Best Music Festival: IceStock

No Ticketmaster convenience fees. No lines for the Port-a-Potties. Actually, no Port-a-Potties, period. No yellow-shirted security goons, local radio-station hype men or overpriced, watered-down beer. Subtract all the distasteful parts of summer music festivals and at least 60 degrees Fahrenheit and you’ve got IceStock, one of the most singular and scenically stunning music festivals on the planet.

IceStock has been held on or around New Year’s Day on Antarctica’s remote Ross Island—home to McMurdo Station, the U.S. Antarctic Program’s premier research facility—since 1990. Station population, which can fall as low as 120 in the southern hemisphere’s winter, swells to as much as 1,200 in the summer. The staff is a mix of distinguished scientists, Burning Man devotees, world travelers, roughneck mechanics and in-over-their-heads liberal-arts grads who’ve taken dishwashing jobs for the season.

The free festival brings everyone together for seven hours of outdoor rock & roll under the bright-white, 24-hour Antarctic sun. Coachella this is not: The stage is made from “two flatbed trailers with a Korean War–era military tent set on them to block the wind,” says McMurdo crew member Zim Zimmerman, a 12-year IceStock veteran. The festival grounds, in sight of the frozen-solid McMurdo Sound and the majestic Royal Society Mountain Range, are demarcated by a dozen hulking cargo-ship containers.

The most recent show, held Decem­ber 30, featured 13 staff acts, including surfabilly trio Secret Cargo Man, ’70s-style funksters Porn Spill, reggae rockers JahChant and the all-female pop-punkers Don Juan Pond. Headliners Muschnuckle, a trio of longtime McMurdo musicians, entertained the parka’d crowd with covers of everyone from Ricky Martin to Rancid.

The day’s prospects ­looked iffy at first. “It was the worst weather I’ve seen in 12 years,” Zimmerman says. Recreation head Stephen Kish, the concert’s lead organizer, says he woke at 6:30 a.m. for setup, “only to find the stage covered in two inches of snow and up to six inches by the
drum riser.”

But that “the show must go on” was a given, even if the gig was taking place in the coldest, windiest, most desolate place on Earth. The only hiccup was a raid on the chili supply by a fearless skua, an Antarctic scavenger bird. And by 4 p.m., says Sky Hofmann, a member of both JahChant and Secret Cargo Man, “the weather took a marvelous turn for the better and warmed up.” By which he means the temperature rose to a balmy four degrees below freezing.