Electric Forest 2022

Details: Written by Tom Snow; Created: 15 May 2023

I don't think I've felt as much anticipation for any festival as much as the 2022 edition of Electric Forest. The last time I'd been there was in 2018, and it was certainly my favorite festival of that year. In 2019 I was living in Germany, and didn't feel that Forest was quite worth the long trip, as amazing as I'm sure it was. Then in 2020 and 2021 it never happened, because of that inescapable pandemic. By 2022, not only had such a long time passed, but the music lineup was just as loaded as Tomorrowland and Untold.

Getting tickets was quite difficult. Forest 2020 had been cancelled after most or all of its tickets were sold out, and all those tickets were still good for 2022. Some people had sold theirs back. So when ticket sales started for 2022 in January, not much was even left to sell. The website's ticket sale system placed anyone trying to buy tickets in a randomly-sorted queue, and by the time I got to the end of the queue, it was too late and everything was sold out. So I signed up for the official ticket exchange so I could have a chance of buying a ticket off of anyone who had to sell theirs in the future. This finally happened a couple months later.

Getting There

Thursday morning, June 23, 2022, began for me in the Travelodge in downtown Chicago. Because I'd done this before, four years earlier, I thought I knew what I was doing. After checking out of the hotel and getting a forgettable breakfast from 7-11, I spent 50 minutes riding the L Train's Blue Line to O'Hare Airport where I would catch the Forest shuttle I had a ticket for.

I walked into the space in the massive O'Hare complex where I would catch the bus, the same spot where I'd done so four years before. There were plenty of other people there waiting for the same bus. When it arrived, a volunteer who was organizing this bus trip told us, "First, we're gonna go downtown and pick up more wooks." Hey, what? So I didn't have to spend all that time riding the L up here, I could've slept in an hour and just walked to another point downtown and met the bus there? OK, noted for next time.

The bus trip lasted five hours, and we lost another hour entering the Eastern time zone when crossing the Indiana/Michigan state line. Long as the ride was, I had the book I'd been reading on the cross-country train, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, to pass the time. The bus stopped for about an hour at a Wal-Mart in Benton Harbor, Michigan so people could eat lunch and buy any last-minute supplies for camp. I got a sandwich for lunch at Subway, a six inch "Bella Mozza."

The time ticked by as the bus passed through Holland, Grand Haven, and Muskegon, and finally stopped at the festival grounds outside of Rothbury, where at last we could all step out, reclaim our baggage, and walk inside to find our campsites.

Camping Areas

As usual, there were different tiers of camping areas, the biggest being GA. Within GA there were the spaces for people without cars (where I was last time), many more for people who did drive their cars in, group camping which also had spaces for cars, and RV camping.

This year I'd be staying in the group camping area of GA. I was camping in the same space with the fam from Hulaween, who had linked up with a much larger group of over 100 people who had reserved a huge swath of group camping.

Closer to the RV camping area was a trailer with showers, which I found to be adequate.

GA camping also was the home of the Brainery, where one could attend yoga workshops and such, as well as a food court which included the Cereal Bar.

People who had a bigger budget could camp in Maplewoods, whose main selling point was being able to camp under trees' shade, as well as the VIP areas Good Life and Back 40.

Inside the Festival

Seeing this once again really felt like a homecoming of sorts. It had been four years since I last looked at this gate, and so much had happened in those four years, including moving from the US to Germany and moving back.

Like last time, there were six stages. Four of those six were in the same places they were in 2018, with the same names, but with upgraded appearances: Tripolee which was right inside the GA entrance, Ranch Arena where the String Cheese Incident always played, Sherwood Court which lies next to Sherwood Forest, and Carousel which was behind the Hangar. Two other smaller stages were new this year, Observatory and Honeycomb.

Tripolee is the first thing you see when you walk in through the GA entrance.

Ranch Arena

Sherwood Court looked way different than last time, with the whole stained glass theme. It looked even more memorable at night...

Sherwood Court at night

The Carousel Club. Like last time, it was behind the Hangar, but unlike last time, it wasn't attached to the Hangar but was a separate building. You had to walk over sand to get inside, and I didn't spend nearly as much time here as I did last time.

The Hangar has expanded since 2018, now made of two adjoining buildings instead of just one. Both of these had familiar-looking rooms, so I'm not sure which one was the original Hangar and which was new.

And now to step into what makes this festival really special, Sherwood Forest...

