festivals
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Thomas Rhett, Dierks Bentley and Billy Strings will spearhead the music lineup for the inaugural Big as Texas Festival slated for May 10-12, 2024, at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds in Conroe, Texas, just outside of Houston.
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In addition to Bentley, Strings and Rhett, the lineup also includes 49 Winchester, Anne Wilson, Clay Walker, Amanda Shires, Dwight Yoakam, Hannah Dasher, Maddie & Tae, Midland, Morgan Wade, Tracy Byrd, Julia Cole and Warren Zeiders.
The three-day festival will feature more than 26 hours of live music from 35 artists. The curated performance lineup also nods heavily to the festival’s Texas stomping grounds; one-third of the artists set to perform hail from the Lone Star State.
“We are stepping out in grand fashion for our inaugural year, and I couldn’t be more excited about the stellar music lineup we have curated for next May. It’s ultimately meant to be representative of the many facets of country and Americana music because we like to think there is something for everyone at Big as Texas Fest,” Big as Texas’ co-executive producer and talent buyer Steve Said noted in a statement.
“With an incredible lineup secured for year one, my team and I now turn our attention to curating all of the major aspects of the festival-going experience for fans — from the food and drink to the nonprofit partnerships to the immersive activations. We already have a lot of amazing plans in store for our fans, and I’m hopeful Texans will show out in major form to support our independent locally owned festival,” added Big As Texas’s co-executive producer Trey Diller, a lifelong resident and community advocate based in the Conroe community.
Beyond music, the festival will offer activities including custom car shows, equestrian exhibitions, art installation and camping.
Additionally, the festival aims to give back by focusing on raising awareness around mental health issues and suicide prevention. Festival organizers will invite local experts, doctors, therapists and more to join onsite in May. In addition to offering resources during the festival, organizers will donate 10 percent of net ticket proceeds from each individual ticket sold to 501 (c)(3) nonprofits that promote suicide prevention in Montgomery County and across Texas.
Three-day general admission passes are on sale now at bigastexasfest.com.
Every time a terrorist or active shooter attacks a music event — from “ >Israel’s Supernova Sukkot Festival invasion on Oct. 7 to the 2017 massacre at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas — police, promoters and venues pledge to improve concert security by adding things like metal detectors, bomb-sniffing dogs and even facial-recognition technology. And while it’s impossible to fully protect venues against gunmen with Kalashnikovs or organized terrorist strikes, three crowd-safety experts told Billboard how fans can help protect themselves in the event of an attack:
— Charge your phone – and consider bringing a portable charger to festivals. “It makes a difference,” advises Nicholas Dawe, fire marshal for Cobb County, Ga., which encompasses Atlanta. “You need a phone to connect with your friends.”
— Use the buddy system. “Keep up with somebody. Watch each other’s backs,” Dawe says. “It’s easy to lose someone, especially nowadays. Four eyes is better than two.”
— Study the venue in advance. Track down a map and go over the sometimes detailed official safety precautions. “When I go to a venue, one of the first things I do is look at where my exits are, and possibly the secondary and maybe even a third exit,” says Howard Levinson, owner of Expert Security Consulting in Norton, Mass.
— Envision an escape route on-site. In an emergency, Levinson says, having a mental escape plan could save your life: “It might be smoke, it might be a situation [where] the lights are out. You picture what it would be like if you couldn’t see, if you had to go on your hands and knees and crawl out.”
— “If you see something, say something.” It’s a cliche, and you might feel uncomfortable eavesdropping and reporting suspicious strangers, but this is standard anti-terrorism advice for large events, posted prominently on official websites for Austin City Limits, Bonnaroo, the City of Chicago and elsewhere. “Telling your friends is not a good idea,” Dawe says. “Say something to security and police personnel.”
— Keep your faculties. It’s hard to avoid weed-smoking and beer-drinking at shows, but avoid getting so blotto that you can’t clear your head and figure out what’s going on during a crisis. “I know it’s not the coolest thing to say, but it does impact how you perceive the circumstance,” Dawe says. “Being alert is pretty much your best option.”
— In a pinch, look for a fire extinguisher. It can be a self-defense weapon. “If somebody is coming for you, before you lock yourself in a closet, an extinguisher could temporarily blind people to possibly allow yourself to escape and overtake them,” Levinson says.
