The Texas Eclipse Festival

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The Texas Eclipse festival could have been the biggest and most perfect festival I've ever seen. Not only would a total solar eclipse happen on the last day, but it had the most stacked musical lineup I've ever seen, along with an equally-impressive lineup of guest speakers giving some interesting talks. For those of us who often go to festivals, this should have been our Woodstock, but from what I heard later, it was turning into a repeat of that other Woodstock which isn't so fondly-remembered, which may be why it was unexpectedly canceled on the morning of the last day.

I can't remember when I found out that this festival was happening, but I know it wasn't until late February that I knew I could take the time off of work to go there, and bought my ticket. As the festival date got closer and closer I was feeling more anticipation for it than I had for a festival in quite a long time. There going to be a total solar eclipse, something I'd never experienced before, as well as the most amazing festival lineup I'd ever seen.

This was an artist lineup that included Big Gigantic, Dirtwire, Joe Russo's Almost Dead, Moontricks, STS9, SunSquabi, The Disco Biscuits, The Floozies, The String Cheese Incident, Tycho, Vulfpeck, Barclay Crenshaw, Boogie T, CloZee, Level Up, LSDream, Megan Hamilton, Of The Trees, Opiuo, Subtronics, Tipper, Truth, Zeds Dead, Bob Moses, Charlotte de Witte, LP Giobbi, Paul Oakenfold, Treavor Moontribe, Atyya, Dimond Saints, Eprom, David Starfire, Desert Dwellers, Equanimous, Skysia, and Vincent Antone...and that's not even a quarter of the lineup, only the most recognizable names and those I've seen before. More quantity AND quality than I've ever seen before or since. There's jam and funk bands in there, dubstep producers, trance DJs, future bass, psytrance...this was going to be like a big mashup of Hulaween, Gem & Jam, Sonic Bloom, Lightning in a Bottle, Electric Forest, a little bit of Bass Canyon, and various psytrance festivals I've never been to, all in one. Like I wrote before, this should have been our Woodstock.


My wristband, along with a pair of eclipse glasses and my car camping pass sticker, showed up in the mail a week or so before the festival.

Burnet, Texas is quite a long drive from Clovis, New Mexico. I spent Thursday afternoon and evening doing a long drive from Clovis down to the small and isolated city of San Angelo, Texas, about 2/3 of the way to Burnet, where I spent the night.

Friday, April 5, 2024

After something like an hour and a half hightailing it down more highways, I made it to the town of Llano (pronounced "LAN-oh"...yes, really) I met up with two friends who we all thought I'd be camping with. When we all were finished stocking up on supplies we needed, which included beer for me, we caravanned the rest of the way to our destination.

At the entrance to the festival, we unsurprisingly had to wait in a long line of cars to get in. We had to have our camping pass stickers affixed to our windshields when we reached a certain point where volunteers would direct us where to go. And that's where I got split up from my friends permanently; they had GA Car Camping while I, strangely, had mistakenly purchased Family Car Camping. Did I hit the wrong button when I bought my tickets to this event? Talking to the staff members there, I tried to trade this for a GA camping pass, but GA Camping was sold out.

So, the two friends I had expected to camp with headed off to GA while I drove to Family Car Camping, never to see them again that weekend. Cell phone signal was almost nonexistent for the whole festival, and the last I heard, they went to a campground called Over Yonder.

It took a frustratingly long time to get set up. Getting to the right spot was challenge because the directions I got weren't precise enough and I made a wrong turn. When I did get to the right spot, there was one volunteer there who was a bit swamped directing all these cars to this, that, and the other spot. But she did eventually get through them and show me where to park. Looking back, this may have been a sign that way more people went to this festival than the organizers had expected.

Finally I parked in a spot in Family Car Camping. As the "Family" part suggests, this is where everyone who brought their young kids was camping. But that wasn't really a bad thing, there were cool people camped next to me who I got to know, and the presence of families with kids meant that no one was going to be blasting dubstep all through the night.

