Electric Forest 2023, and a Chicago Restaurant Recommendation

Details: Written by Tom Snow; Created: 07 May 2024

One of the best music festivals on this side of the world, Electric Forest, returned in 2023 with its characteristic top-notch lineup of EDM and jam bands. Only problem was, after so much traveling packed into the last six weeks, I just wasn't in the mood for it.

Wednesday, June 21, 2023

Early that morning at 4:30, well before sunrise, I had dragged myself out of a perfectly good bed in a Portland hostel, rode an Uber to the airport, boarded a flight to Chicago--on United, the only flight on this whole trip I was paying full price for--and skipped ahead two hours as the plane brought me one step closer to what should have been the most-anticipated festival of the year. Except I wasn't feeling a whole lot of anticipation. It would be a little while before I realized why.

This year was the first year I wasn't entering the festival on the shuttle bus. I had a friend driving up all the way from San Antonio, who had never been to Electric Forest before. He picked me up from O'Hare Airport, from where we would spend the next four or five hours driving to the festival.

Before really starting this long drive, we wanted to stop somewhere for lunch so I pulled out my phone and looked on Apple Maps to see what was nearby while we were just west of the airport on I-90. We decided on the Lazic Deli. This place was quite a find! It's an eastern European restaurant; I'm not precisely sure of the nationality but I think it's either Serbian or Croatian or one of the other former-Yugoslav countries. For lunch we both got bureks. Now I'd never even heard of a burek before that day. It was some kind of savory pie made with whatever fillings you ask for. I got one with feta cheese and spinach, but you can also get various kinds of meat with it too. The thing was a circle about a foot wide, and cut into four quarters. I intended to only eat half of it, taking the rest away in a box, but ended up devouring 3/4, which was a mistake because I soon felt overstuffed.

So remember that name if you're in the northern edge of Chicago near O'Hare Airport: Lazic. You won't be disappointed.

The drive to Forest was along the same route I'd always taken in the shuttle bus the last two times I'd gone there, but this was the first time I wasn't in a bus. You have to drive along the shore of Lake Michigan, switching from one highway to another several times to stay on the shore. We crossed the state line from Illinois into Indiana as we left Chicago, and not long after that crossed another state line going into Michigan. And with that, a time zone border as well, leaving the Central Time Zone and entering Eastern. I was now three hours ahead of where I'd woken up that morning.

After the long drive up the lake shore, it took almost as long to get into the campgrounds. Unsurprisingly there were seemingly endless lines of cars waiting to get in. At least while we were waiting we could listen to the Forest's own radio station which isn't just an internet radio station, it can actually be listened to on a real actual radio, like the one in your car. I can't remember the frequency and it's not mentioned on the website anymore. It's an extremely weak signal and your radio won't pick it up unless you're close enough to the festival that you're waiting in line to get in.

Not much else happened on Wednesday. Since my friend who I was riding with was in GA car camping while I was going to be in Group Camping, so I had to get out of the car and part ways for the rest of the day, as I searched for the group I was in. The year before, I had gone to Forest with this large group of friends I had camped with at Hulaween, and we had linked up with a much larger group of Midwesterners that we didn't know very well who always reserve a space in Group Camping and let us camp with them. This year, the Hulaween friends weren't coming, but the big camping group still let me stay there. That was before the friend I rode with even decided to go to the Forest.

While dragging my well-worn rollaround suitcase through the dusty ground, and carrying a cardboard box containing 1/4 of a burek in the other hand, I began to realize that I was feeling pretty burnt-out. It was only Wednesday night, the very beginning of this long festival, and I was already in "I'm tired and I want to go home" mode. It wasn't just because I'd just been at the abruptly-canceled Beyond Wonderland the weekend before, it was because I'd been traveling so much before that. Less than three weeks before flying to Seattle for Beyond Wonderland, I'd been drinking my way down Bourbon Street in New Orleans. That trip itself was a week after a work retreat at a secluded resort in New Mexico's southern mountains. And that trip was only two weeks after my visit to Augusta, Georgia. By this time I definitely needed a long break from traveling. But before I could take such a break I had to get through the entirety of Forest, spend a couple days in Chicago, and get through yet another festival, June Jam, the weekend after...ugh. I definitely learned not to overbook myself.

