Lollapalooza kicked off the August festival season by setting the bar high! Over the course of three days, Chicago’s Grant Park saw 300,000 festivalgoers and 130 artists attend the festival madness, and included headlining performances from Eminem, Skrillex, Calvin Harris and Outkast.
But it’s not over yet! Boom Festival opened its gates only a couple of hours ago and thousands of international ravers are currently making their way over for a week of magical extravaganzas.
In the pipeline are festivals in Sweden, Canada, Hungary, and in several cities across the UK and the US. Year in and year out, we are spoilt with choice when it comes to music festivals.
Boom Festival
August 04 – 11, 2014
Idanha-a-Nova, Portugal
“Boom is not only a festival, it’s a state of mind. Inspired by the principles of Oneness, Peace, Creativity, Sustainability, Transcendence, Alternative Culture, Active Participation, Evolution and Love, it is a space where people from all over the world can converge to experience an alternative reality.” – Boom Festival.
Held biannually just off the border of Spain, in Portugal, Boom Festival is a bohemian mishmash of art, music, culture and spirituality, where every festival goer is a VIP; there are no echelons, no VIP areas, no special treatments.
Boom Festival first began in 1997, where people from all over the world would flock over to Portugal for a weeklong festival of psychedelic music, including trance, chill-out, alternative and all other sorts of electric styles. Art and performance are also a big attraction, with circus, street theatre, jugglers, fire shows, film screenings, and a variety of sculptures scattered across the grounds.
Boom Festival also focuses its sustainable spirit, art and culture, and energy to create a transformational experience for those who seek one. Free spirits are encouraged to communicate without words in order to eliminate all social and cultural norms that influence our daily lives.
The festival also provides a Healing Area, in which group workshops, sound journeys, mediation and therapy take place, and where love, compassion, wisdom, beauty, patience, acceptance, forgiveness and kindness are practiced.
Boom also has an Environmental Program and has been recognised with the Outstanding Greener Festival Award. It strongly focuses on clean energy, encourages participants to recycle and uses biodegradable products.
Boom Festival starts today (August 4). If this bohemian experience speaks to the inner you, check out the website and book your tickets for Boom Festival 2016!
http://www.boomfestival.org/boom2014/home/
Way Out West
August 07 – 09, 2014
Gothenburg, Sweden
Seen as the “Swedish Woodstock” or the Glastonbury of the 21st Century, Way Out West has become one of the most popular cultural festivals in Europe, centred on music, film, art and a carbon-free footprint. The Swedish festival first began in 2006, after Sony, Spotify and Stockhold-based music producer Luger teamed up to host Way Out West.
With a healthy and eco-friendly mind-set, where alcohol and drugs are trumped by dancing, where camping and crowd-surfing aren’t permitted, where all food served in the park is vegetarian, and where all plates and cutlery are biodegradable and all festival merchandise are made from organic materials, it’s no wonder Way Out West has won several awards, including MTV’s O Award for Most Innovative Festival.
During the daytime, there is a selection of 50 different musical acts on three different stages, food stalls, a merchandise market and street art installations. The park itself has a zoo, a couple of lakes, and both playing and picnic fields.
At nightfall, Way Out West transforms itself into Stay Out West. Venues, pubs, clubs, museums and churches all around the city open their doors to host a diversity of events, with international acts as well as local acts providing entertainment until the early hours of dawn.
Film and talks are also a big part of the experience. Music videos screenings and documentaries are played in theatres across the city, while art, advertising and journalism talks are held in auditoriums.
The musical roster is an impressive one and has seen the likes of Prince, Florence and The Machine, Sigur Rós, Public Enemy and Manu Chao bless the stage. This year’s line-up is of no disappointment either – acts such as Outkast, Clean Bandit, Jamie XX, Queens of The Stone Age, Icona Pop and Little Dragon are to perform (to list a just few!).
Shambhala
August 08 – 11, 2014
Salmo, Canada
Apparently at Shambhala, “DJ’s play in the heart of the forest out of burnt-out, old grown cedar tree stumps while surrounded on all sides by fire-breathers, hula dancers, fairies, furries, and various creatures of night.” – 300fest.
