Future perfect Nature boy

MANILA, Philippines - He arrives without carbon footprint. Marvin Kiefer, whom you might know from his stint on Survivor Philippines, comes to meet Young Star on a longboard. On the photographer’s suggestion, he leaps from the balcony we were standing on to a spiral staircase under a mango tree.

With wild locks and a wide smile, he talks about why he fled from his hometown: “I found Cagayan de Oro (CDO) too small for me.” Right after high school, he went to the big city for work as he had been doing during summers. “It was for commercials—medicine, biscuits, and stuff. I earned a lot of money for a 14-year-old,” he recounts. But now at 22, he finds himself prepping for a big homecoming.

This weekend, April 26 to 28, he will  go back to the farm where he grew up for Luna Musikalawaig, a full-moon festival, and then travel further south to Zamboanga for Paz Musika del Mar on April 30 to May 1. With his brother Raphael Kiefer, entrepreneur Marco Lobregat, and filmmaker Jeminah Ferrer, he organized the trip to become Summer Peace Festival (SPF) 2013, another addition to the country’s expanding music fest roster and a follow-up to his wildly successful venture that was last November’s Tagaytay Electronica Festival.

“I kind of fell into the job,” Marvin relates. Since his first concert-party experience, catching Slapshock in CDO on a pre-exam night when he was 10, he found himself organizing infamous house parties. His crew, Epic Proportions, grew into promoting for the clubs (currently in URBN), and they are now bringing the music and the party outside of the city and back to nature.

SPF bans tarps, promotes communing with nature, and upholds Mindanao tradition. Surrounded by folk and contemporary art, the fest brings together the homegrown music of CdO, Butuan, Malaybalay, Cebu, and Davao and the international grooves of Barcelona, New York, and Berlin. Festival attendees can expect to be served the region’s freshest produce, join yoga and traditional tattoo sessions, plant trees, paddle on white water, and even play music with the performers on a big jam circle.

While Marvin’s affair with the city isn’t done yet, he gets to go home to what now matters to him more. He says, “I see myself more in festivals because they’re less on alcohol but more on enjoying. They’re more of gatherings.” He may have more to conquer—spray painting more walls, managing his co-founded Fighters Club MMA, maybe winning a jiu-jitsu medal, and still modelling when he’s free from promotion duties—but this weekend, he’s home, and as Nat King Cole sang, after having “wandered very far, very far/ over land and sea./ A little shy and sad of eye/ but very wise was he.”

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Visit summerpeacefestival.com.