Eventually I found the group camp and reintroduced myself; they recognized my name from our GroupMe chat room. After setting my tent up I hung around Main Street, the thoroughfare in GA Camping with food and drink stands and merch tents, to have a few drinks and unwind, mentally preparing myself for the next four days.

From here I knew I was going to have to take it easy. Don't try too hard to experience too much, don't get overstimulated, get enough sleep and don't bother with the after-hours renegade sets.

Main Street on Wednesday night

Thursday, June 22, 2023

Main Street had some great breakfast options. One place served breakfast burritos. The Solar Café made some great vegetarian and vegan dishes, like tofu wraps and black bean burritos, along with smoothies. Waffle Stix made exactly what was in their name. Hot Box made stuff like wraps, loaded fries, rice bowls, and nachos. Another place had bowls of island noodles. Ahli Baba's made pitas with various fillings. At least three of these stands also served coffee. And on my first morning there, I found one where I got an oatmeal bowl with honey and peanut butter.

It was during this festival that I picked up a new habit that most people had already picked up years ago: paying for nearly everything with a credit card. Because I'd drained all my Delta reward points with the Augusta trip, and burned up all my Southwest points with the New Orleans trip and this one, I really needed to replenish them both quickly. From this point on, I paid for everything alternating between my Delta credit card and my Southwest one.

Now I had to go wait in line to use the shower. As usual, there were trailers in the camping areas with showers that you had to pay to use, and of course you have to spend something like an hour standing in a slow-moving line. But I still did this, not just Thursday but Friday and Saturday as well; it's really a necessity if you're constantly moving around outdoors all day in the summer.

I entered the festival when it first opened that day. This being my third Forest, I mostly knew my way around.

The main gate was quite familiar.

Inside the main GA gate is the Tripolee stage. I stopped at one of the bars for a beer, and was pleasantly surprised to see that Bell's Oberon had returned to widely-available house-beer status. So I got one of those. The other beers they had, here and at all the other bars, were Bell's Two Hearted Ale, Angry Orchard cider, Leinenkugel Shandy, Modelo Especial and Oro, and Coors Original and Light. They also had wine, White Claw, hard lemonade, Beat Box, and various cocktails available. Pretty good selection.

I did a slow walk around the grounds to reacquaint myself, and see what had changed since the year before.

The new incarnation of Ranch Arena. Here there's no one playing yet, and it looks like the crew is still getting all the projection screens ready to go.

Sherwood Court has a similar theme as in 2022. All the decorations you see there are animations projected on screens. You'll see more later on as we see the stage with artists performing on it.

As always, an abundance of food stands with an incredibly diverse array of cuisines could be found around the three big stages. There were stands serving up banh mi sandwiches, poké bowls, gyro wraps, falafel, tacos, and various kinds of vegetarian and vegan bowls. If you wanted something a little greasier, there was also grilled cheese, pizza, loaded mac & cheese, burgers & fries, corndogs, and funnel cakes. Some of these stands, like Festi Bowls and The Grilled Cheese Incident, had names that were familiar to anyone who goes to a lot of festivals. Two stands near Ranch Arena served coffee, which was essential for me to stay awake after sunset.

I know a lot of campers like to bring their own food to eat, which is certainly more economical, but I like to eat as much festival food as I can, even if it's rather pricey, because there's always so much stuff there that I like. I got lunch that day from one of those food stands, a gyro wrap with Buffalo chicken.

Sherwood Court was missing something I expected to find there. I'd passed it back by Tripolee without realizing it...

This was the craft beer bar. They still had a big selection, but it was in a smaller space now. In previous years it was a big tent near Sherwood Court, now it was just another drink stand in the Tripolee area.

Now in the evening we're back at Tripolee for J. Worra. This stage is where most of the music was on Thursday.

Did I mention I liked the food here? While hanging around Tripolee I got a shrimp noodle bowl from one of the stands.

Lee Foss was next on Tripolee. This was a good house set.

I didn't do much else on Thursday. I'd wanted to see Odesza, but missed their entire set when I stopped at the camping area for what was only supposed to be a few minutes, but drifted off to sleep for a few hours instead.

