Pyramid Festival Experience Review
I just came back from Pyramid Festival in Serbia and I think I finally understand what people mean when they say a festival can actually feel like a community.
For context, this was my first Pyramid. I’ve been to Boom and Ozora before and quite a few electronic music events, so I’m not completely new to this world.
I didn’t really know what to expect from Pyramid. It’s much smaller, somewhere under this strange mountain called Rtanj in eastern Serbia, and honestly I went there without huge expectations.
I left feeling like I had lived in a little village with a bunch of strangers for a week.
I’ll try to separate this into the good, the bad and some thoughts because there are a lot of things still going through my head.
The positive
1 — The people. By far.
This is the main reason I’m writing this.
I’ve experienced “festival love” before. Everyone hugs, everyone is your friend, everyone says beautiful things and then Monday comes and everyone goes home.
This felt slightly different.
People interacted A LOT.
You could sit somewhere alone and somehow 20 minutes later you were part of a conversation. People shared food, drinks, stories, instruments, shade, whatever.
And there were so many kids and families.
Normally kids at festivals can feel like they are just accompanying their parents. Here they somehow became part of the whole thing. You’d see children running around, people dancing, someone playing an instrument nearby, parents hanging out, staff eating with guests.
At some point even the food court turned into a party with the people working there.
There wasn’t really a clear line between “festival”, “staff”, “artists” and “audience”.
I danced with several of the DJs from the main stage after they finished their sets. They weren’t backstage somewhere being artists. They were just there.
It sounds cheesy writing it now, but it genuinely felt like a tribe.
2 — THE SUNSETS
Jesus Christ.
Rtanj mountain is basically sitting in front of you while you dance.
During the day it looks impressive but when the sun starts going down the whole place changes.
I think sunset was my favorite time every single day.
Hot day slowly disappearing, temperature becoming perfect, mountain in front of you, music getting louder, everyone slowly coming alive again.
And then at night you look up and the sky is ridiculous.
We could clearly see the Perseid meteor shower.
There were moments where I honestly forgot I was at a festival and just stared at the sky.
3 — The whole place actually feels alive
This might be my favorite thing about the organization.
The festival isn’t designed so that everything leads to one giant dancefloor.
You walk around and things are happening everywhere.
People doing workshops. Someone lying under a tree. Kids playing. Someone eating. Someone suddenly dancing next to the food court. Healing activities. People talking. Music somewhere in the distance.
And then there was the Jam Stage.
What a fucking gem.
Some of the most beautiful people I met during the entire festival were there.
People singing, jamming and playing all kinds of instruments throughout the day. You’d walk past intending to go somewhere else and suddenly you’ve been sitting there for an hour.
At times that little corner genuinely felt like a fairy tale.
What I really appreciated was that workshops and other activities weren’t fighting with the main music all the time. You could actually participate without having psytrance blasting through someone’s meditation session from 50 meters away.
It really felt like a village rather than a festival site.
4 — The music, sound and KOLO stage
Sound was excellent on both main stages.
Powerful but very clear.
But visually KOLO was something else.
The stage itself was beautiful, but once the projection mapping started at night it completely transformed. I don’t even know how to explain it properly because photos don’t really capture what it was like standing there.
Rising Dust closing the festival was probably my musical highlight.
There was something about that final set combined with everything that had happened during the week that made it incredibly emotional.
People weren’t just dancing anymore.
It felt like everyone knew we were approaching the end.
5 — Food
Festival food is normally one of those things you tolerate because you need calories.
Not here.
There was surprisingly good variety and the quality was genuinely high. I heard they brought in some very good local chefs to run the food operation and I can believe it.
Prices also felt surprisingly reasonable for a festival.
And again, the food court itself became part of the experience rather than just somewhere you go to eat.
6 — Camping and nature
Plenty of shade in the camping area, which was absolutely necessary because…
The negatives
1 — The heat
Fuck.
Some parts of the day were HOT.
There are showers/sprinklers around the main stage which honestly saved us sometimes, but there were parts of the afternoon where my body basically said “no, you’re sitting under a tree now.”
The nights were beautiful though.
That temperature change when the sun disappears is almost therapeutic.
2 — Shower queues
Nothing catastrophic, but at certain times there was maybe 10–15 minutes waiting.
You quickly learn when NOT to shower.
3 — Compost toilets
I actually like the idea and generally they worked fine.
The problem is that apparently not everyone understands how compost toilets work 😂
So occasionally you would pass one and your nose would tell you somebody had misunderstood the assignment.
Not terrible, but definitely part of the experience.
4 — The fucking quad
This is ridiculously specific but it annoyed me enough to include it.
You’re sitting somewhere surrounded by trees, looking at Rtanj, hearing birds and people playing instruments somewhere in the distance…
and then:
BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
a quad drives past.
I understand that a festival needs logistics and people need to move things around, but every time it happened I wanted to throw the quad into the mountain.
This is the part I’ve been thinking about since I left.
I’ve been to bigger festivals.
I’ve seen bigger stages.
I’ve seen more expensive production.
I’ve been surrounded by tens of thousands of people experiencing the same music together.
But Pyramid made me think about something else.
Maybe community at a festival isn’t about how many people you can bring together.
Maybe it’s about how many barriers disappear between them.
At Pyramid I stopped thinking so much about what I was supposed to be doing.
If you wanted to dance strangely, you danced strangely.
If you wanted to hug somebody, you hugged them.
If someone started playing an instrument, other people joined.
If somebody started dancing somewhere that wasn’t a dancefloor, suddenly there were five people dancing.
The more freely someone expressed themselves, the more it seemed to give permission to everyone around them to do the same.
And nobody seemed to give a shit whether you looked stupid.
Actually it was almost the opposite.
The weirder and freer you became, the more people joined you.
That’s probably the best way I can describe the vibration of this festival.
It was extremely difficult to feel down.
Wherever you looked there was somebody smiling, hugging, dancing, playing something, talking to someone they had probably met 30 minutes earlier or just lying somewhere looking completely peaceful.
Not fake positivity either.
Just this strange feeling that everyone had silently agreed:
For these few days, you can be exactly whatever you are.
And apparently that’s contagious.
By the final day I realized I knew people everywhere.
Not necessarily their names.
Just faces.
Someone from the Jam Stage.
Someone I danced next to three nights ago.
The woman whose kid was running around the food court.
Some DJ I saw behind the decks yesterday and then danced next to today.
Someone who gave me something to eat.
Someone I watched the stars with.
It starts feeling less like an audience and more like a temporary little society.
And then Rising Dust played the closing set.
That one hurt.
When everything finished, people were hugging and crying.
And people just… didn’t want to leave.
Some stayed another day or two. Some started helping clean. Some were cooking for the staff who were dismantling everything.
Nobody asked them to.
They were just still there.
That image probably summarizes Pyramid better than anything else I could write.
A festival ended and instead of immediately becoming customers packing their shit and leaving, some people stayed behind to take care of the place and the people who had created it.
I’ve heard the word “community” used approximately 900,000 times in the psychedelic scene.
Most festivals say it.
Pyramid was one of the few places where I don’t remember needing to hear it.
You could just see it happening around you.
Maybe that’s what stayed with me the most.
Not the stage.
Not even the music.
Just how ridiculously easy it became to love complete strangers for a few days.
9/10.
Would absolutely return.
Just please find a quieter fucking quad.
PS. Loved this two just the way they smile to everyone was a pure bliss…