Fallas

To Valencia for Fallas, a crazed annual festival where every neighbourhood in the city competitively builds a vast and complicated wood and papier-mache sculpture in one of their squares and then torches it on Saturday night. There are also two lots of fireworks every day in the Town Hall square - a spectacular display at midnight and this one, at two in the afternoon, which is also competitive and mainly built around noise. It's really quite incredible: a mixture of firecrackers and deep, almost subsonic, explosions that build in intensity until the soles of your feet and your breastbone are vibrating in tandem and the beats have blurred into one ear-splitting boom, The 'drop' is mad - and the crowd yells and waves their arms - it's kind of like a cross between a warehouse rave and an actual aerial barrage...

This is a guest blip from Beck, by the way. I think I was a bit too caught up to think about getting my phone out...