— Flee. Steven Adelman, vice president of the Event Safety Alliance, a concert-industry group of promoters and security experts that puts out a free crowd-management guide, reels off a macabre list of tragedies, from Columbine to Sandy Hook to the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., and gives one word of advice: “Evacuate.” Then he adds: “Quickly.” Just as if there’s a lightning storm at an outdoor event. “We live in harm’s way — when we go to school or an entertainment event or a supermarket or a church,” he says. “What can people do? Be prepared to run.”
The world’s largest automotive trade show is launching a music festival next month, bringing together live entertainment and car culture in Las Vegas.
The Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) — a 60-year-old trade organization representing after-market auto part manufacturers and sellers — is launching the first-ever SEMA Fest at the Las Vegas festival grounds Nov. 3-4 with performances by acts including Imagine Dragons, Incubus, Wiz Khalifa, AJR, Third Eye Blind, Bush and Walk the Moon. The festival takes place during the annual SEMA trade show at the Las Vegas Convention Center, which will open to the general public for the first time. Besides music, the festival will also include a full slate of immersive automotive lifestyle events, a consumer marketplace, world-class drifting, motorsports competitions and freestyle motocross.
“What we’ve noticed over the last 10 years is that the connection between a manufacturer and an end-user is getting closer and closer,” says Tom Gattuso, vp of events at SEMA.
“We decided as an association a couple years ago to open a membership category to an enthusiast or a consumer,” he added, noting that prior to 2023, the SEMA trade show was only open to wholesalers and retailers.
“And as soon as we opened it up, the consumer wanted to know how they could be part of the event,” Gattusto continued. “So we started to think how we could really engage consumers and have this complete distribution cycle where you’ve got manufacturing, distribution, and end-user all in one place. So we created SEMA Fest with an eye on automotive activation tying in another passion — live music — that would help our industry with growth.”
Tickets for the two-day festival start at $179, while tickets to both the Friday tradeshow and the weekend festival start at $299.
“Everybody remembers the first time they drove their car all by themselves — it was all about driving in the car, but also what you were listening to on the radio,” says Gattuso, who hired California talent buyer Roger LeBlanc to book the festival. “We really got positive response from both the industry and the public at large and we’re excited to see it all come together in November.”
SEMA Fest will be spread out over two stages, with the lineup of 21 artists also including The Struts, Ludacris and Dead Sara. There will also be three activation areas for Formula Drift, Hooligan off-road racing and Nitro Circus freestyle motocross.
“There will always be something to do as fans make their way through the festival grounds, either exploring something that may be new to them or exploring something that’s a deep passion for them and really interacting together in that space,” Gattuso says.
Click here to learn more about SEMA Fest.
When David Sinopoli answers the phone, he’s at his Miami nightclub Jolene, rolling joints.
Sinopoli, along with member of his staff, are prepping roughly 1,000 joints as part of the gift bags artists will be getting at III Points, the festival Sinopoli co-founded in 2013, which launches its 2023 edition on Friday (Oct. 20) at Miami’s Mana Wynwood center and its adjacent blocks. Other goodie bag items include crystals and magic mushrooms. (But not too many, as in past years, a few artists got so high that they had trouble getting onstage.)
“It’s become [a tradition] where we can all get together, eat some food, everyone plays music,” Sinopoli says of this annual rolling session. “It’s really nice, fun and quite wholesome.”
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It’s also one of the personal touches that have made III Points a standout on the U.S. electronic festival circuit over the last decade, while also elevating Miami one of the crown jewels cities in the country’s electronic scene. It’s founders grew up in Miami, and the lineup is 60% local acts — Coffintexts, Jonny From Space, Nick León — along with 2023 headliners including Skrillex, Fred again.., Iggy Pop, Caroline Polacheck, Grimes and Black Coffee. The food vendors and visual artists are also all from the city, as are many of the 50,000 people who attend over its two days.
“I think it’s just very authentically Miami, and a real time capsule of Miami sonically and visually right now,” Sinopoli says of putting on a festival with an identify and real personality. “I think people feel that when they come.”
III Points is able to rep the city so well because Sinopoli and his team — “they’re connected here 365” — know it so intimately. Sinopoli is also the co-owner of Space, the city’s 24-hour bacchanal of a nightclub that he, along with Davide Danese and Coloma Kaboomsky, took over in 2016. He’s also the owner and operator of Factory Town, a 190,000-square foot arts and nightlife complex built in a World War II-era mattress factory, as well as the cocktail bar Floyd and Jolene, the intimate “sound room” where Sinopoli and his some staff are rolling Js.