Every year, the Bundschuh family open the gates to their 500-acre Salmo River Ranch, to host the largest EDM festival in Western Canada. Shambhala Festival, first created by the Bundschuh kids in 1998, with two stages and 500 attendees, now has six stages and over 10,000 attendees. With 200 shambassadors (volunteers) and no corporate sponsorship, this extended family affair, filled with team spirit and a feel-good, cosy, home-y vibe, has achieved more than any working ranch, with cows, horses, pigs, chickens, and miniature donkeys, would have expected.
More than just an EDM rave, Shambhala has art installations, painted murals, yoga platforms, meditation bays, craft workshops, ethical fair trade vendors, hip-hop and beatboxing acts.
Sziget
August 11 – 18, 2014
Budapest, Hungary
Sziget festival has been described as “an electronically amplified, warped amusement park.” Held on the island of Óbudai-Sziget, in the heart of Budapest, Sziget has become one of the most popular European festivals, and has recently received the merit of “Europe’s Best Major Festival” for its 24h jumble of music, art, food, performance and regional culture. There’s also a luminarium!
The festival has been deemed the Eastern European Burning Man (see below), but its array of musical experiences sets it apart from any other festival. The musical diversity showcased at Sziget certainly has something for everyone.
Plus, the city of Budapest is itself a huge attraction. You’d be crazy not to escape from the island madness for a day and discover one of the only cities left in Europe that has a raw vibe to it.
This year’s line-up includes Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, Skrillex, Bastille, Imagine Dragons, The Kooks, Stromae, London Grammar and so many more.
This one is a definite must! For more details, visit the website.
Creamfields
August 22 – 24, 2014
Daresbury Estate, United Kingdom
Creamfields, one of the largest electronic dance music festivals in Britain featuring live acts and DJ’s, has set off a dozen other Creamfield festivals around the world. The 3-day event, held on August bank holiday weekend in Daresbury, expects 200 artists to fill 11 stages during the course of the weekend. Party people are looking forward to huge LED screens, VIP lounges, cocktail bars, fairground rides, and silent discos, to top off their rave experience that includes a cocktail of genres such as drum ‘n’ bass, techno, dubstep, electronica and deep, hard, tribal, funky and indie house.
Creamfields was spawned by the success of Liverpool’s nightclub, Cream. The success of Cream’s weekly music night that showcases international DJ’s led to Cream hosting a night in Amnesia, the award-winning and world famous nightclub in Ibiza. Cream then launched itself into the festival market in 1998. Creamfields has since expanded its reach and has organised festivals in Dublin, Buenos Aires, Andalucía, and more.
Creamfields has one of the most vibrant summer music festival vibes around. This year’s line-up is yet again unbelievable.
For a last minute chance to see Avicii, Deadmau5, Armin Van Buuren, Steve Angelo, Eric Prydz, Maya Jane Cole, Skream, Pete Tong, Joris Voorn and so many others, all in one place, check out the website!
Notting Hill Carnival
August 24 – 25, 2014
London, United Kingdom
“A battle of the bands makes for some frenetic and full-contact dancing. The costumes are as beautiful as the copious amounts of bare flesh, with silver-sequined G-strings shaking to the sound of samba.” – 300fest.
Recognised as one of the largest street festivals in the world, Notting Hill Carnival uses music and dance as a means to interconnect cultures. The festival was first set up to celebrate diversity and shake off racial tensions.
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Before Notting Hill became a “poshemian” (boho and posh) district around the 1980s, it was a run-down neighbourhood home to West Indian immigrants. In January 1959, following the 1958 Notting Hill race riots in which a mob of 300 plus working-class whites attacked West Indian immigrants in their Notting Hill homes, an immigrant from Trinidad decided to throw a carnival in St. Pancras Town Hall in a celebration to repair cultural differences and celebrate heterogeneity. Since, it has escalated to the Jamaican hippie-inspired festival that it is today and brings in at least £100 million a year.
