By Yonah Lempert Luecken

Special to the Homer Independent Press

A “sacred acre” is the intertidal zone that is sometimes ocean and sometimes ground. For four years, local promoters have drawn on the aura of the vast Kenai Peninsula tidelands and the success of Salmonfest to attract more than a thousand people annually to Ninilchik for the Sacred Acre electronic dance music festival.

Festival director Chris Miller predicts that this year’s festival, at the Kenai Peninsula Fairgrounds in Ninilchik Sept. 11-13, “will be the biggest year that we’ve ever had.” Sacred Acre is a celebration of the pulsating dance rhythms and brilliant light shows of EDM. Its purpose is to build a community of music and dance while raising funds and awareness to push back on industrial ocean trawling.

The event bills itself as “one of North America’s most unique destination festivals,” and attendees are encouraged to explore beyond the venue where it is based. There will be helicopter tours around local glaciers available, foraging hikes with experts in the area, as well as opportunities for attendees to fish, either with guides on the Kenai River or spearfishing for halibut with local company Coldwater Alaska. Saturday morning there will be “Bumpin’ on the Bay,” a three-hour sightseeing trip around Kachemak Bay on the Rainbow Tours’ boat Discovery, with a DJ playing music on a sound system specially installed for the excursion, and beverages from local company Odin Meadery.

The festival has more than 35 musical acts from Alaska and beyond, with the state’s largest laser light show enhancing the musical experience in the evenings. VJs Glass Crane (Steven McCorry) and Papa Bear (Jesse Yaun), both veterans of many EDM festivals, will entertain with their large psychedelic flowing animations.  

While the festival uses Alaska companies as much as it’s able, most of the equipment for the light show is brought up by barge from Washington state.

“Currently, there’s not enough lasers in Alaska to do what we do,” said Miller.

Homer-based entertainers SeaLegs Stilt and Puppets Troupe will also be at the festival, providing whimsical performances filled with humor and surprises.

The EDM featured at Sacred Acre is part of a wide ranging genre that gained traction in the 1980s, focused on danceable rhythms and syncopation, sometimes leading to a meditative state in its listeners. While synthesizers and drum machines are a strong presence in EDM, it also can incorporate live instrumentation and singing as well. 

When asked to define the large musical body of work encompassed in EDM, Miller said, “You can have country-forward electronic music (a blend of two styles), you can have jungle and techno. There’s so many sub-genres, and electronic music now is spreading so deeply into all genres of music that it’s hard to even categorize as its own genre … there’s so much variation.”

EDM icon Tape B (Kemal Berk Alkanat), who was born in Istanbul and grew up in New York City, will be headlining the festival along with Maddy O’Neal and Effin. Maddy O’Neal’s music is self-described as, “Dirty funky bass music, but make it pretty.” It combines influences from funk and soul with EDM. O’Neal has played at Coachella, Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo and other notable large music festivals. Effin, a bass player from Nashville, is known for merging creative sampling with modern basslines, and has released EDM albums Cheap Thrills and Daydreams.

NYC-based Mindchatter, New Zealander OPIUO, Denver-based Mlotik and many other acts will help fill out the entertainment on the festival’s three stages. Josh Teed, whose mother grew up in Anchorage and who played at last year’s Sacred Acre, will play his music combining violin with EDM rhythms. The selection of musicians is a panoply of EDM virtuosos.

More than 25 workshop presenters will be at the festival’s Stillwater Reflection Center, where attendees can learn about topics including sound healing, Mesoamerican influenced cacao ceremonies, ecstatic dance, tea ceremonies, the definition of a sacred acre, and more. Six painters will be making new artwork throughout the weekend. Festival attendees will be able to bid on the canvases they create, with 30% of the proceeds going to the nonprofit organization SalmonState, to help prevent industrial trawling in the Bering Sea. Other crafts will also be for sale, with about 40 different vendors in total.

Food will be omnipresent at the festival, with more than 10 food vendors serving up a variety of tasty comestibles. A focus on food is a natural fit for the festival, as its producers Miller and Hannah Stearns each have a long history in the dining and hospitality fields. 

Miller, who co-owns local restaurant The Kannery, noted the similarity between the restaurant industry and the music industry.

“What creates community (is) shared experience. That includes things like food, and that includes things like music. Having a place where all of those things come together, like Sacred Acre … is what we’re trying to do,” he said.

Stearns, who has worked with Salmonfest since its inception, said, “I was born into the music industry.” 

She explained that her father, Jim Stearns, had been the backstage hospitality manager for the Grateful Dead, and helping to build out large music performances has given her skills and experiences that she uses in her work as Assistant Director for Sacred Acre.

“The thing we are continuing to grow at Sacred Acre is … this is a safe space for a weekend,” Stearns said. “You get to come and remove yourselves from the strength of the world, but also we give a platform to different nonprofits, like SalmonState and Mother Kuskokwim [Tribal Coalition], that are talking about Alaska’s problems … the things that we, as Alaskans, can make a difference in.”

Sacred Acre takes its name from the writings of author Ivo Dominguez Jr., who described a sacred acre as the area between high tide and low tide, existing as both land and sea. 

“The sacred acre is a place to take a pilgrimage to and get back in tune with your sea spirits and your land spirits,” Miller said. “It’s the only place on the planet where both the sea and land can interconnect and mingle.”

Tickets and more information are available at sacredacreak.com.