David Sinopoli
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Born in New Jersey, Sinopoli relocated to Fort Myers with his family when he was 15. He was diagnosed with cancer while in high school, once spending five months in isolation at a Durham Children’s Hospital. A bone marrow transplant from his brother eventually brought him back to good health, and after he finished high school, Sinopoli went to college in Gainesville. He rose through that city’s nightlife scene then making a name for himself in South Florida, where he founded III Points in 2013 with his business partner Erica Freshman. Their statement-making debut lineup featured James Murphy, Jamie xx and DJ Shadow, a crew that was 180 degrees away from the big-name EDM DJs dominating the city’s club scene in that era.
Carving out a place for underground and indie-leaning electronic music, and getting acts to town that might otherwise never play there, “is part of the reason I started III Points,” Sinopoli says.
Routing a tour to Miami has long been financially challenging for artists, with many acts just skipping the city altogether. “To play Miami and be supported by Orlando and Tampa on the way down almost doesn’t make sense [for artists],” Sinopoli says. “A lot of time Orlando and Tampa don’t support the same things Miami does. Miami is in Florida, but it’s not f–king Florida.”
III Points has also been embraced within the industry for booking new acts agents are excited about, but who don’t often yet have major name recognition. Sinopoli says while such signings “maybe are not making the most sense financially,” they payoff is in fresh lineups, industry goodwill and the opportunity to break artists and grow along with them.
As the festival has expanded Sinopoli says many agents now just block off the weekend in advance then look for an offer from III Points. This is easier given the fest happens in the fall, the opposite side of the year from Miami’s other major electronic music festival, Ultra. While there’s some lineup overlap, each largely does its own thing, with Ultra driving loads of business at Space, Factory Town and Floyd each March.
Business was also shored up when III Points partnered with electronic festival behemoth Insomniac Events in 2019. The company took an ownership stake in Space and became partners in all of Sinopoli’s business ventures. “They sat with us for a long time before they stepped in in some of the areas we really needed them,” he says. “They let us make mistakes first, before they were like, ‘We can help you with that.’”
“I’m not even 40 yet,” he continues, “so I’m learning so much by mistake, and sometimes you can’t afford to keep making mistakes, because it will put you out of business.”
Insomniac has been especially helpful in training him and his team in marketing and budget management. “We would think we made money or only lost that much money,” he says, “then the real report would come out and it’d be like, a swift kick in the stomach. They helped us understand that you start with this budget, then every 30 days you cut it down, then cut it down again.”
The partnership was especially stabilizing in the pandemic and its aftermath. In 2020, III Points moved its dates four times: “It was [Insomniac’s] backing that allowed us to do it,” Sinopoli says. “If it was up to us, we would have cashed in and walked away.”
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The peace of mind of solvency allows for a focus on music and experiences. When assembling lineups, the team first considers who hasn’t been to Miami in awhile, and who’s never been at all. Sinopoli also dreams up the moments and vibes he’d like to create, then plugs in the artists mostly likely to conjure them. This worked especially well in 2017, when The xx played the mainstage with a glowing light on the festival’s giant disco ball (“the largest disco ball on the southeast!”) that gently twinkled on the side of the warehouse wall.
“It almost looked like raindrops, then all sudden this cold drizzle of rain started coming down on the crowd.” Sinopoli looked next to him and saw his production manager was crying. “Because it wasn’t something we could have planned,” he says. “It was like this f–king God moment.”
This weekend will, fingers crossed, deliver other such magic. III Points’ six stages will host the aforementioned headliners, along with Explosions In The Sky, Bone Thugs N Harmony, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, Alice Glass, SBTRKT, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Moscoman & Whitesquare and many other stars and up and comers culled from both around the world and around the block.
Sinopoli laughs when asked if he feels like he runs the city’s electronic scene. “No! No, no,” he insists, listing a dozen names of people on his staff that help make it all possible. He’s been having a lot of big-picture conversations about the festival’s ten-year anniversary, but his days are more about details, like lights on the disco ball and joints rolled with love.
“We’re so deep in the bubble that I don’t really even grab on to any outside significance of it,” he says. “It’s really just about the next show.”
