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by BunsanSpace 36 days ago
> aka European Burning Man

Fusion festival is a Psytrance festival. It's nothing like Burning Man (a DIY community driven festival).

For the American's it would be closer to Electric Forest or Lost Lands (but with good music).
1 comments
pocksuppet 36 days ago
Right. I've been to Fusion Festival. I'm surprised someone called it Burning Man. It's nothing like Burning Man - but I think it has similar counter-cultural vibes. I've not been to Burning Man though. Apparently Fusion is actually the bigger event of the two.

I'd call it an electronic music festival (or a giant rave, because terms like "EDM festival" were invented by corporations to displace "rave" the same way "open source" was meant to sanitize "free software" and Fusion is not a corporate event). I wouldn't call it a psytrance festival - that's just what they play on one stage of many, and maybe the 3rd or 4th biggest. There's a stage run by people from Berghain that plays techno the whole time (my favorite), a drum-n-bass stage, a couple more electronic music stages that I'm not sure about the subgenre, some smaller stages where live rock and metal bands play, theater performances, some kind of car racing thing next to a circus-looking tent, neither of which I've visited. And what the heck is "the hotel"?

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BunsanSpace 36 days ago
Burning Man is unique in that it's a bottom up festival. Where it's the attendees that build the stages and festival. Vs a normal festival where it's the organizers who do the stages and programming. There are local "burns" in Europe but they're very small.

I only know Fusion festival from the psytrance community so I didn't realize it was a multi genre festival, but that makes sense!

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pocksuppet 35 days ago
Right. I believe Fusion organizers are quite open to getting contacted by those who want to perform there (besides music - I have no idea how the music lineup works), so in that sense it's open to everyone, but it's still all planned out in advance. They also get a few thousand people to help with build-up and tear-down in exchange for free tickets.

Last year they had some weird cyborg racing thing going on, and I also remember people performing a dance routine on top of very bendy tall poles. Last two years or more, they had a system of phones that usually connect you to the wrong place, and I met one of those involved people outside the event (twice actually). There is definitely random stuff happening, but yeah, as I said, it isn't Burning Man.

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