I've actually been to Reveille Peak Ranch many times before, always to run obstacle races. Every year on one weekend in the spring, Spartan Race stages their Austin Sprint and Austin Super there. When I lived in San Antonio, I did one of those, usually the three-mile Sprint, every year for six years.


This was the only thing there that looked familiar, other than the sign at the entrance. Climbing over this bridge was part of the route in 2018; I've still got a map of that year's race course.

Wondering where to find my friends now, I looked at a festival map which had all the campgrounds labeled. The GA car camping areas were named Alamo, Tower, The Pasture, The Flats, Horseshoe, Grove, and Vista...strange, not one of them was called Over Yonder. That may have been a hint at some of the behind-the-scenes issues this festival was having; more on that much later.

Whatever problems were going on, this festival was still the fantastic result of a huge collaborative effort between 12 festival-promoting art collectives from all over the world. Also, I think the people at the top, who brought all these collaborators together, were the same people behind the Oregon Eclipse festival back in 2017.

The festival grounds were huge, ensuring anyone here was going to rack up well over ten thousand steps every day. Inside the entrance nearest my campsite, there was a long path lined by food trucks as well as one of the pavilions used for yoga and guest speakers. From there I could look to one side and see a different part of the festival way off in the distance...


Some of these structures looked a little Lightning in a Bottle-ish, too.

The food was exactly what you'd expect. The food stands included perennial festival favorites like Dump City Dumplings, the Grilled Cheese Incident, and Festi Bowls, as well as Space Fruit smoothie café, Fistful of Tacos, Menya Jiro (serving Japanese food), Bill Yum's Bites (serving Bahamian food), and many others where you could find fried rice, Thai noodles, empanadas, pizza, smoothies, cold brew coffee, and much more. There were some Texas food trucks there, including Shawarma Point, The Big Red Trailer (serving Philly cheesesteaks), Mr. Gumbo, and Taco Baby.

The drinking situation was pretty good, too. There were bars all over the place and this was the menu at all of them:


I can't remember what the "value beer" was anymore. Lone Star? Coors Light? And notice, they had liquor shots! You might think "yeah, and?" but that was a big deal considering this was Texas, and most festivals in this state in the last few years, like ACL and Float Fest, have sold nothing but beer and wine

There were no artists on Friday I was interested in, so I spent the rest of the day exploring and familiarizing myself with the humongous festival grounds, occasionally enjoying a beer or a shot along the way, and eventually getting some Dump City dumplings and one of Bill Yum's Bahama Bowls for dinner.


One of the food courts.


The Moon stage still under construction.


My first look at the Sun stage. Later in the weekend, this stage would host some amazing psytrance.

Saturday, April 6, 2024

My car's fully-reclined driver's seat wasn't the most comfortable bed, but was still more serviceable than a leaky air mattress.

There were a few clusters of food stands in the camping areas. At the one nearest me I got a pretty good breakfast: a big pizza slice and a cold brew coffee.

In that same general area were trailers with showers. The lines of people waiting weren't nearly as long as at some other festivals, thankfully. But when I finally made it into one of the shower trailers, I found it flooded with water up to my ankles. This was probably another sign of trouble behind the scenes. Well, at least the showers worked and there was warm water.

Later, inside the festival, I got an interesting concoction called Shakti Chai from Elixart and made my way to...


Meow Wolf! That wonderful immersive art experience, which I've been through in Santa Fe, Denver, and Grapevine, Texas had set up their own little area at this festival.

Being a temporary outdoor exhibit, this Meow Wolf couldn't be the experience that their permanent locations are. Still something to see, though.


If you haven't been in a Meow Wolf, this is pretty typical.


Those signs tell you where all the Meow Wolf locations are. Denver, Las Vegas, Santa Fe, Grapevine, and...Houston? "Coming Soon" it says. Wow, they're building another one! Why Houston, I wonder?

There was an interesting talk I wanted to get to around noon. The noted mycologist Paul Stamets was going to be there and I thought would be worth listening to.