CRSDD Music Festival has been a fixture of the Southern California electronic circuit for more than a decade, having become so, and stayed so, on the power of lineups featuring a smart blend of legends, rising stars, reliable genres and experimental sounds.
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The fall 2023 edition of the festival, which happened this past September 23-24, demonstrated this same balance. Headliners included Flume, Underworld, Amelie Lens and Charlotte de Witte, with a loaded undercard including Salute, DJ Minx, Weval, TSHA, HAAI, SG Lewis and many others.
This electronic melange was set against the extremely picturesque San Diego waterfront, with the festival again drawing thousands of fans to its longtime base at the city’s Bayfront Park.
Were you there? Did you miss it? Either way, take some time to transport yourself back to the event with these three exclusive CRSSD Fall 2023 sets from Basement Jaxx, Interplanetary Criminal and Nikki Nair.
Basement Jaxx
The English legends brought the heat during their headlining set, loading up their 90 minute performance with loads of funk, disco strings, Latin rhythms, edits of their own hits, classic Donna Summer and lots of other mega high-energy house music.
Interplanetary Criminal
The rising Manchester native played a 75-minutes set made of ultra fast-paced house music, spatial experimental sounds, drum ‘n’ bass and loads of hard house by U.K. and Irish artists including Knuckleheadz, Camrisa and Ryan Donaghy.
Nikki Nair
The Atlanta-born producer loaded his set with experimental sounds, with the vibe ranging from spare to elastic to crunchy to spacey to pummeling. Listen for his 2023 Hudson Mohwake collab “Demuro.”
Dutch dance festival DGTL will produce its first U.S. editions this December.
DGTL launches in the States with back-to-back days happening on opposite ends of the country. On Friday, Dec. 1, the festival will go down in New York City with a lineup that includes a live set from Danish trio WhoMadeWho, techno titan Ida Engberg, amapiano artist AMÉMÉ, German deep house producer Henrik Schwarz, Irish mainstay Mano Le Tough and South Korean producer Shubostar.
The next day, a similar version of this show will happen 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles, with DGTL’s Dec. 2 lineup also featuring WhoMadeWho, Mano Le Tough, Henrik Schwarz and Shubostar, along with French duo Parallelle.
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Venues for these events have not yet been announced.
Both shows will be put on in partnership with the longstanding New York City-based electronic producer Teksupport, with the Los Angeles show also produced in partnership with Stranger Than. Both companies have established themselves by producing dance events in non-traditional locations in their respective regions.
Originating in Amsterdam, DGTL has also done festivals in Barcelona, Madrid, Tel Aviv, Bengaluru, Mumbai, New Delhi, Santiago, São Paulo and Guadalajara.
Since its launch in The Netherlands in 2013, the festival has become known for its immersive, cutting-edge stage designs. It’s also a leader in sustainable live events, with initiatives including plant-based food options on site, extensive recycling programs and elimination of single-use plastics and residual waste.
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Nigerian-American Afrobeats superstar Davido, British-Gambian rapper J Hus and Ghanaian rapper Black Sherif are headlining the 2023 AfroFuture Festival, Culture Management Group (CMG) announced Tuesday (Oct. 17).
Launched in 2017 and previously called Afrochella until last year, AfroFuture will be held at El Wak Sports Stadium in Accra, Ghana from Dec. 28 to 29. This year’s theme is “Black Unification & Pan Africanism” to honor the achievements of Black pioneers throughout the diaspora and highlights their contributions to art, culture and innovation. The theme will also delve into the global connections and shared experiences of African people, including conversations on the history of the Pan-African movement, the role of diaspora in global politics and the significance of diaspora unity.
“AfroFuture has always been more than just a festival; it’s a full-circle celebration of everything African — our culture, our people, our talents, and serves as a platform for us to appreciate and acknowledge the larger contributions we make in the world,” said Abdul Karim Abdullah, CEO/co-founder of AfroFuture, in a press release. “This Detty December, we’re back bigger, better and stronger and we can’t wait to give our global supporters an unforgettable experience by beautifully blending the worlds of food, art, fashion and music.”
Leading up to the festival, AfroFuture will host a two-week expo of digital experiences, wellness sessions, screenings and panel discussions; an entrepreneurial pitch competition in association with Pharrell Williams‘ non-profit Black Ambition; the Rising Star challenge for up-and-coming artists looking for a shot at performing at this year’s AfroFuture Festival and market their music to more people; a short film competition in partnership with the non-profit Black Film Space; a community service day; and more.
