This past weekend, the current incarnation of Stereoreel was invited to play at Extreme Reality’s Inside Out Youth Retreat held in Cross Junction, VA. Admittedly, this specific youth group holds a special place in our hearts, seeing as how the youth director is related to 3/4 of the band. However, she’s only willingly related to 1/4 of the band. 

What did we glean from this event? What nugget of wisdom could we bestow upon the eager minds of the thronging public? 

Make sure all band members are awake for at least 1 hour before the set.

The entire retreat was a blast and we enjoyed getting to meet a lot of new kids who had never heard of us before. God’s presence was really apparent for the entire time that we were there. We are sad to say that mornings just aren’t our time to shine, though. That’s the sun’s job, and we don’t want to step on anyone’s toes. Caleb and I drink coffee to get our brains up and jogging on the sunrise road. Ethan, who doesn’t drink coffee and who had awaken only 20 minutes prior to our Saturday morning set, tried a far different approach to a morning pick-me-up.  When everyone had been gathered to the morning session (held in a barn inhabited by old airplane parts rather than animals and deer antlers), he began to focus all of his energy into a Bass playing version of the Super Collider. 

What happened next can best be described as a scene from Dragonball Z where Vegeta begins screaming until he turns into a Super Sayan and your eyeballs are suddenly bombarded with seizure inducing imagery. Ethan had successfully channeled the personalities of a bass playing Keith Richards and a shirt-wearing Iggy Pop. During most of the set list, we could look up from our instruments and find Ethan wandering through the crowd, jumping up and down, or standing on the wooden benches in an effort to entice the young campers into a worship crazed frenzy. Then, he lost his balance and fell on his back. At this point he more resembled a turtle than anything else, and waited for the next break in the song to get back up, where he promptly began a more cautious array of sleep-kicking moves.

Afterwards, he didn’t seem to be any more awake than before.

In all fairness, he did manage to finally harness his energy into an electric force for our final set on Saturday night, where (by Ethan’s prompting) all the kids began shaking the rafters by jumping like rabid kangaroos on “Dance” and other songs. One of these days, the world will realize that they can run 10 cities off of the amount of fuel they could sap from the overflow of a Worship concert inspired to dance by a Super Sayan Bassist.

In case you were wondering, Dustin wakes up before the sun does.

-Seth

Tags: Extreme Reality, sleep-kicking, Stereoreel, worship music, youth retreat