Greetings,

My name is Telo Dunne and I am the Marketing and Production Manager for the Clover Music Festival taking place in Traverse City, Michigan this August.  Clover will be the largest Christian Dance Music Festival ever held worldwide. The festival is FREE OF CHARGE.

Say WHAT?!? 

The Way Things Were

Honestly, I don’t know where to start. I’ve been running Tastyfresh.com now for almost 5 years. I’ve been following the Christian dance scene since 1992. Through out this time, I have seen small Christian production companies come and go. A good event had between 200-300 during the peak time, most of who probably weren’t Christians and probably thought some guys had just broken into a church to throw an underground party. Actually… that’s not a joke. I did hear that suggested at an old Amplified Life party I was at once. Anyway, during my 14 years of “experience” in this scene one thing remained a constant: Everyone wanted to see a national Christian dance festival but nobody had the experience or funds to pull it off.

You could argue that Cornerstone in Bushnell, Il was and still is this national festival. I’ve argued that many times myself. Cornerstone however is a Christian rock festival with a nightly dance club. When it comes down to it though, Cornerstone does not put a huge emphasis on the dance club. You can tell this simply by it’s location. The club (barn actually) is hidden behind all of the food court trailers. There aren’t any noticeable signs to point club goers to the club either. The worst part however is that it’s the area of the festival where much of the garbage is collected, sorted and shipped out from during the day. You have tons of “water” runoff from the food court, which only adds to the smell and the mess that surrounds the club. Here’s the kicker though, since Cornerstone is primarily a rock concert, there isn’t a real financial incentive to improve the conditions around the club. Beyond that though… I’m not 100% sure there is another place where some of the garbage processing could be done.

Yet, despite all of this, those of us who have attended more than once call this barn our home away from home. We are also as a community extremely grateful to the Jesus People USA group for continuing to support the dance club despite the fact that it is not a major draw for the festival. I personally hope that it continues on for many years to come. Despite the exterior problems, the Dance Barn, as veterans call it, is perhaps the coolest venue on the Cornerstone Farm. If for no other reason than the fact that it is the only one with an actual floor and a permanent structure. For those of you who aren’t in the know… rumor has it that originally, we didn’t get to use the barn. We had a tent like everybody else. So, since the first year that Cornerstone hosted a dance club it has acted as the national Christian dance festival or conference. Some of this has changed now.

The Dropping of the Bombshell

I got back from Cornerstone this year really excited as usual. As I wrote in my Cornerstone 2006 Wrap-up article, I was amazed at how the event this year was carried off by the scene and not a record label as it had in the past. Everyone worked together and it was a very cool and practical expression of the unity we do have in this scene. It wasn’t until July 21 that perhaps the second largest bombshell in the Christian dance scene hit my email box. The first for those of you who may not know or remember, that was Scott Blackwell’s departure from N*Soul Records.  Here was that bombshell:

Greetings,
My name is Telo Dunne and I am the Marketing and Production Manager for the Clover Music Festival taking place in Traverse City, Michigan this August.  Clover will be the largest Christian Dance Music Festival ever held worldwide. The festival is FREE OF CHARGE.  You have a fantastic website & our company would love to get Tastyfresh involved in some great sponsorship opportunities.

Please contact me directly at your earliest convenience. My information is listed below.  I look forward to hearing from you.  

Warm regards,

Telo Dunne

Did I see that right? A Christian dance festival? They aren’t charging? This has to be a joke I thought. I couldn’t believe it. Even today it sounds too good to be true. 14 years of people saying “wouldn’t it be cool if…” of some people trying to pull it off and of heated debates involving people like me trying to talk some sense into people who were thinking about doing it when they lacked experience, funds and a full vision. Somebody had somehow come out of nowhere. Someone who I hadn’t even heard of and dared to do what the realist in me thought was totally impossible to do.

So… who is this Telo Dunne, who is she with and why does she think she can even come close to pulling this off? That was what was running through my mind. So, I checked out the url attached to the email and I was even more shocked. She was claiming that in a month and 3 days, 75 Christian DJs and artists would be performing in Traverse City, Mi and that this was going to be a professional show. I still didn’t think it was possible. I kept reading the information on that page and eventually I got to the explanation of it all:

A DEMF Production

My mouth dropped. DEMF? NO WAY! First, there’s no way those guys are Christians. They put on the BIGGEST EDM festival in the world and have been for years. Second, they wouldn’t be dumb enough to actually do this. They’d loose their shirts! I didn’t know what to think. So… I figured like any good guy who wants to see the scene grow and hopefully drive more traffic to his website, I called Telo. By this time, DEMF was contacting just about everybody who acted like a DJ on Tastyfresh and started booking them. It seemed totally legit.