“Every year, we look forward to contributing to the growth of Ghana’s tourism and hospitality sectors by welcoming international visitors back to the country to experience not only our events, but all that Ghana has to offer,” adds Kenny Agyapong Jr., COO/co-founder of AfroFuture. “As one of Ghana’s most recognized cultural moments, AfroFuture will continue to foster engagement, increase interest and boost tourism within the country, with a goal to make Ghana a premier destination for all travelers worldwide.”
TuneCore, YouTube, Black Ambition, Topics, Martell and Jameson are sponsors for this year’s AfroFuture Festival.
While the moon eclipsing the sun up in the heavens will serve a the event’s primary headliner, Texas Eclipse 2024 has today (Oct. 17) dropped the lineup for all the artists that will play in honor of this celestial event.
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The lineup features Bob Moses, LP Giobbi, STS9, CloZee, Big Gigantic, Dirtwire, LSDream, Claude VonStroke playing under his bass-forward Barclay Crenshaw project, Lee Burridge, the Desert Hearts crew, Tycho, Zeds Dead, The Disco Biscuits and other heady heavy hitters.
Produced by Disco Donnie Presents and experiential event company Probably Nothing, Texas Eclipse will happen at the Reveille Peak Ranch in Burnett, Texas (located about an hour’s drive from Austin) on April 5-9, 2024. Tickets go sale this Thursday (Oct. 19) with two, three and four day ticket options available. (Ticket prices are not yet available.) Texas Eclipse is an all ages event, with children 12 and under getting in for free and discounted tickets available for 13–17 year olds.
Four festival stage areas — appropriately titled the Earth, Sky, Moon and Sun areas — will be curated by a crew of event producers from around the world, including Canada’s Bass Coast, California’s Symbiosis (a crew that did its own eclipse festival in Oregon in 2017), Germany’s Bachstelzen and 10 others.
In addition to music, Texas Eclipse will offer art installations, wellness areas, science workshops, kids and family education areas, yoga and more. The total solar eclipse will take place on Monday, April 9, 2024.
“We’ve curated an incredible mix of artists from around the world, representing diverse genres and styles, all coming together under the captivating backdrop of the 2024 total solar eclipse,” Disco Donnie says in a statement. “This promises to be an extraordinary experience where music, art, and technology and space converge in a truly unique way.”
See the complete lineup for Texas Eclipse 2024 below.
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The concert business is set to close out another record year fueled by pent-up pandemic demand, higher priced tickets and intense fan commitment to their favorite artists.
Hoping to capture a snapshot of the concert business when cumulative grosses for the top 100 tours and attendance are higher than ever, Variety VIP+ and talent agency UTA have released a new report titled “Peak Performance” combining data from Billboard and Pollstar with insights from PwC and an online survey of more than 1,500 concert goers.
“Our desire to do this study was spurred by the anecdotal evidence we were seeing from our own music representation and music brand partnerships business,” said Joe Kessler, UTA partner and global head of UTA IQ.
The report paints a bullish and optimistic picture of the concert business with more fans willing to spend money and travel farther to see their favorite artists live, as well as an increased urgency for consumers to find time for more live music and festivals in the post-pandemic period. But the rapidly increasing price of tickets and the increased use of credit cards and debit to pay for experiences continues to represent a potential liability for both music fans and the industry writ large, the report finds.
For the first time ever, the concert business is expected to cross the $30 billion revenue mark in 2023, with the top 100 tours accounting for nearly 20 percent of total sales. Survey respondents overwhelmingly agreed that some of their favorite memories took place at concerts and 79 percent of respondents agreed that attending a concert or festival is more important to them following the COVID-19 pandemic. Approximately 43% of consumers said live music events were more meaningful to them than other types of live events or experiences.
Driving the enthusiasm for concerts, Kessler explains, are millennials, now in their mid 20s to early 40s, who have “consistently and substantially shown a desire to want to engage in collaborative and communal experiences as a group.”
“Music has always been a big part of that,” Kessler says, noting that it was millennials who fueled the growth of the festival business over the last two decades.
“As the economy improve and they have more disposable spending, I think we’re going to see a continued rise in the desire to want to see live shows,” Kessler says,” a trend he expect to grow “as our lives become increasingly virtual and we spend more and more time behind screens.”
