Festival Season

It’s day 7 here at Ozora Festival in Dadpuszta, Hungary, and the pounding 170 BPM Psytrance beat carries on unabated.

It’s as if the maddening, matrix bending trance beat has never stopped once the entire week. Discerning where one track ends and the next begins is futile, as is the notion that anyone here will get more than two or three hours of sleep per night.

Ozora is one of the largest trance festivals in Europe, home to 30,000 people from all corners of the globe for one week each August. Situated in a lush valley surrounded by pockets of dense forest amidst the Carpathian Basin in Central Europe, there is a distinct woodland faerie and elfin motif in play here. Rustic venues with names like ‘Dragon’s Nest’ and ‘Artibarn’ elicit a medieval faire on acid aesthetic that’s quite refreshing in the landscape of highly corporatized global music festival offerings.

I was invited to Ozora to give a talk at a festival stage called the Chambok House, curated by renowned academics Georgia Gaia and Graham St. John. I had never heard of the festival prior to the invitation, but a quick Google search let me know that this annual pilgrimmage is serious business.

I ended up giving two talks and emceeing the Chambok House stage for two of the days throughout the week. The first talk explored the intersection of cyber culture and psychedelics, which have have a curious double helix like intertwining connection. The second talk was on satire in the psychedelic and spiritual communities, which has become my calling card at conferences and festivals around the world.

The programming for the festival was spread out among a dozen or so primary locations, with hundreds of smaller pop up experiences and installations scattered about to ensure that there was always to satisfy your inner 5D elfin mind 24/7.

The European Psytrance community defies all boundaries and social conventions in this type of prolonged ecstatic ritual, collectively pushing the limits of the human experience and conjuring a potent and undeniable form of earth magic that enables superhuman feats - or at least that’s what it feels like when you’re watching Ajja in a sea of ten thousand people shrouded in clouds of Changa smoke and passing in and out of the K-hole. 

If there was a costume contest at Ozora, everybody would win. The elaborate designs and attention to detail that goes into many of the wardrobe choices on display are equal parts haute couture and DMT elf.

The Freak Show Cabaret was the first act of the week I caught; over two of their performances, they managed to combine fire spinning, aerial dancing, physical comedy, elongated unicycle juggling, audience participation, cryptic Dali-esque humor, and hole hooping in a straight jacket into a family friendly show that was both wildly entertaining and oddly relatable.

Below is a link to video summary of Ozora that i produced the day after leaving.

A who’s who of global Psytrance artists like Astrix, Infected Mushroom, Ace Ventura, and hundreds more kept the party pumping at an insane level of octane for 144 consecutive hours without exaggeration.

Non Psytrance musical highlights from the week included Desert Dwellers, a globally recognized electronic music duo from the Southwest U.S. that embeds Alan Watts samples into their downtempo sonic palette, and African Head Charge - the originators of psychedelic dub who have been at it since 1981 and are still in prime form.

Ozora Festival has opened me up to a whole new world of intense ecstatic experience and it’s devoted global subculture of trance enthusiasts that had somehow flown under my radar up until now. I could go on ad nauseam providing anecdotes and insights culled from my week in the Hungarian Psytrance vortex, but the accounts and descriptions would never do this extraordinary event justice anyway. //

**I wrote this account on the last day of Ozora, which wrapped up about 10 days ago. After spending two nights in Budapest catching up on sleep and playing tourist, I jetted off to London for the next chapter of this current saga.

In total I spent a week in England after Ozora, where I was invited to give another talk on psychedelics and cyber culture at Campout in Oxfordshire, England. This event was markedly more relaxed and quite a bit smaller than Ozora, yet still an impressive gathering with somewhere in the orbit of 400 attendees. One of my highlights of Campout was meeting former Mycopreneur Podcast guest and particle physics research scientist Dr. Claire Malone.

I spent some time in London before and after Campout, staying with my friend Batuhan Bintas who runs Cyber Mushroom - an impressive ‘digital mushroom VR experience’ that has been garnering a lot of attention around the UK and Europe.

While in London I also got to drop in with the inimitable Darren Le Baron , globally celebrated mushroom educator and activist extraordinaire. Darren gave me a tour of the East London neighborhood of Brick Lane where he grew up, including a couple murals he helped paint and a sensational Indian feast at a restaurant that has a course offering specially designed for Darren and his guests. As the proprietor toasted my host, ‘Long Live The King.’

Looking forward, I’m pleased to share that I’ve been announced as a speaker at Wonderland in Miami this November.

This conference is essential for anyone who wants to get more connected to the industry side of psychedelics - but it’s so much more than that. This year the conference reach has expanded to include longevity and well-being in addition to psychedelics. It’s a networking goldmine, and I encourage everyone to learn more about it and consider joining us by purchasing a ticket here. There are also scholarship opportunities and the chance to volunteer or apply for a press pass among other routes to conference admission.

I’m also up for a panel at South by Southwest in April of next year - it would mean the world to me if you’d consider taking a minute to cast a vote for our panel by clicking the link below. Reggie Harris of Oakland Hyphae, journalist Mary Carreon, and Bob Johnson of Mycroboost are my prospective collaborators on this panel that focuses on Psychedelic Entrepreneurship and the Underground Economy. This is the only proposed panel in the field of submissions that focuses on the legacy market for psychedelic substances, one which is likely to be in the tens of billions of dollars in the U.S. alone currently.

Please consider voting by following the instructions on this link: SXSW Voting

I’m in Berlin for this week, further immersing into European electronic music culture while supercharging myself with giant crystals and currywurst.

The podcast continues on a weekly basis - in fact, I’m going to edit and release this week’s episode right now after I wrap this newsletter up.

A curious feature of the last 17 days between Hungary and England is that I basically had no internet or stable cell service the entire time thanks to the remote rural locations of the two conferences. I’ve finally got reliable, high speed internet again, and must take advantage of this opportunity to keep the momentum on this platform going strong.

I’ll finish this week’s newsletter by thanking the Mycopreneur brand partners, who each have played a pivotal role in enabling the continued success of this platform.

For mushroom coffee and supplements, Mycroboost has been my lifeline for staying vitalized and energized throughout the intense demands of international travel - and especially festival season. It’s incredible to experience the value of a functional mushroom supplement routine in real time when your body and mind are being taxed by the intrinsic energetic demands of a music festival and international travel.

Finally, if it’s reliable and viable mushroom spores and mycology equipment you’re looking for, look no further than Inoculate The World. The professionals at ITW have set the industry standard for viable spores and there’s a ton of other mycology supplies and cultural offerings available through the site.

As Mycopreneur continues to grow and globalize, I want to express sincere gratitude to everyone who’s riding with me and to each of you who have taken the time to read this newsletter. It is an absolute grind to run the platform sometimes, but this labor of love is the hill I’ll die on. I welcome feedback and look forward to the next chapter of this little node embedded in the ever evolving mycelial web that we’re all stewarding together.

PS: If you’re not all voted and hyperlinked out yet, please consider leaving a review of the Mycopreneur Podcast here and or here to help more myconauts and mycopreneurs around the world discover the Mycopreneur Podcast.

Cheers everyone, see you next week 😀 

DW