# Stop Chasing The Perfect Set At Festivals Theres A Direct Way Into The Zone **Source:** https://letsrethinklife.com/fr/rethink/rethink-festival-wisdom/stop-chasing-the-perfect-set-at-festivals-theres-a-direct-way-into-the-zone **Language:** French --- 1 oct. 2026 13 min de lecture 15:05 écouter 69 reads Partager ## In short Festivals promise a state where the search stops and you are fully inside the music. After forty festivals of hunting for it, I learned to recreate that state on purpose — at home, with friends. **Listen to this Rethink**15:05 min · Lean back and enjoy listening to the read-aloud Recently, some of my friends received an invitation from me. It said, in large letters: **YOU ARE OFFICIALLY INVITED TO BE DRUGGED AND KIDNAPPED.** A reasonable first question is whether I have finally become dangerous. But behind that sentence sits everything I learned after over 40 Festivals and Burns: why the best part of a party happens less often than you hope for — and how to make it happen on purpose. It starts with a problem you already know. You prepare, you hope, and you arrive with a beautiful picture of what the weekend might become. Your friends told you last year was incredible. The lineup looks promising. You bought a ticket, packed a tent, went shopping for great new outfits, drove six hours, stood in the queue with all your stuff, built your camp and a few hours in, you find yourself having a conversation like: "Hey, how do you like the festival?" "Yeah… it's okay. I hope the next DJ is better." "I heard someone really good is playing later." "When?" "Two in the morning." "So what do we do until then?" "Let's get a beer." So you get a beer. You walk to another stage, where the music sounds slightly more interesting. One friend wants to stay, another has heard about a hidden dance floor behind a hill, somebody needs food, somebody has lost a jacket — and then somebody meets a friend they last saw eighteen months ago, and everybody stands around during a very detailed life update. That's not to say all of this has value or isn't part of the adventure you enjoy. But is this why you came here? Next morning someone always tells you that you just missed the best set of the festival. Of course you did. House parties run the same script, with better toilets. A few people talk about work in the kitchen. Music plays in the other room. Two attractive people stand near the dance floor while everyone admires them from a safe distance. House parties run the same script, with better toilets. "Go talk to her." "Maybe after another drink." "Do you want to dance?" "When the music gets better." Here is the funny part: technically, the party has already started. People are there. Music is playing. Drinks exist. Somebody even bought lights. All the evidence says party — and still, everybody is waiting for it to begin. Sometimes the evening becomes extraordinary. Often it becomes quite nice. And "quite nice" was hardly the dream when we packed glitter, drove across the country and slept on a mattress thinner than a slice of bread. For a long time I thought people went to festivals for the obvious reasons: music, friends, dancing, freedom, costumes, substances, a few days away from normal life. All true — and none of it explains the strange math. One brilliant two-hour set can justify an entire weekend. A single dance floor gets remembered years later. And sometimes you meet a friend in the crowd, look at their face, and know instantly that both of you are having exactly the experience you came for. There is a point where the search stops. The beat gets into your legs, your hips start doing their own thing, the music lands behind your ribs. Your heart is full of beautiful rich emotions and your thoughts lose importance. You stop checking whether another stage might be better, and you stop wondering how you look. You are there. I call this place the zone. Once you know it, you can see it on other people: the face changes, the movement changes, they are deep inside the music and wide open to the moment at the same time. Listen closely and you'll notice that most festival conversations are, at heart, conversations about the zone (and substances, which are supposed to help you get there). "The music never really got me." "That set yesterday was insane." "What did you take?" "I danced for four hours. Best night of my life." "I went to every stage, but eventually went to bed" Different sentences, same subject: did we find it or not? For most of my life, I couldn't have told you any of this. I was the most boring guy, on the far other end of any kind of ecstasy. Through most of my young adult years, parties did very little for me. I stood near the edge, body stiff, the music somewhere outside me, watching other people melt into the atmosphere and trying to work out what exactly they were enjoying. I went on a quest and started asking people outright what they enjoyed at a party, because I wasn't enjoying any of it. Around twenty I explored alcohol, because that seemed to be the standard solution. It made me drunk and occasionally more social. A great party remained a mystery other people talked about. Electronic music made even less sense. It sounded repetitive and loud — just like noise. Obviously I had been to a number of clubs in the city where I grew up. I endured it, and a few years later I stopped torturing myself. Also, truth be told, I started to have girlfriends, and later a wife, so there was need for midnight hunting in the city. Then, in 2019, at the age of 42 (that is a long way into adulthood), I went to AfrikaBurn. My first ever festival. I landed there more or less by accident. Enough to say that a bunch of people from a co-living project in Cape Town I was part of all went, and I heard myself saying yes. I had idea what I was saying yes to. I spent the first days overwhelmed and slightly confused. Art, costumes, camps, fire, thousands of people having what looked like the time of their lives, day and night — and me, feeling totally lost and alone. By day four I was ready to leave. A friend looked at me and said: Art, costumes, camps, fire, thousands of people having what looked like the time of their lives, day and