Friday, June 23, 2023

Quite a selection of food stands on Main Street to choose from, where to get breakfast? I got some kind of vegan wrap, I think it was a tofu scramble wrap from Solar Café, and it was as delicious as it was steaming hot.

Later, I was walking through the gates just as the festival was opening up.

Walking into the festival in the early afternoon, Fury was warming up Tripolee with a drum 'n bass set.

One of the can't-miss experiences of Electric Forest is the scavenger hunt in Sherwood Forest. There are always secret rooms to be found in Sherwood Forest, and one of them is always reached by finishing the scavenger hunt. First you go to the Time Travel Agency and get a card which contains riddles. Each of the riddles, as you decipher them, will guide you to stamps. You find the stamp, you use it to stamp your card next to its corresponding riddle, and when you've got a card full of stamps you take it back to the Time Travel Agency and get a pin, and use that pin to get into one of the "secret" areas.

At each stop on the scavenger hunt, you had to examine certain items closely to figure out the combination to a lockbox, in which you would find the stamp. For one, there was a table in the forest set for a feast with certain items in certain places, in another there was a clock and a list of times and you had to set the hands on the clock to those times...

In years past, the Time Travel Agency, the secret rooms, and some other cool places to hang out were all in a building called the Hangar. But in 2023 the Hangar was no more. It had mostly been replaced with the new Dream Emporium, while the Time Travel Agency was in its own pavilion in the forest.

Here's the Time Travel Agency.

My scavenger hunt card after getting all the stamps. This took me something like two and a half hours to finish.

So I went back to the Time Travel Agency, got the pin, and then I was off to...not the Hangar but its replacement, the Dream Emporium.

I walked into the Emporium and the first thing to see was a lobby, where I showed someone working there my pin, and I got directed to a door, beyond which I walked through a series of rooms. There wasn't much interesting that I remember. One room had a roller skating rink, but I didn't feel like roller skating and moved on. Another room had a wrestling ring in it, but nothing was happening there at that time. Eventually I was wandering back outside again.

I never entered the Dream Emporium again. I'm sure I would've enjoyed it more, but every other time I saw the place, there were so many people queued up outside, waiting to get in, and it didn't seem worth the trouble.

One of the food stands near Ranch Arena was serving some great vegan grain bowls, one of which I bought for my combined lunch-dinner.

I had one of these. I can't remember which, but it tasted great.

The first big set of the day that I couldn't miss was the String Cheese Incident.

The String Cheese Incident was on for two hours. Great set, with all the jamming and improvisation you'd expect from them, even if I didn't recognize a whole lot of the songs.

With Cheese over with, we went over to Tripolee for Virtual Riot. This was a great headbanging dubstep set, exactly what I'd expect after seeing him at Bass Canyon almost a year earlier.

On the way back to Ranch Arena through the forest, we stopped at Frick Frack Blackjack for a little bit.

If you've never heard of Frick Flack Blackjack, they're always set up at festivals like this--they're also a regular fixture at Hulaween, and have also been at Sonic Bloom and Lightning in a Bottle--where people play blackjack, but instead of money, people gamble with hokey objects they find lying around their homes. They were there every night, but this was the only time I actually stopped there.

Back on Ranch Arena, Illenium was playing his set, which I experienced most of. This was an intense set with a lot of dubstep and 2000s rock sounds. I really liked this, and with all the fireworks, pyrotechnics, guest singers, and guitar solos, it was the highlight of the night.

Saturday, June 24, 2023

Breakfast from the Main Street food court was about as different as possible from the day before: a burrito with egg, cheese and salsa.

While walking through the forest early in the afternoon, perusing some clothing vendors' tents, and eating a spicy Korean chicken bowl from Asian Sensation, I heard someone playing a disco set over on Ranch Arena, which I rather liked. One of the songs was Chicago's "Street Player." The schedule said I was hearing Jellybean Benitez, who I'd never heard of. It wasn't until almost a week later I discovered he was someone I should have heard of. My Facebook feed often shows me old Billboard music charts from the 80s and 90s, and while waiting to board my return flight out of Chicago the next Wednesday, I saw one from 1984 which had a Madonna song on it, "Lucky Star" maybe, with J. Benitez listed as one of the producers. Yep, that was the disco DJ I'd been listening to four days earlier. He's had quite a career.