Paul Stamets gave a pretty interesting talk about psilocybin mushrooms (or "magic mushrooms" as some of us know them), the history of their use, and their potential for treating mental health issues like PTSD and depression. A video of the whole talk is on YouTube.

I got lunch from a Japanese food stand, Menya Jiro. They had some great meat-filled dumplings there, known as gyoza.

And now back to the music. I knew Dirtwire was going to play a great set, having seen them once before at Gem & Jam. They're a band that defies description, which incorporates an amazing variety of styles and instruments into an electronic base. They've coined a few new labels like "swamptronica" to describe it.


Dirtwire on the Lone Star stage. Not the best photo, but I couldn't get a better one.

On the Sky stage that afternoon was none other than British trance legend Paul Oakenfold.


Now here's someone I've wanted to see for a long time! This is someone I've been listening to since the mid-2000s, and he's been around for even longer.

After Oakenfold was finished, I got a Festi Bowl for dinner. If you go to festivals like this one, you'll certainly find Festi Bowls among the food stands. You want a bowl full of rice, garbanzo beans, at least three kinds of vegetables, and some kind of delicious, spicy sauce? Stop here.

Had to get a cold brew coffee, too, since I had many more hours of music to experience that night, starting with...


Some dreamy, trippy dubstep served up at the Eclipse stage by Truth.


Another one of my irritatingly fuzzy photos. That's Big Gigantic, who played a great set on the Lone Star stage.

After Big Gigantic I found myself over at Meow Wolf... 


This place wasn't just an art installation, but there were events going on there too, like this burlesque show.

Headlining the Lone Star stage was none other than the String Cheese Incident! This is one of the biggest jam bands in the country, and those of us who go to a lot of festivals have seen them many times at Electric Forest and Suwannee Hulaween.


Yeah I didn't get many good nighttime photos.

I've been to so many Cheese sets at those other two festivals, that this one didn't particularly stand out. But that's just fine because I can't not enjoy a Cheese show.

Sunday, April 7, 2024

Sunday didn't really start for me until afternoon, since after breakfast and a long walk around the camping areas, I went back to my car and slept some more. Apparently I hadn't gotten enough sleep the night before.

That breakfast, by the way, was a stuffed beignet. The food selection here was really the best. And speaking of the food selection, there was also a green bus just inside the nearest gate to me that was selling fresh fruits. I had to buy some of those to take back to the car before beginning another festival day.


While walking around the festival before things really got going, I found that Incendia was here! I've been to this stage at Hulaween a few times. At night, this all would've been on fire. Unfortunately I never got around to visiting this stage when anyone was playing.

Playing at the Lone Star stage in the early afternoon was Moontricks, who I wanted to see. They have this sound they call "bootstomping bass" which sounds both electronic and Appalachian. I'd already seen them once at Gem & Jam two years earlier.


Moontricks on the Lone Star stage. It was a great set, but a little difficult to enjoy standing right under the burning hot sun.

Among the food trucks that were lining the path from the gate nearest my car to the Lone Star stage, I saw an old favorite from Austin: Shawarma Point. They serve these great Mediterranean wraps and bowls the I used to enjoy at Austin City Limits and Float Fest every year. Here, I got a delicious falafel wrap.

At the Movement pavilion, which was mostly used for yoga, I had caught little pieces of a few interesting talks, but this time I got there to listen to a whole one. Jennifer Dumpert's talk was about the hypnagogic state between sleep and wakefulness. Have you noticed that every night when you fall asleep, you'll spend a short time in a not-quite-asleep-but-not-quite-awake state where you see, hear, or feel strange sensations? That's the hypnagogic state, and Dumpert has some fascinating ideas on how you can use that state for liminal dreaming to improve your life.