We just may have found the original wook here.

Here's Grand Artique. This collective sets up stages at festivals like this one and Lightning in a Bottle. They had not only their music stage but also a trading post which I didn't visit this time.

The Music

The lineup this year was absolutely stacked. There were so many artists I wanted to see, and unsurprisingly no way to see them all because of how many were scheduled at the same times on different stages. In my review of 2021's Suwannee Hulaween, in which I compared it to Forest 2018, I described that iteration of Forest as "mostly a rave with some jam bands, funk, and others." That description still held true in 2022, and nearly everyone who was anyone in those genres was on stage on one of the four nights. The String Cheese Incident played their many "incidents" on Ranch Arena Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The Disco Biscuits and Kitchen Dwellers added some more jam band sounds, Lettuce and SunSquabi represented funk, and there were also some rock acts like Rainbow Kitten Surprise and Blu DeTiger.

Most of the lineup, of course, was for the ravers (people like me) and included the entirety of that spectrum. There were the house producers like Fisher, Sidepiece, Duke Dumont, and John Summit. GRiZ and Big Gigantic were there with their saxophones. For the Lost Lands and Bass Canyon crowd, there were bass-heavy producers like Liquid Stranger, LSDream, Subtronics, Slander, 12th Planet, and Notlö.

Thursday

Thursday night, after I'd set up my tent and explored the grounds, I got to catch Duke Dumont's set and a little bit of LSDream. Headlining the Ranch Arena stage that night was one of the artists I'd wanted to see, Disclosure.

This isn't the best photo I got of Disclosure, rather it's the least bad. It's just hard to get a good pic with all of the lights.

I really loved Disclosure's set. Just about every one of their songs made an appearance in it. "Latch," "When a Fire Starts to Burn," "Magnets," along with almost everything from their newest Energy album, like "Douha (Mali Mali)" and "Ecstasy"...they even played "White Noise," which was what first got me into Disclosure a decade ago.

Here's something that can tell you what a great experience this set was: earlier this year--2023, when I'm writing this--I heard Disclosure's best known song "Latch," which came out in 2013, and I noticed that it now reminds me of something different than what it has in the past. It used to be that listening to "Latch" always reminded me of my life in San Antonio in the mid-2010s, when I listened to it most often. Now, it makes me think of hearing it there in the Forest in 2022.

Here's Elderbrook finishing up his Thursday night headlining set on the Tripolee stage as I was walking out and to the camping area. I'd wanted to catch this set too, but he was on at the same time as Disclosure so I had to miss it. He'll be at Hulaween 2023 so I'll try to see him there.

Friday

Walking through the gate early Friday afternoon, Dino was playing some great DnB on Tripolee, so I had to stay for some of that.

Toro y Moi, who helped popularize chillwave, was on Sherwood Court, and I stayed there for some time before moving on.

As always, Cheese played several incidents on Ranch Arena on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, for several hours in the late evening as the sun set. Friday evening I didn't stick around for an entire incident, but still took in quite a lot of it while walking this way and that way past Ranch Arena. I've really grown to like Cheese as I've heard their music enough to recognize it.

The highest-profile artist I saw on Friday night was GRiZ, who headlined Ranch Arena. GRiZ is a producer whose music ranges from dubstep to funk, augmented by his saxophone playing. He calls it "future funk."

At first, though, I wondered if the schedule had changed at the last minute because what I heard coming from the Ranch Arena stage early in the set sounded more like dubstep than anything else, and I didn't hear any sax. Not to say that I didn't like it, it just wasn't what I expected. I actually asked eomeone else if I was at the right stage, "because GRiZ is supposed to be on, but this doesn't sound like GRiZ." She replied, "Yeah this sounds more Liquid Stranger-y." During that same time, Liquid Stranger was supposed to be playing on Tripolee, so I wondered if they had swapped stages.

And then as I was at the back of the crowd, walking in the direction of Tripolee, I heard the sax start up over Rüfüs Du Sol's "Innerbloom" and that's when I knew the schedule wasn't wrong after all and I really was listening to GRiZ. Overall it was a great set and I'd be back for more on Sunday, and then again in Denver six months later.

Saturday

On Saturday afternoon I walked by Sherwood Court and heard something that was definitely different from anything else being played in the Forest. This was Lightcode. As I discovered months later, this was actually LSDream using an alias for this new musical project. This was certainly electronic music, but nothing anyone could move to in any way; it didn't even have a beat. I would describe it as...a deep soundscape. Most everyone in the crowd was lying flat in the grass, soaking this sound up as if it was sunlight.

