r/psytrance

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…

Hey guys, so i am a spanish man in his late 20s, Drops festival just ended and i wanted to share my thoughts while they are still fresh.

For the record i went to a considerable amount of electronic music parties, mainly underground freeparties in Spain/France, and maybe around 10 psytrance festivals in my life, most of them were on the bright side of light, full on, progressive psy, etc

This time, after Sizigia festival got cancelled i decided to go to Drops festival in Slovenia, and by doing it i was giving another chance to dark subgenres.

I will classify my opinions on the good, the bad and the reflection.

THE GOOD:

1-The vibe : I felt most of the interactions were real, there was a lot of smiles but also some people saying truths to the face to others. Facial expressions of annoyance, anger or dissaproval were not repressed at all.

I felt surrounded by mainly introverted people who mostly had good heart but they weren't taking any shit from anyone.

But of course mostly love payed with love.

Honorable mention to how i felt a lot of this dark hippies and punkies were kind of "Live the life or leave the life", i talked to a lot of people in this festival and many were metalheads or psycore/experimental heads or both. It gave me the feeling that some of this people dressed and acted very similarly in their daily lives. Not a lot of cosplayers, although i don't have anything against them. But you know, just saying.

2- The bathrooms: Very very clean for the most part, only the night of saturday (of course) they were dirty. The rest of the festival i even sit on the toilet while shitting. AWESOME. Of course the pissoirs played a big role in this.

3- The music and sound quality: The selection of artists was very good in my opinion, i didn't have a lot of energy on this festival due to i guess my current health state, but even while not dancing the music was so damn enjoyable. You could hear every detail of every fucking psychedelic wave, and being darkpsy/forest so focused on the ambient sounds this couldn't have been better.

A truly psychedelic experience. Lambda labs in main stage and funktion one on tekno/psytechno stage.

Acousma and Necropsycho were my favorite sets Also Fantazma with the start of the rain and thunder was crazy.

Sator arepo felt like home in a cold couch while wrapped in blankets.

4- The stage design and lights were just a masterclass of how to transmit a vibe properly. It was a wooden spider. The main colors were red, electric blue and purple. Of course no lights in the stage at night, practically forcing you to introversion ( this can be a bummer for some people, but it grows in you)

5- The landscape: I didn't see a lot of people on forums talking about this, are you guys serious? The forest that surrounds the festival is a goddamn gem. Biodiverse, you saw many different trees next to each other, different colors, of course all of them were gigantic.

6- The workers: Security guards were nice and treated well by the festival( i asked several of them), so were the bar people.

THE BAD:

1- UNDERCOVER POLICE : At some point there were like 3 or 4 of them at the same time on festival grounds. I saw one man handcuffed with ropes and heard about more people taken to the police station just for even weed. This is unacceptable. But i am not going to get into who is it at fault or not.

2- Food options : Only two. An oriental food restaurant (that was very very good) all vegetarian. And a burger place i didn't try.

3- Chill spaces : Not enough, with how intense this music can be, chill spaces with shade felt insufficient for me. Nothing crazy, there were some options and the chill stage was nice. But more shade in the chill zone next to the stage would have been nice. Not a very big deal though.

4- The light behind the spinning wheel in the stage could be very annoying depending on the angle/distance you were on the dancefloor, kind of shitty for when you are tripping, specially if there is a lot of darkness don't shoot some laser light to my eyes.

5- The drug selection : The thing about living the life is that there is a lot of drug abuse, specifically in this party there was a lot of heavy doses of psychedelics, but also ketamine, and i also felt speed and coke. This for psytrance "peace and love" people can be shocking and/or different. Me i don't care, the vibe felt even better this way, or not better but more interesting.

6- No shade at the camping area.

THE REFLECTION:

I went to Gaggalacka festival last year and i didn't really connect with the music. This time at Drops it took me a while sometimes.

In my opinion, these darker genres are not passive music at all. I mean when you hear full on psy or prog, people automatically dance, the dance comes from the body and the bpm range is acceptable for most. But in these subgenres i had to concentrate, did some inner meditation and closed eyes dancing to give it some sense.

It is really a trip. Because mainly, i felt the music was chasing me. Sometimes the beat spoke violence, aggression to me, and so i talked to him in the same language. I started to stomp the ground with my feet with every beat. And danced like if the veins of fists and fingers were filled with boiling blood. I spoke anger with my body, and now after the party ended i felt liberation.

But some times the music spoke frustration, eeriness, creepiness, desperation, poverty, and the most important one suffering. Even the drums sounded different, like a David Lynch movie. And so i embraced it several times, and felt goosebumps.

Maybe that sounds insane, but that's representative of the whole vibe.

Oppressive would be the word, the music feels like the minds of people with mental health issues, so when i accepted it felt like home, and when i danced i felt acceptance.

To rate it somehow i would give the festival a 8 out of 10.