Most of the rest of the afternoon and evening I spent at the Sun stage which was all psytrance. Before then I'd heard a little bit of psytrance and thought it was all right, but here I found myself really getting into it. Psytrance can be loud, fast-paced, and sometimes bass-heavy, but somehow feels really hypnotic at the same time. From the schedule, I learned the artists I was hearing there were supposed to be Rising Dust and Barakuda...but looking at my pictures, the first of those didn't look anything like Rising Dust.


The schedule said Rising Dust was supposed to be on at this time, but this is clearly someone else. I think this may have been Swami Harami, who was scheduled for early Saturday morning.

The DJ who took over for him, however, I know for sure was Barakuda.

After sundown, I decided to leave Sun to go see Barclay Crenshaw over on the Eclipse stage. Barclay Crenshaw is Claude VonStroke's real name. I'd been to two Claude VonStroke sets before and really enjoyed them, which is why I checked out this one, but as Barclay Crenshaw his set was less house and more hip hop. I guess that's why he was using a different name for this set. After a few minutes I decided I'd rather be dancing to psytrance and went back to the Sun stage.

So I enjoyed the psytrance for even longer, but eventually I had to leave again, and find my way to the Lone Star stage for a funk band I really wanted to see, Vulfpeck.


Vulfpeck is a funk band from Michigan I'd heard of before, but didn't really start listening to until preparing for this festival this year. They try to replicate the sound of early-1960s session musician collectives, like the Wrecking Crew, and their music has a lot of Fender Rhodes keyboard sounds. I've since downloaded their Thrill of the Arts and Shvitz albums which I've enjoyed.

I've also wondered what the deal was with that name. "Vulfpeck" is exactly how a German person would pronounce "wolfpack." I've found a pair of decade old interviews with Jack Stratton who didn't say where he got the name from, but did say that he got the idea to form the band after reading an article about 1970s German producer Reinhold Mack, and that made him want to start a rhythm section that would sound like what a German version of the Wrecking Crew or the Funk Brothers would have sounded like, if such a band had existed. So that may partially explain the name.

After Vulfpeck I was ready to go back to camp and turn in for the night. As I hiked up the trail past all the food trucks, Of The Trees took over the Lone Star stage, and their show included an amazing drone show. When I turned around and looked back, I saw this:

Monday, April 8, 2024

This was it, this was going to be the big day of the eclipse! The weather that morning looked a little bit cloudy, also rather breezy and it felt like there may be rain on the way, but not bad enough to ruin the eclipse.

While standing in line waiting to take a shower, I and everyone else heard announcements blaring from speakers mounted on the staff's golf carts driving around. They said that the festival was canceled due to inclement weather! They also said that everyone could stay around to watch the eclipse, but everyone had to leave after that.

Inclement weather? Seriously? Looking at the sky, the day may not have looked like it was going to be hot and sunny like Sunday, but it sure didn't look like there were thunderstorms or tornados coming. When I first heard the announcement I thought it was a prank, but no, it was serious. No one was getting back into the festival area again.

I was more than a little disappointed. There was still a lot of music scheduled for Monday that I wanted to experience, including LP Giobbi, STS9, Charlotte de Witte, and Bad Snacks. Also, after perusing so many vendor tents, I had planned to wait until Monday to buy plenty of clothes and such from them, and now that wasn't going to happen.

I still had a chance to track down my long lost friends, though! There were pedicabs taking people to and from far-flung parts of the campgrounds, accepting money through methods like Venmo, and I paid one to take me all the way to Over Yonder. This was quite a ways away from the Family Car Camping--the name "Over Yonder" was pretty accurate--and the pedicab driver had to weave around the endless lines of cars that were quickly clogging up all the roads.

I heard later that the festival had been badly oversold, leading to far too many people showing up to camp than there was space made for. That was why the organizers had to quickly set up this impromptu Over Yonder campground at the last minute to accommodate everyone. This space was huge and sprawling and it looked bigger than any of the other car camping areas I had seen during my walks around the grounds on earlier days.