I also caught a little bit of Yung Bae on the Tripolee stage. His set was kind of disco-ish, and what drew me to the stage was his playing Jamiroquai's "Little L." He's on the lineup for Hulaween 2023 so I'll have to check out his set there.

Cheese's last incident on Saturday night, what everyone calls "the big shebang," has always been something that can't be missed. It was mostly cover songs, though unlike their other big shebang at Hulaween there's no theme to them. From the moment they first took the stage I noticed a huge crane beside the stage. And then, some time later in the incident, the crane turned around and hung the most enormous disco ball I've ever seen over the crowd.

That disco ball was only the beginning. During an extended medley of Sister Sledge's "We Are Family" and Joe Cocker's "With A Little Help From My Friends," there were skydivers jumping out of a plane and parasailing down to the ground, leaving a trail of sparks. The balloons came out next, with festival workers supporting these huge balloons--a yellow star, a blue star, and a pink heart--slowly walking them around the edge of the crowd. And finally, fireworks!

And this wasn't even the end of the incident, they kept playing for several more songs.

Cheese was only the beginning of the night for me. Next I made my way over to Tripolee for John Summit. This was one of the artists I wanted the most to see at this festival. I'd first found out about him at the end of 2020 when I was living my final months in my apartment in Germany waiting to move to New Mexico, everything was closed because the second Covid lockdown was going on, most of my household goods had already been shipped, and Tomorrowland One World Radio was playing a new track called "The Thin Line," which was based around a sample of Lisa Stansfield. I really liked that song then, and then over the next year and a half liked "Escape" and "Human" even more.

John Summit was definitely one of my favorite sets of this festival. It was a great pumping house set with all of his own tracks I'd gotten to know over the last two years--"The Thin Line," "Escape," "La Danza," "What a Life," "In Chicago," "Make Me Feel," and several more from other people like Depeche Mode's "Enjoy the Silence" and the 90s rave classic, Green Velvet's "Flash." His last track was "Human."

After Summit was over, there was one more set that night I was interested in, the one I most wanted to see out of anyone playing there: Porter Robinson. He's one of my favorite current artists of any genre. Back in 2016 I got to see him share the stage with Madeon at that year's Austin City Limits, but because their hour-long set was at the exact same time as Haim's--another artist I'd wanted to see that weekend--I could only take in half of one and half of the other, and it wasn't enough of any of them. Finally at ACL 2021 I got to see a full Madeon set, and now at Forest 2022 I was at last going to take in a full Porter set.

Porter was starting up at the same time that John Summit was wrapping up. I actually jogged from Tripolee to Ranch Arena so I wouldn't miss anything. Most of the set was devoted to his latest album Nurture, with some older favorites like "Shelter" and "Sad Machine" mixed in. I had gotten familiar with most of the new songs, like "Get Your Wish," "Something Comforting," "Look at the Sky," and "dullscythe" from his set at the direct-to-YouTube 2020 Second Sky virtual festival, which happened in the spring of 2020 when the whole world was locked down. I bought the album from iTunes when it was released a year later.

Porter Robinson has certainly evolved as a musician and a performer since I had last seen him six years earlier. He started out making club hits like "Easy" a decade earlier, before the 2014 Worlds album which was definitely moving in a different direction. Most of his songs up until the latest album featured guest singers, while he sung everything on Nurture himself, with some kind of vocal processing software changing his pitch to make it sound like there were several different singers. He may have started off his career as a DJ, but now he had both turntables and a synth on stage, and sang all his songs with the same processor to raise and lower his voice to match the voice on the album.

One unexpected incident happened near the end: the electricity went out, but not all of it. Porter's microphone still worked, and so did the synth, but that was it. His earpiece was dead, and without that working there was a delay between his playing the piano and his actually hearing the sound through the speakers that were aimed at the crowd. But after a few minutes power was restored and he could finish the set. He was lucky the power came back so quickly; the same problem, I heard, also afflicted CloZee over on Sherwood Court, and the power never came back for her, which is why she got to play a whole other set Sunday evening at Carousel.

Porter Robinson's set had to be my favorite from the whole festival. I'd been waiting years for this, and I was not disappointed. And at the very end, just before he walked off the stage, he even said "Happy Forest!"