There was a pretty good band playing on the Honeycomb stage in the middle of Sherwood Forest, but I can't remember the name. This is one of the smaller stages that I didn't spend a whole lot of time at.

Later on in the afternoon, Chromeo played at Ranch Arena. I really liked this set, one of my favorites from this festival. I wasn't too familiar with their songs at that time, but really liked their funky stylings and have listened to them a lot more since then. I also saw that they would be playing again that night at Carousel, and I couldn't miss that one.

The String Cheese Incident started the first of their two Saturday night sets on Ranch Arena after Chromeo wrapped up...

Crowd gathering for Cheese

OK this was pretty cool.

Cheese's first set was followed by a huge intermission, which I mostly spent looking for more clothes to buy that I probably wouldn't be wearing outside of music festivals. After the band took the stage again, I got a tasty açaí bowl from Coconut Bowl and Grill, one of the food stands near Ranch Arena.

The second Cheese set was supposed to be the "big shebang" they do every Forest on Saturday night. But, it wasn't quite as big of a shebang as the year before. The 2022 shebang had raised my expectations maybe just a little too high, with all the fireworks, paragliders jumping from airplanes, and the humongous disco ball hanging over the crowd. This year's shebang didn't have any of that; it wasn't all that different from their Friday set. I'd brought a friend here who had never been to Forest before, and I'd been hyping up the big shebang to him as the high point of the whole festival. It was a great set as far as Cheese sets go, mostly original songs and a few covers with guest singers in the end, but it wasn't the high point of the whole festival I was expecting.

The Cheese set was over after sunset. I took that moment to go back to the camping area, back to my tent for a quick change of clothes, and then headed back inside the gate to Tripolee where Chris Lorenzo was spinning a great house set. I stopped here not just because of the music but because there was something I wanted to do that I could have done at I don't know how many past festivals but just never bothered with: ride a Ferris wheel.

Forest always has a Ferris wheel, and it's always set up near Tripolee, just inside the GA entrance gate. This was my first time actually riding the thing.

Everyone dancing to Chris Lorenzo

GA Camping

The GA entrance gates, with Main Street beyond

One more stop to make that night, and that was Carousel. On the way I passed through Sherwood Forest...

The Carousel Club was where Chromeo was playing their second set. I loved it, but I barely felt like moving at this point, which is why I just sat down on the grass and mulch in the back through the whole thing.

Sunday, June 25, 2023

Just one more day, hang in there, you can do this!

So, what's for breakfast today? Every morning of this festival I went to a different Main Street food stand. This time it was Solar Café for a chilled peanut noodle bowl--a bowl of linguine noodles in peanut sauce--with an iced latte.

Not much interesting happened until after noon, when I returned to another Main Street hangout I'd wanted to check out more: Paula's Pancake Palace. There was a drag show going on then.

I love how they decorated Paula's. It really makes me want some pancakes and coffee...

But I wouldn't be getting any pancakes at that moment. It wasn't long after the drag show that something terribly familiar happened; a big storm moved in causing everything to get temporarily shut down, just like in 2018. The entire festival area was evacuated, all the food stands and vendors on Main Street, including Paula's, closed up shop, and nearly everyone retreated to their camping areas to take shelter. That included me, and pretty soon I was back in group camping, under one of our pavilions with several other people in the camping group waiting for the storm to pass as the torrential rain poured down.

If there's anything I've learned about rain, it's that the harder it falls, the sooner it will be over. I don't think this storm lasted longer than an hour.

My first stop was Paula's again, just to get some pancakes. After that, back into the festival. Unlike the time this happened five years ago, I actually made it back in, despite the long line.

Here's Dogs in a Pile playing at Ranch Arena.

Daily Bread was playing on Sherwood Court. Great chill set for a Sunday evening.

During Daily Bread's set I got my last festival meal from one of the Sherwood Court food stands: a gyro wrap with lamb, something I usually have to get at least once at any festival.