I walked from one row of parked cars to another, searching in vain for my friends who I had been separated from when we entered grounds on Friday. Messaging was impossible as there was still no cell phone signal. Every now and then I had to stop, put on my eclipse glasses, and look at the sun. The moon was gradually moving in front of it.

As the moon blocked more and more of the sun, I gave up my search and decided to just watch the eclipse and head out. With the sun being gradually, progressively blocked, the daylight became gradually dimmer. This can seem strange to anyone who hasn't experienced it before. Much like during the previous year's annular eclipse, which I also watched, the sunlight level was similar to early morning or dusk, but with the sun, paradoxically, still shining blindingly far above.

I stopped at a place where a few other people had gathered, where there was an amateur DJ spinning some 2000s trance music. As he had Motorcycle "As The Rush Comes" playing, the sky began to get noticeably dimmer. Putting the eclipse glasses back on, I looked up at the sun again and there wasn't much left. The moon had almost completely obscured it. The crescent that was the sun got thinner and thinner and then...

Totality. The sky was now as dim as late evening. Hanging up where the sun used to be was nothing but a mysterious white ring that one could look at without eclipse glasses. I tried getting a picture but it was too washed out, of course. But this is what the surrounding area looked like:


1:35pm never looked so dark.

The totality lasted something like four or five minutes. During that time one could actually look at the sun, now reduced to a thin ring of light shining from behind the moon, without damaging one's eyes, and the sky was dark enough that stars were visible. Seeing this, I knew I had to find a way to experience more in the future.

The moon continued to pass in front of the sun and totality ended, with the sunlight increasing again and daylight returning. With nothing left to do here, I walked back to my car, and I don't remember how long that took from that far away. By the time I made it back, most of my camping neighbors were already gone. I broke down my tent, which I had never slept in the whole weekend, started up the car, and joined in one of the slow moving queues waiting to exit.

Leaving Reveille Peak Ranch took forever, with so many people on the roads at one time. Even after I made it to the entrance, there was still a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam on the roads all the way to Burnet.


The entrance to Reveille Peak Ranch. It's a sign I remember seeing from the days when I was running a Spartan Race here every year.

At one point in the exit traffic jam, there were news crews speaking to random people in the cars. One of them asked me if I had a good time there and I said I had a great time, because overall I did!

I got to experience a festival that combined all the best parts of Electric Forest, Lightning in a Bottle, Sonic Bloom, and probably more I've never been to. Not only did I get to see Cheese, Moontricks, Dirtwire, Vulfpeck, and Big Gigantic, but also got to finally experience a set from Paul Oakenfold who I'd wanted to see for many years, and discovered I really like psytrance. And we can't forget the impressive array of talks and presentations; Paul Stamets certainly added to the star-studded lineup there. And finally, I got to see a total solar eclipse for the first time!

In the weeks since, I found out about all the problems that were going on beyond my notice. One thing I heard was that at least one person died of an overdose because there weren't enough medics there. Five months later at the Unison festival I met some other people who had also been to Texas Eclipse, who said that it was so badly oversold there just weren't enough staff or medics available to be able to help everyone. Since the "inclement weather" never materialized, the likelihood is that this was the real reason the festival was canceled early. I suspect the organizers were afraid this would turn into another Woodstock '99 if they let it go on.

The organizers, meanwhile, say that the event wasn't oversold, and are standing by that.

But still, the thing I remember the most about the whole weekend was seeing that eclipse. This made me want to be an eclipse chaser. That night in a San Antonio hotel room, I had my laptop set up and was looking for information on the next few solar eclipses and where they will be visible from. The next one will be in 2026 and will be visible from Iceland and Spain. I've heard that the people behind Texas Eclipse and Oregon Eclipse are already planning a Barcelona Eclipse festival, but I really would love to see Iceland...well there's still two years to think about that.

Here's all the live sets I was able to find out there. Just looking at this list, you can see what an amazing lineup this was. There's so much here I wish I could have seen while I was there, but when you have such a loaded lineup on so many stages it's impossible to not miss out on a lot.

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