Not sure where to go next, I listened to a little bit of Slander's set at Sherwood Court while getting a beer from the craft beer bar. And then, instead of going to any stage, I stopped in Sherwood Forest for what I thought would be a little while but ended up being the rest of the night. We'll get into that later in the blog.

When the festival area finally closed up for the night and everyone had to leave, the party wasn't nearly over yet, thanks to all the renegade sets being played in the RV camping area. They were of varying size and quality. Sometimes it was just one person standing next to an RV behind a set of turntables on a foldable card table, with one or two speakers, and a handful of people dancing to the music there. The first soundsystem I stopped at was one of these. After a few songs, which included Chris Lake's "Turn Out The Lights," I moved on to one with more of a crowd gathered.

This one, the only RV party I got a picture of, had a DJ playing both dubstep and DnB. It was kind of a short preview of the next festival I would experience, Bass Canyon, two months later.

The last one I walked into was just incredible, really went above and beyond compared to everyone else, and I only wish I had a picture of it because it really needed to be seen to be believed. The owners of two RVs, parked next to each other, had turned their space into a makeshift nightclub. The DJ was, I think, on top of one if not in front or inside it, there were people dancing on top the other, with a much bigger dancefloor being the space between the two RVs. And not only that, there was a huge ball pit some people were in.

So if you're camping there, the RV parties are something you can't miss. After the festival closes for the night, RV camping is a whole world of clubbing waiting to be explored.

Sunday

Sunday afternoon GRiZ played a second set at Ranch Arena. This one, subtitled "Chasing the Golden Hour," was mellower than his Friday night set, and some people called it a "detox" set.

Sunday night was kind of a cooling-down for me, being the last night, so I didn't get super into anyone playing that night. I listened to some more Cheese at Ranch Arena, and someone whose name I don't know playing DnB at Grand Artique as I moved from one experience to another.

My last two sets of the festival on Sunday night were both at Tripolee. First was Shiba San, who spun a great pumping house set, but nothing in particular stands out about it.

And finally, Air2Earth. This was actually Porter Robinson, who started using this new alias to play trance music. This was a great way to end the festival. I hadn't listened to any trance all weekend, in fact I don't really listen to it enough anymore and I probably should. Too much of it I liked but didn't recognize. You can find this set in the links at the end, and other Air2Earth sets, like at EDC, are unsurprisingly all over YouTube.

After Air2Earth I was done. I'd planned to go dance the night away at the renegade sets at the RVs, but with my shuttle bus to Chicago leaving the next morning, I decided to call it a night, and a weekend, and retire to my tent.

What I've described here was only a sampling of everything you could have heard that weekend. With everything going on here, with the totally loaded lineup combined with all the other experiences I'm about to get into, it's just impossible to see everyone you want to. I would've loved to take in sets from Fisher, CloZee, Lettuce, Sidepiece, Subtronics, Lab Group, Liquid Stranger, and LP Giobbi, but just couldn't fit them in.

Experiences

The first thing I have to write about here is the secret rooms. Just like every year, there were secret rooms hidden in the Hangar, which required a lot of detective work to find. Back in 2018, I only made it to the Speakeasy, and couldn't find any other. This year, I wanted to get to at least two.

This year, the Hangar consisted of not one but two buildings, and in the back of one of these was a place meant to look like a swanky early-to-mid-20th-Century hotel, named The Dorothy Parker Hotel. All of the secret rooms were part of this "hotel."

First I found my way into the only secret room I had found during my last time here, the Speakeasy. Just like before, I had to get this card from the Time Travel Agency, and take it to certain places in the two Hangars to get stamped. After getting the stamps, I took it back to the Time Travel Agency to get my pin...

They've upped their pin game. This is a whole other level compared to the pineapple pin I got in 2018.

So I showed that pin to one of the "desk clerks" at the Dorothy Parker Hotel who showed me into the Speakeasy.

This is definitely bigger than the one that was there in 2018!

The Speakeasy was a real nice hangout, and I went there no less than three times that weekend. There were quite a lot of entertaining shows going on, as you can see.

So that's one secret room. Back in 2018 I only ever saw that one secret room so I wanted to make it to at least two this year. And, I did! This time, I finally got to visit the Poetry Brothel. Although I admit I didn't find out how to get there on my own; someone else just told me the right thing to ask at the hotel's front desk. I never did find out the "legit" way I was supposed to learn that information. And so after I said whatever I needed to--I don't remember what it was anymore--in the hotel, the desk clerk led me and some other people down a hallway and through a door.

