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Desert Stage at Mystic Festival is the kingdom of stoner, doom, hard rock, and all adjacent genres. You can expect an opulence of old-school sounds, primordial magic, and low frequencies.
Desert Stage is the universe’s only desert so full of life forms. Not all of them are friendly – some are lethally dangerous, but all of them are absolutely fascinating. Some are rare, almost extinct. See them now, or never.
At first, on 2nd June, you’ll see Stay Nowhere, and their show will be a post-hardcore emotional rollercoaster, going from rage to melancholy. Major Kong’s riffs bear the stoner/doom weight, but they also fly high, all the way to the cosmos. Dead Lord comes from Sweden, and from the 70s – hard to believe that today anyone could feel classic rock à la Thin Lizzy or Nazareth in this way. Finally, The Picturebooks, whose blues rock sounds like a trip through American South on a chopper through an endless, dry summer.
But this summer does not end with sundown. Every night at Desert Stage there are long afterparties with excellent playlists. On Thursday, Nightrun87 will run the stage, and with a set tailored from synthpop, he’ll transport us to the 80s.
On Wednesday, Only Sons will first invite you to the desert. They are from Kraków, but their home is the riffs with the Alice in Chains vibe – straight from the US, from a quarter-century ago, situated somewhere between stoner and grunge. “This is heavy metal how it should be done”, wrote “The Guardian” about Green Lung. It’s hard to disagree – they have weight, trance, and black magic there. Spacelug will play doom and stoner, fueled by space rock, and The Stubs will give you punk’n’roll straight from a garage in Warszawa. With such bursts of energy, sandstorms might occur. Favorit89 will host the afterparty with synthwave steeped in darkness.
The last day of the festival, 4th June, will hit you hardest – and it will charge you with enough energy to last till the next Mystic Festival. Taraban will take care of that. This band from Kraków will join blues, hard rock and psychedelic. Red Scalp’s music has similar influences, but they add tribal rituals and cosmic visions to the mix. Norwegian Arabrot will push it even further, merging noise rock and gothic, post-punk and metal. The Vintage Caravan will close the line-up with psychedelic hard rock. If they played it in the breakthrough of the 1960s and 1970s, it would have turned them into international stars. After that, you will experience the afterparty show of the collective Neon Haze, which brings together Octopussy, Favorit89 and Nightrun87. Enjoy!
The poster for the Desert Stage was designed by Kuba Sokólski, the artist whose work you know from album covers and music posters. As you can see, Desert Stage is part of the Mystic Festival universe, but the distinct nature of this scene and its music could not be clearer.