Would definetly come back the next year if i have the money and the time

Had such an amazing time performing at Grooves of Azaadi in Anjuna for Independence Day , the energy of the Dancefloor was palpable and everyone was out to dance and express themselves... I had just finished producing this Tune that I wanted to open my set with after 4 or 5 days of sound design , programming sounds ,sequencing and mixing and mastering this track in Ableton 12 beta ( because of all these amazing new extensions ). Instead of just using the vocal sample I produced a full length twilight style Psytrance banger at 150 Bpm . Psytrance is one of the most popular Electronic dance music genres in this country , Largely because it has roots in Goa in India ... I've recently been composing most of my productions in the Bhairav mode as I'd like to represent where I come from in my Sounds and it's proximity to Phrygian mode being one note away connects it to the roots of Goa trance.

UPDATE: MARIJN HAS BEEN FOUND. HE IS STILL CONFUSED, BUT IN GOOD HANDS. HELP IS ON THE WAY. I WANT TO THANK YOU ALL FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY HEART FOR ALL YOUR KINDNESS AND HELP.

Hello everyone,

Our close friend Marijn, or Marino, has gone missing after visiting Mo:Dem. He was last seen on Wednesday at Timeout Heritage Hotel in Zagreb. He is believed to be in a pyschosis and was acting strange the days leading up to his going missing. He is Dutch and lives in the Netherlands. After the festival ended, he had no plans on how to go back to the Netherlands and just tagged along with other people he camped with until he arrived in Zagreb. His phone has no battery, and he lost his bank card.

The whole way until Zagreb, he was acting strange, talking to himself, not making much sense and just overall confused. He ended up staying with a friend at Timeout Heritage Hotel and that was the last he was seen by anyone who knows him. The friend had to leave to catch a train and initially Marijn was gonna go with him but because he was taking too long to get ready, the friend left without him. Marijn stayed sleeping in the hotel, and we later learned that he refused to leave the Hotel room or pay, and the police was called and he was arrested.

He has since been released, on Thursday, and we have no idea of his whereabouts. His family is aware of this, so is the Dutch Police, and I believe also Croatian police, as well as the Dutch Ministry of Foreign affairs. The police and the ministry seems to be of no help at all, and they're very passive.

Please help, the last time anyone received contact from him was on Wednesday, and he was clearly in a psychosis, but still very friendly/not aggressive.

Since he has no bank card or phone, we strongly suspect he is still in Zagreb, although it is possible that he left.

He is about 160cm tall, has long black and blonde hair, with some dreadlocks.

If you live in Zagreb and have seen him, please message me privately.

If you need any more information, please let me know.

TL;DR: I’m building Ravebase, a genre-agnostic event discovery platform aimed at making it easier for people to discover electronic music events and for organizers to reach new audiences beyond Facebook.

Events will be free to publish, with optional paid social media campaigns (initially TikTok + Meta) managed through Ravebase. Organizers can also create password-protected events for private sharing.

I’m looking for party-goers and event organizers to test the platform and give me honest feedback before I build further.

Hey everyone!

I’ve been working on Ravebase, a platform for discovering electronic music events, and I’m looking for people who are willing to test it and give me some honest feedback.

You can check it out here:

https://ravebase.net/

I’ve been thinking about this idea for quite a while, and while there are already platforms like Goabase, I’m trying to solve a slightly different problem.

Goabase, for example, has built a strong community around its platform, with things like forums, user posts, shoutboxes etc., and has a strong focus on psytrance.

Ravebase is intended to be more genre-agnostic and focused primarily on event discovery.

The problem I’m trying to solve is something I’ve noticed in the scene where I live. From what I can tell, Facebook Events is still one of the main ways organizers reach people, but that seems to be getting less effective as younger people increasingly aren't using Facebook.

That creates a bit of a problem: organizers have a harder time reaching new people, and if new people aren't introduced to the scene, the scene eventually stops getting new blood and the audience starts shrinking.

Even though I’m personally fairly selective about who I invite to some of my own events, I also understand that scenes need new people coming in to stay alive. There needs to be some way for people who are interested but aren't already part of the network to discover what's happening.

That's one of the problems I'm hoping Ravebase can help with.

The basic idea is that publishing events will be free.

Longer term, organizers will also be able to optionally pay for social media campaigns. Initially, I’m looking at TikTok and Meta.

The idea isn't to make organizers become advertising experts. You upload your creatives images/videos in the required formats and Ravebase handles the campaign management for you.

There’s also a use case for events that organizers don't want to publish publicly. Events can be placed behind a password-protected page, allowing organizers to simply share a private link and password with whoever they want.

But before I build too much more, I want to make sure the core idea actually makes sense.

So I’m looking for two types of testers:

As a visitor

• Browse and search for events
• Try the filters and discovery features
• See if anything is confusing, annoying or missing
• Tell me whether you would actually use something like this

As an event organizer

• Try creating and managing an event
• See if the process makes sense
• Try the different visibility options
• Tell me what information or functionality is missing
• Give me your honest opinion on whether this could actually be useful for you

I’m especially interested in negative feedback. If something sucks, is confusing, unnecessary, or makes you think “why would I use this instead of X?” please tell me.

I’m still early enough in development that feedback can actually influence what I build next.

hello loves

i was dancing at thursday morning at the hive to the set of micoX and boogie knight. there was a guy whit his puppet and i would really love to hear if anyone has his insta. he made my morning! what a talent