Back here in the Brothel, you can listen to poetry readings from the Poetry Whores--yes, that's what they call themselves. First there were two who read their verse to all of us, and then the crowd split three ways, each group with a different Whore who read us more. I've never listened to many poetry readings in the past, so this was all new to me. I really liked and will recommend this experience.

The Poetry Brothel is not exclusive to Electric Forest. They're a part of the Poetry Society of New York and stage their events in many other locations, of which the Forest is just one. At this point in time while I'm writing this, their next scheduled event is all the way over on the other coast in Los Angeles.

I didn't find my way into any of the other secret rooms. I think I heard there were six, all in the hotel. I did find a video, not long after I got home, shot by someone who worked there, of all of them, but that video seems to have disappeared because I can't find it anywhere no matter how deep I scour YouTube.

So just who was Dorothy Parker, anyway? It seems she was an early 20th century writer known for her razor-sharp wit. Some of her more quotable moments have been collected here. Out of all those, my favorite has to be "Tell him I was too fucking busy--or vice versa."

Outside of the Dorothy Parker Hotel, the Hangar had its usual variety of themed rooms. One room had a tattoo parlor, I never found out if the tattoos were real or not. Another actually had a bowling alley. In another room you could get a massage. There was also the matchmaker where you can fill out a dating profile and they can find you your perfect match. Making one of these profiles was a requirement for getting one of the passport stamps needed for the Speakeasy.

Remember how in 2018 the Speakeasy's entrance was in a mechanic's garage in the Hangar? This year, there appeared to still be a garage there, but with its door closed. I wondered if it was going to open later, but I peered through a crack in the wall and saw nothing but grass behind the "garage door," which was apparently not really a door, and just an homage to years past.

There was another quest in the Hangar that I spent a lot of time on. It involved finding all these clues in innocuous places. The point was to find all these words--peace, night, some, line, over, lunch, lapse, and life--which all have one thing in common: they can all form new words when combined with "time." Once I'd figured all these words out, I went back to the Time Travel Agency and was rewarded with another pin, and...well that was it. Just the pin, which couldn't get me into any secret rooms.

In the forest you'll find an electric piano called the Oculus Organ. Most of the time, anyone could stop by and play a tune on it, but there were times when some of the festival artists played some not-widely-announced sets here. Porter Robinson actually played here for about a half hour, I think, on Sunday afternoon, and I totally missed it! I was, in fact, really close by, and I heard someone playing "Shelter" on the piano, and just assumed it was another festival-goer like me. I even inadvertently recorded a few seconds of this while I was taking a video of some passing performance artists. Then, back at my campsite I was going through Facebook, found a "story" from Porter Robinson from several hours earlier where he announced he was going to be at the Oculus Organ. So, that was really Porter I heard playing back there? Yeah, it was.

This space was called the Library. All the tables had bookshelves by them, stacked with old books and magazines. Occasionally there were amusing performances on the stage, like this guy doing this silly routine with a bunch of derby hats.

As expected, Frick Frack Blackjack was also there in Sherwood Forest. This is the place where people play blackjack but instead of betting money, they gamble with hokey, cheesy items they have lying around their homes, which, if they lose, will probably be displayed here. Every time I passed the place was during the daytime, and when it was open at night I never even thought to go there. That's just too bad, because I actually brought a couple items, an old baseball glove and a book called How to Make Anyone Fall in Love with You that I still can't believe I ever bought, that I wanted to gamble away. Maybe next year.

I've also got to mention the Complimentary Bar. I have to mention it because it's the creation of two of my friends from the San Antonio days, though like me they've moved away from there since then. This is what happens here: anyone can stand behind the bar and give out compliments to anyone who stops by. That's it! People who haven't patronized this "bar" might find this a strange concept at first, but once you've been there and done this, you'll find yourself really enjoying it. The bar has been making appearances at festivals since 2018, including at Hulaween (in the Spirit Lake area) along with just about every other festival that happens at the Spirit of the Suwannee. They were actually at Forest in 2018 and 2019, but both times they were set up in the Good Life VIP camping area; 2022 was the first year the bar was in Sherwood Forest and could be visited by everyone in the festival.