While Taylor Swift and Beyonce have dominated the headlines in 2023, the report found that men still significantly outnumber women in terms of concert attendance, with men more likely to have gone to a concert in 2023, with 42 percent saying they’ve attended a live music show in the past 12 months, compared with 31 percent of women.
The survey also found that more fans are traveling for events than ever before, with half of respondents traveling four hours or more to attend a concert, 39 percent have flown within the U.S. to attend a show, and 30 percent have traveled to another country for a live music event.
While fans are willing to spend more money that ever on concert tickets, the survey also finds that high ticket prices are among consumers’ chief complaints. With average ticket prices north of $122, more than 62 percent of respondents said the biggest impediment to live music attendance was the price, while 38 percent of fans reported that high ticket prices have prevented them from attending at least one concert in the last 12 months.
“That should not be all that surprising,” says Andrew Wallenstein, president and chief media analyst for Variety Plus, noting that while concerns over price have long existed in the concert business, ‘more than half of the consumers surveyed are just as willing to purchase VIP tickets now as they were prior to the pandemic, while 3 in 10 have become more willing” to buy expensive tickets.
“I think there is a demographic out there that despite the cost pressures feels there is more value in spending top dollar than ever before,” Wallenstein says.
Unsurprisingly, debt is fueling a large part of consumer spending. The survey found that more than one-third of fans had used a buy-now, pay later service to buy tickets, while 34% have opened a credit card specifically for a concert or music festival presale.
“Macroeconomic circumstances have to be paid attention to,” says Wallenstein, who notes that federal student loan payments are resuming this month after a three-year pandemic pause, but notes “this demographic values the concert going experience in a way that previous demographics may not have.”
“Despite the fact that student loan forgiveness is out the window, and many are not saving for things like home ownership, [millennials] may still spend money on concerts the same way they have in the past,” he tells Billboard.
While the report doesn’t offer up any forecasts as to how much runway is left for growth in concerts, Kessler says be doesn’t expect the business to cool off any time soon.
“No one can know how long it will last, but I don’t think this is a temporary blip on the map,” Kessler says. “The data that came through the study tells us that, this is here to stay for the foreseeable future.”
Click here to access a copy of the report.
As the Palestinian group Hamas continues to attack Israel and the country retaliates by bombing Gaza, survivors of the terrorist attack at the Paralello Universo Supernova Sukkot Gathering electronic music festival near the Gaza border are continuing what has become a grim search for hundreds of people who are still missing.
So far, the Israeli search and rescue organization Zaka has reported that it found 260 dead bodies at the festival site in Re’im, Israel. An unknown number of attendees have been abducted by Hamas terrorists. At least 150 Israelis were abducted on Saturday (Oct. 7), according to the New York Times, and some of them were taken from the rave.
On Tuesday morning (Oct. 10), President Biden referenced the massacre during remarks on the Israel-Hamas conflict, naming “young people massacred while attending a music festival to celebrate peace” among the violent incidents of the last few days.
As of Sunday evening, 600-700 festival goers were believed to be missing in the immediate aftermath of the attack, according to artist manager Raz Gaster, who was at the event and represents several acts on the lineup. The exact number of the remaining still missing has not been verified, although two sources in Israel put this number at approximately 150, accounting for bodies that have since been recovered and identified as well as survivors who have been identified; though another source on the ground there says it’s still hard to tell how many remain missing.
Gaster, an artist manager who was at the event and represents several acts on the lineup, told Billboard Tuesday (Oct. 10) that he and members of the festival production team are working to locate survivors and gather information about festival attendees who remain missing.
“At the end of the day, it’s our responsibility as human beings to [provide] the families of these missing people whatever information we can get,” Gaster says. “We will keep working until we get information about each and every one of them.”
The Israeli offshoot of the longstanding Brazilian festival brand Paralelllo Universo, Supernova Sukkot Gathering was named in honor of the Jewish Sukkot holiday, and hosted approximately 3,000 attendees on a rural site with two stages.
Those who escaped the festival describe the terror on the ground when at about 6:30 a.m. Saturday rockets began flying from Gaza, with some landing near Re’im. Within 20 minutes, terrorists armed with guns and RPGs arrived in ATVs, pickup trucks and motorcycles, as well as by paraglider, and immediately began shooting attendees.