With its mixture of scenes, from family-friendly events to parades with costumes that take on a sexy twist on “Adult Day”, with a mixture of floats ranging from masquerade to steel drums to calypso and SOCA, the musical clashes end up sounding like a mashup of calypso vs. drum ‘n’ bass and dancehall vs. disco.
There’s also a bunch of street vendors along the route, selling jerk chicken and other typical Caribbean dishes in between the music and dancing.
Notting Hill Carnival is one of the wildest outside of Rio. Click here for more info about the event.
Burning Man
August 25 – September 1, 2014
Black Rock Desert, Nevada, United States
The Burning Man Project takes place in the middle of the Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, USA. For 7 days, Black Rock City is a place of community, art, self-expression and self-reliance, where the people are guided by ten principles that echo the cultural spirit of the event: radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation, immediacy.
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It is a place built by the participants from scratch and where everything is set on fire at the end, to leave without a trace. The burning of the large wooden effigy (the burning man) ritually takes place on the Saturday night. Within the city are innovative sculptures, installations, performances, theme camps, art cars, and all-flower costumes. The temperature drops below 0 degrees C at night and soars to 45 degrees C during the day.
To join the movement, check out Burning Man’s website.
Electric Picnic
August 29 – 31, 2014
Stradbally, Ireland
“The Picnic is, in short, a picnic, a feast for the intellect, aesthetic and all the senses via its music, art and narrative.” – 300fest.
Electric Picnic is a quirky and weird boutique festival held in the green Irish countryside.
Aside from its eclectic line-up that includes Foals, Paolo Nutini, Chic ft. Nile Rodgers, Lilly Allen, Flume, Clean Bandit, James Vincent McMorrow, SBTRKT, London Grammar, Metronomy… It has a Body & Soul stage made from fallen trees, a collection of creative art installations, with trails that meander “under circus top tents, through fairy-tale forests and past psychedelic installations”. It also has a Trailer Park, in which you may find a jumble of painting, graffiti, installations, electronica, performance art, public theatre, restaurants, mini music venues, carnivals, and a bunch of caravans.
What’s more, there is a Comedy Tent that showcases great Irish comedy, which is considered one of the most important events of the Picnic and is an integral part of the whole Electric Picnic experience. There is also a Spoken Word area that seeks to carry on the Irish storytelling tradition, with talks that range from love to loss to TED-style talks, on subjects ranging from pop culture to academia. Plus, there is an area dedicated to oral performance in Gaelic.
The festival is sold out this year. See tickets for next year.
Electric Zoo
August 29 – 31, 2014
Randall’s Island Park, NYC, United States
Electric Zoo Festival, held annually over Labour Day weekend, is an electric music festival that gathers top international DJ’s and live acts on New York City’s Randall Island. Since it first began in 2009, the festival has received International Dance Music Award nominations for Best Music Event in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013. In 2013, Electric Zoo announced that it would expand and launch the first edition of Electric Zoo in Mexico City in May 2014.
Due to a tragic incident at last year’s festival, where two members of the Electric Zoo family were lost to a drug overdose, Electric Zoo has released a statement that reads: “Our hearts are heavy, by our resolve is firm. Drugs have no place in this celebration.” This year, festival goers are expected to come together and enjoy the music, while they dance without Molly.
This year’s line-up includes David Guetta, Nicky Romero, Dubfire, Jamie XX, Laidback Luke, Sub Focus, Kaskade, Chase & Status, Netsky, and the list goes on!
For more info, visit the official website.
Bumbershoot
August 30 – September 01, 2014
Seattle, Washington, United States
Bumbershoot is not just a festival, it’s many festivals in one, over the course of three days. Bumbershoot is a music festival, as well as a comedy, literature, theatre, film, visual arts, history, pop culture festival… with some much more to offer than the latter.
With it’s amazing line-up, over 100 film screenings, mini intimate venues, artisan chocolate markets and, believe it or not, scheduled zombie walks, Bumbershoot sounds like a place full of fun!
It’s also family-friendly, with free access passes for kids and a Youngershoot within the festival confines, where kids can act, paint, sing dance, and basically have as much fun as their parents, if not more!