The last thing I have to say about Sherwood Forest is all the people I met there who I just never would've met, and who probably never would've met each other, anywhere else. First I met someone originally from Brooklyn but now living in Chicago, who was talking about how he couldn't figure out how to eat a Chicago pizza. Someone else said you have to eat it with a knife and fork, like a pie, and he said, "wow, I've always heard a pizza called a pizza pie, now it all makes sense." Like he'd just had this great revelation. Then someone with the most epic handlebar mustache joined us. He handed everyone these card with a picture of him in a pool along with his Instagram handle @joeyhandlebars on it. He was a hairdresser. All this time there was a drag queen, dressed exactly like Frank-N-Furter from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, sitting there eating two pieces of pizza, one stacked on the other, in the most sexy, seductive, slow way possible. Now where else are you ever going to meet all these people at the same time and place?

And finally, back in GA camping was the Brainery. I did go to one workshop, I think it was something to do with yoga, but other than that, there just wasn't anything that interested me there. I should've spent some more time around there, because this review says there some memorable late-night comedy shows.

There's so much to do, see, and explore in the festival, and much of it I missed out on, making me think I need to check out those things I missed next time. But there's only so much time during the festival, and no matter how hard you try to soak it all up, you're going to miss out on something.

The Food Scene

The quality and variety of food was just as amazing as it always is, so much that I was often reluctant to eat what we had at camp, even if our own supply was cheaper. While there were food stands were scattered around the festival, most were concentrated around Ranch Arena and in the GA Camping area. Some of the delicacies I enjoyed were:

Vegan paella (a box of rice, vegetables, and peas)
Sweet potato tacos (fried sweet potatoes, red cabbage, black beans, chipotle aioli)
Vegan bowl with greens, tofu, black beans, salsa, guacamole
Falafel wrap
Three Sisters Bowl (black and red beans, squash, corn, quinoa, onions)
Greek salad and falafel from a food truck by Sherwood Court

The Cereal Bar was back at GA Camping, with its selection of sugary breakfast cereals many of us remembered growing up with. Unlike in 2018, when this was a favorite hangout spot for me, in 2022 I only ever stopped here once, for breakfast on Sunday morning.

Some other stuff you could get included pizza by the slice, deep fried cheese curds, grilled cheese from the Grilled Cheese Incident, Vietnamese fusion (noodle bowls, rice bowls, Banh Mi, cold brew, spring rolls), and noodle bowls made by the hilariously-named Send Noodz.

The house beers were different now than four years earlier. Back in 2018, every bar sold the Michigan-brewed Bell's Oberon, along with Bud and Bud Light. In 2022, the Bud products were swapped with Coors, while Bell's had been replaced with another Michigan brewery, Founders. The Founders beers on offer were All Day IPA, All Day Vacay, Centennial IPA, and 4 Giants and Haze of Destiny; I don't think I tried any of them because I'm not much of a fan of IPAs and didn't know at the time that the All Day Vacay was a wheat ale. There were also canned wines available, other carbonated hard drinks like Four Loko and White Claw, as well as a few cocktails. Additionally, the bars near the Tripolee stage also sold Pabst Blue Ribbon and Modelo.

Just like the last time I was here, there was a craft beer bar near the Sherwood Court stage. If you were missing the Bell's Oberon that had been ubiquitous in Forests past, it was available here.

Final Thoughts

Without a doubt, this was the best festival of the whole year. It might even be my favorite festival I've ever been to, although I'm not sure I want to make such a heavy statement. When it comes to the artist lineup, it was right up there with Tomorrowland 2019 and Untold 2019 with the sheer amount of big name talent that was there. All the other experiences, all the stuff in Sherwood Forest and the Hangar, was just as good as in 2018's Forest, or Hulaween's Spirit Lake. The renegade sets were wonderful too, turning the RV camping area into a whole other festival after hours. The only thing I can't say too much about was the Brainery, which didn't feature anything that really appealed to me, unlike 2018's Brainery, or any of the many learning pavilions at Lightning in a Bottle.

I'm already confirmed to go to the next Electric Forest, 2023, and as of the time I'm writing this, it's just over a month away. I already know it will be an unforgettable experience. And this time, I promise not to wait nearly a year to write a blog about it.

I got the pin for $35 from someone selling them in GA camping. It's really impressive how many artists' logos they managed to squeeze in there.

Want to watch some full live sets?