Shelly Barel, who sells jewelry and clothing at music festivals throughout Israel, had been on the site since Thursday, Oct. 5. At that time, the outdoor space was hosting another psytrance festival, Unity, with Supernova Sukkot Gathering starting on Friday. Supernova Sukkot was only moved to the Re’im site two days prior, after another site in southern Israel fell through.
“The festival was so much fun,” Barel says of Supernova Sukkot through a translator. “Amazing people, it was really full of joy.”
Everything changed when rockets started falling early Saturday morning. Barel and her husband hit the ground and lay there for at least five minutes, until festival security made an announcement telling attendees to run to their cars and leave the site. Barel and her husband spent 10 minutes packing their belongings, then loaded them into their vehicle and drove away, with Barel’s husband behind the wheel. At the time, they assumed they were being asked to evacuate because of a rocket attack, a relatively regular occurrence in Israel.
They soon hit a bottleneck of cars trying to exit the festival. Without realizing that armed attackers had arrived, they took a hard right turn and drove across the dirt field adjacent to the site instead of waiting in the exit line. That decision, made as much out of impatience and an instinct to escape as anything else, might have saved their lives.
“In hindsight,” Barel says, “I understood that the terrorists shot the [people in the] first cars, so those cars couldn’t move, and the rest got stuck behind them. They formed a traffic jam for everyone coming after that. It was a death trap.”
When Barel and her husband drove off the field and back onto the road, they came upon two stopped vehicles, both of which had all their doors open. Then they saw the occupants of those vehicles lying dead on the ground.
Barel’s husband made a U-turn and minutes later received a text from someone in his army reserve group saying there were attackers in the area. “When we realized we had to fear the terrorists,” Barel says, “the missiles seemed like the smallest problem.”
He kept driving, following signs to the nearest city. “We decided to go as fast as we could, full gas, only slowing during turns,” she says. “The rockets were falling around us and at this point I thought it was the moment to say ‘I love you’ to each other and say goodbye.”
They didn’t get hit. Eventually, they made their way back to their home in central Israel. There, they found out that some of their friends from the festival had been killed, while others had been abducted. Many remain missing.
Nitay, a 26-year-old security professional from Tel Aviv who also attended Supernova Sukkot said that he was helping an artist pack up some gear when gunmen appeared and started shooting at the festivalgoers. As shots rang out, “my friend called me when I was running away from the attack and asked me to try and find his sister,” says Nitay, who did not wish to give his last name. “I really wanted to help him, but I had to flee and hide. I felt like I was constantly surrounded by gunfire.”
Nitay ran for several miles and eventually hid for 10 hours in an olive grove. At one point he thought the group he had taken shelter with had been discovered by armed men speaking in Arabic — they were about 20 yards away, close enough that he could see the men’s legs through the olive tree branches.
“I prayed to my father, who passed away several years ago and begged him to help me,” Nitay recalls. As he hid, the men began shouting and Nitay says he braced himself for an attack. The shouting went on for about a half-hour, then the armed men began backing away from the area in which he was hiding with several others, including two tourists from Argentina. They stayed there for several more hours until Israeli finally arrived and led them to a nearby police station. Nitay says he never found his friend’s sister.
In the days since Barel and her husband escaped, they, too, have been searching for information on their missing friends, but they haven’t found much, even as obituaries have started to appear. The trauma is so fresh in her mind that she says she became “hysterical” when the elevator door in her apartment building opened and a man she didn’t know was inside.
For decades, Israel’s dance music scene has been thriving. Psytrance, the electronic subgenre featured on the Supernova Sukkot lineup, became big in Israel in the late ’80s and ’90s, and it has been the country’s biggest electronic sound since, although house and techno have also grown in popularity in recent years.
On any given weekend, especially between March and October, there are several big parties like Supernova Sukkot throughout Israel, with crowd sizes ranging between 50 and 10,000, according to Amotz Tokatly, who’s been involved in the country’s electronic scene for more than 20 years as a promoter, manager, consultant and writer. “If you go to a psytrance party or a house or techno club, you see people from the age of 18 to 60 or even 70,” says Tokatly. “It’s a basic activity in Israel. We love to dance. We love to go out.”
It’s hard to tell what will happen to this scene in the aftermath of the attack, not to mention the war that is expected to follow.
“What happened here is a disaster. It’s unbearable,” says Tokatly. “The most important thing for us is to [show] the world that this is a crime against innocent people. They don’t belong to any political side. These were just kids going to a party.”
Additional reporting by Tal Rimon.