The Background

After some research on the side and a phone call with Telo, it turned out that CloveR was clearly not a joke and that Carol Marvin, the founder of the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, really was heading it up. For those of you who haven’t heard of the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, Wikkipedia has a great history of it.

The short version is that Carol Marvin and Carl Craig founded the festival in 2000. For the first year, they had over 500,000 people in attendance. By 2002, that number had grown to 1.7 million attendees. Sadly, Carol and Carl parted ways rather publicly and not necessarily on the best of terms given what the media published . In fact, there are several stories out there as to what exactly happened including one the CloveR Festival program itself. Despite all of that, DEMF has lived on and this year decided to try their hands at a Christian Festival, as Carol is a Christian.

So, planning was done. The location was chosen. The party happened without a snag. Oh wait … there was one snag. Originally, the festival was to be your typical paid entry event. The snag was that the festival also was to take place in a public park. The city council didn’t like the idea of having the park closed for a private event when it was funded by public funds. Honestly, this was the right decision. Taxpayers should be allowed access to the places that are funded by their money and that normally would be open to the public. According to the media, the issue wasn’t necessarily CloveR Festival but the fact that it could have been the start of many private events utilizing the same public space over time. No policy had been written to cover this type of use. Eventually though, the city allowed DEMF to have the event, so long as it was free and open to the public. Thanks to DEMF’s generous financial partners and backers, they were able to meet the city’s request.

CloveR Festival?

Well, I’ve given you the background on this, but I still haven’t told you what CloveR is or why I keep capitalizing the “R” in it. According the official website:

CloveR stands for Christ's Love Restores, Respects, and Rejoices. The Clover is a long-standing symbol of Christianity due to its three distinct leaves representing the Trinity: The Father, The Son, and Holy Spirit. Of further inspiring significance, a clover plant itself offers a wonderful analogy of Christ's power and its work through one Christ-living Christian: If you plant one clover in a meadow, over time the entire meadow will become clover. If you plant one Christ-living Christian in any life situation, the events will change for the best simply by the presence and example of this special person. The CloveR Festival celebrates the personal potential we each possess to help God create the world around us.

The festival itself is set up to connect and energize young adults through the power of Christ and to help them get excited about dance music, art, fashion and so on. In some ways, who cares about the other stuff? It’s a dance music festival with the focus on worshipping God and strengthening each other’s faith. It’s what we typically find at Cornerstone but focused on dance music rather than (mostly) rock music.

What do I mean by a whole new level? Well, this year, CloveR started off with at least three stages and had well over 30 acts for 12 hours of continuous dance music. Compare that to Cornerstone’s 4-6 hours of music for 3-4 nights depending on who was in charge of the club that year. But that wasn’t all. In some ways it was also a time when some fairly big named DJs in the secular arena stepped out of the proverbial Christian closet. Just a few of the names that seemed to come out of nowhere included Kenneth Thomas, Farley “Jackmaster” Funk, Boo Williams, Eddie Fowlkes and the list goes on. In many cases, we’re talking about the “founding fathers” of house, techno and trance. Upon seeing the line-up, I realized just how small our perspective of Christians in the dance industry really is. My eyes have been opened much wider thanks to CloveR.

Is It September All Ready???

So, August has come and gone now. The first ever Christian dance music festival is over. Sadly I personally did not get a chance to attend. A fair number of Tastyfresh members did though. From every report I have heard, the festival was simply awesome. Everything was done to a level that nobody had seen in a US-based Christian dance event before. From the photos I’ve seen, I am amazed at the level of seriousness the DEMF people gave this festival.

The only negative comment I have and that several people have expressed is “Where were people?” I find this a comment both insulting and valid at the same time. DEMF worked their butts off to get this festival off the ground. They had a huge delay in getting the permit. They did not have the media coverage they really needed. They also didn’t have the time to really promote this event on a national scale. If you can’t secure a venue though, you can’t have the event and so there’s no point in promoting. DEMF seems to have done the best they could with the time afforded them. I guess the best thing to do though is to reflect on Carol Marvin’s own words from the CloveR Festival program:

“We are planting the seed this year, wait and see what happens next year, we have been through this before. Maybe some don’t get it right now but by the weekend they will. In fact every day more and more people are figuring out what this is all about and are jumping on board.”

Given Carol’s optimistic outlook, the rushed nature because of the problems securing the venue and the DEMF’s successful track record, we should too be optimistic. I can tell you this though: This festival was an answer to a lot of prayer over the course of several years. God seems to have given Carol a vision and I’m all for supporting her efforts to follow God’s will for her life.