The penultimate set of the festival, for me was Madeon at Sherwood Court. I'd seen Madeon before at Austin City Limits 2021 and really enjoyed that set. This one, two years later, was actually the same "Good Faith Forever" set with all the same visuals and most of the music from his 2019 Good Faith album.

This photo is from ACL 2021. This animation was also used here. All that cryptic writing is in the Imperial Alphabet that Madeon invented. EDM Identity did an interesting deep dive into some of the messages on screen, including on that throne.

These are both from a short video I took during the song "You're On":

This says "YRO," probably referring to the song title.

This says "TELL."

The whole production was really impressive. Madeon's setup consisted of two tables, one with a synthesizer and the other with a DJ console, and a microphone. Because of how the lighting was configured, he always looked like a mysterious silhouette, wearing this wide-brimmed hat and a long coat, in front of the lit-up screen. He even sometimes stood on a platform, obscured by the darker parts of the animations, that would rise and lower to make it look like he was standing on one object or another on the screen.

As the set was drawing to a close, I wondered if we were going to hear "Shelter." I didn't remember hearing it at the ACL set two years before, it hadn't appeared yet in this set, and I thought "maybe it's only considered a Porter Robinson song now?" And then, just as I was thinking that, Madeon said to us, "this is a song I wrote with my dear friend, it's called Shelter." First, he played the whole song on the piano while singing it himself. Then, he turned to the turntables and played the actual track. Perfect ending to this set.

On the way away from Sherwood Court, wouldn't you know it, I ran into some of the people I was camping with. First we spent some time at the silent disco, where there were three DJs spinning some pretty good sets of different genres. After that, it was on to Ranch Arena for the last set of the festival: Above & Beyond.

Above & Beyond's set was the best part of the whole festival for me. They're some of the best trance artists around.

"Good evening Electric Forest people." If you've ever seen Above & Beyond before, you know that they talk to the crowd by typing out messages that appear on the screen in real time.

Just what I needed to end this long festival, an hour and a half of trance I could lose myself in. Above & Beyond played so many of their own tracks, as well as many more from other Anjunabeats artists. The next-to-last song was of course "Sun and Moon," which I'd actually expected to be the last song. This included the "push the button" ritual, in which some people in the crowd get invited onto the stage as the song is paused near the end, and one of them gets to push the button on the DJ console to start it up again. They had done this the last two times I'd seen them, at Euphoria 2016 in Austin and Tomorrowland 2019, but I barely noticed back then until watching videos much later.

With the last set of the last night over, I was soon walking in the huge crowd with everyone else on the grounds, on the way back to the GA camping area. While some of them were probably going to stay up all night dancing to renegade sets, I was headed back to camp to go straight to bed. The next day I'd be on my way to Chicago.

Monday, June 26, 2023

Monday morning, all the food stands had already shut down with their operators packing up. There was nothing to do but pack my own stuff up as a little bit of rain returned. Sitting in my friend's car again, it probably took at least three hours to finally get out of the park. During this time of barely moving, I was able to get out of the car, run over to one of the closing-up food stands, and grab a leftover quesadilla we could split for breakfast.

Looking back, I enjoyed the festival as best as I could, even though for most of the time I really wanted to be at home in bed. On Saturday and Sunday I hardly drank any beer because after a week of gulping so many gallons, I was sick of it. The fest was very well done and I would've enjoyed it a lot more if I hadn't been feeling so drained. The lineup was great, and I loved sets from the String Cheese Incident, Illenium, Gryffin, Chromeo, Chris Lorenzo, Madeon, and most of all Above & Beyond. Sherwood Forest was trippy as always. Delicious, if a little expensive, food abounded.

Even so, there are a few things that were just slightly not as good as in previous years. The Hangar was sorely missed; the Dream Emporium was not the best substitute, with only one way in that required a lot of waiting in line. The craft beer bar was rather underwhelming compared to in the past. And Cheese's Saturday night set wasn't quite the big shebang I was expecting.

With Forest finally out of the way, the next phase of this trip was going to be a short visit to Chicago, followed by a short but much-needed break from vacationing at home before heading off to June Jam in Arizona.

As always, here's all the live sets I was able to scrounge up:

Beyond Wonderland & Electric Forest 2023 Trip: