or the corporate business or whatever. Deep down inside that's our feeling—you know we don't like all that shit—the essence of it all is just an extended house party. Let's do a house party in a bigger house. We're not interested in doing anything else really. The very first Freerotation we did six years ago in this outward bound centre up in the mountains. We hired the whole place for the weekend.

I didn't know that. I just assumed the first one was the first at Baskerville Hall.

No, that was the second one. The first one was two years before that. It was quite successful. We had about 350 people there, and we had Portable, Lump and Lakuti, and various people that we knew from round the country. Just different crews, and they brought some mates with them, and it just developed from that. We literally got blown out by the venue because it was just too much for the local community to handle. We realised that we would have to find a venue that would fit the bill so we didn't do one the next year, and then Baskerville came up and we just went for it really... And lost shitloads of money!

Steevio performing live at Freerotation 2010.

You've had a group of internationally renowned residents play every year. Did you guys decide to do that from the off, or did that happen quite naturally?

No, there was no decision on that at all. The collective residents obviously, because it's our little collective that started it off. People like Jackmate and Move D were just people who were responsive to our requests, you know? We just sent out e-mails to all the people who we respected and just saw who got back to us. We said, "You're not gonna get paid much, because the whole event costs so much money, we got so many people playing, we've got so much infrastructure to pay for, and there's only a maximum, effectively, of 650 punters."

That's not enough to be able to pay anyone lots of money so we just saw what happened. David (Move D) he just came straight back and said "I'm not bothered about the money. It just sounds like a great thing and I want to do it," and the same with Michel and Susana from Soulphiction and Sam Shackleton... In fact, virtually every artist has done it purely because they want to do it, and not because of any financial thing.

Almost every artist has sort of trusted it, and every year when we ask them to come back, they just want to join the party, really. The difficulty is, of course, that every year everyone wants to come back, and every year we've got another twenty or thirty percent more artists. And actually, that is the hardest part of the job to be honest. For example, this year I had to ask a few people and say, "Look, we can't put you on this year. You've played the last two years, but sorry. We've gotta bring some new people in, but we'll have you back next year." It's quite difficult, but most of them react really well to that.

You made quite the speech at the end of the festival, saying that you weren't moving to another site. Can we expect any changes next year?

No, absolutely not. It works. That venue... There's something about it. It's seedy but yet it's subtle. It's faded grandeur, and it's got a kind of character to it. The security are spot on, they're not heavy-handed...

They don't need to be heavy-handed because there's no trouble at the festival, I guess.

They're used to dealing with these farmers fighting in the disco next door on a Saturday night, and they do! The police cars are going backwards and forwards on the Saturday night at Freerotation going to the disco behind the club, and it's purely to arrest fighting farmers. It's mental! And the guys who are working in our half are kind of like, "I'm so glad I'm in here tonight. This is just a piece of piss man. It's fun, like."

There is gonna come a point where in the future where people will say things like, "I've done that now," but that's not happened just yet. It still feels like there's plenty of energy in this party and we've got no intention of getting bigger. We don't want to get bigger. That's just not what it's about for us. We've always been involved in the underground and that's what we do, and we've got no intention of becoming corporate and branded or whatever. It's just bollocks, you know? It's nothing to do with what we're about.