night — and me, feeling totally lost and alone. "Did you take something?" "No," I replied. (I was experienced with substances, but never took them in public. Sounds crazy, I know. But I was introduced to substances during spiritual ceremonies and therapeutic workshops, not at parties.) "Man, you have to take drugs. Otherwise this place is unbearable." "Fair enough. I will give it a shot," I said. Over that festival I tried 2C-B, LSD and MDMA, at different times. When the first 2C-B kicked in, my relationship with music changed for good. I heard a beat from a distant stage, and for the first time in my life a rhythm pulled at my legs. My skin started tingling — all over, my whole body at once. An actual physical pull, as if the music had hands. I remember thinking: Oh. That feels nice. So I follow it. On the dance floor the beat says something and my legs answer. It says something else, my hips answer. My skin keeps tingling, the bass fills my whole body, and my mind — the department that has supervised every one of my movements for forty-two years — is left behind. On the dance floor the beat says something and my legs answer. I feel bliss and ecstasy at the same time. I melt into the music and into something greater than myself. I look at the people around me and think: Ah. This is why you are all here. For this. This strange group ecstasy where everyone is deep in their own experience and still sharing the same frequency and euphoria with hundreds of others. Then I look at the DJ, and my heart overflows with gratitude. It felt as if he knew precisely what beautiful things he was doing to me - to all of us. So this is why people worship DJs: he is the one serving divine sounds that connect your body, your feelings, the crowd and whatever lies beyond it, all at once. In that moment, the DJ felt like a modern priest to me. Or a shaman. No idea how I had arrived there. Only that I wanted to stay. From one moment to the next, electronic music had become a language my being could read. I was in the zone. And like every fresh convert, I immediately wanted more. It turns out there are a lot of festivals. This sounds stupid to anyone who grew up in festival culture; I simply had idea. So I bought a tent, a sleeping bag and everything else required for sleeping badly in fields and deserts. Camping had never featured in my dreams. Apparently it was now the entrance fee to the zone. Fine. Europe first, later South Africa — which turns out to be a spectacular place for electronic dance music festivals. More than forty festivals in three years. I expected to find the zone everywhere. Instead I found a lot of standing next to dance floors, waiting for the music to change. Then walking to another stage. Then another. Sometimes I found the right set and it all happened again — two or three hours of music that filled me so deeply that the drive, the camping, the missing sleep and the astonishing quantities of dust all became worth it. I felt fed, nourished inside out. That is still the best word I have for it: my whole being had eaten. Other weekends I searched for hours and came home hungry. I started to think something was wrong with me — too picky, taste gone narrow, not surrendering hard enough, wrong amount of substances - I had idea why the zone kept eluding me. Then I started watching everybody else — and there it was. People checking the lineup and migrating between stages, debating which DJ might be better later, retelling yesterday's set, chasing rumours of last night's miracle. Some danced while looking bored. Others talked through entire sets because the music gave them reason not to. Most seemed to find one great set per festival, then talk about that one set for the rest of the weekend. Most seemed to find one great set per festival, then talk about that one set for the rest of the weekend. Then it hit me: It is not just me. Everyone is hunting for the zone. And far from everyone gets it reliably. Think about how much gets built for a festival: stages, sound systems, light shows, camps, sometimes entire temporary cities. Now think about how the actual experience is handled — the one everybody came for. We prepare as well as we can and hope the right conditions arrive: the DJ finding the track that opens the floor, the substance creating the right state, friends showing up with the right energy at the right hour. One track that brought us into the zone with all our friends around, and we remember it for years. I became an addict craving the zone. I would always be perfectly prepared, but couldn't manufacture the experience myself. I had control over whether it would happen or not. Looking at the harvest of time spent in the zone and time, money and energy preparing and being at festivals, I became more and more frustrated and even more picky. I only went to festivals with a high zone probability, to save energy. Everyone would tell you this: the obvious ingredient that decides whether the zone will happen is the music. That's why we wander from stage to stage, hoping for the wave to catch us. It was clear. A zone experience needs zone music. So the first thing I did was start collecting tracks that reliably created a response in me. Genre labels — techno, melodic house, organic house, downtempo — told me almost nothing about whether a track would carry me anywhere. I started hunting for music with intention: tracks that seem to know where they want to take me. I made it an art and science to distinguish music with and without intention. You can find out more about it here: intentional-electro.org You would hear me complaining about music at every festival — until I could longer bear to hear my own complaints. I was ready to write a long open letter to all the DJs in the world complaining about their music. But instead, I did the unexpected: I got myself a silent disco set with 16 headphones and brought it to festivals. Randomly, I would pop up a small dance floor and hand out my headphones playing my intentional electro playlist. The response was overwhelming: You would hear me complaining about music at every festival — until I could longer bear to hear my own complaints. "Thank you so much, I really needed this." "Why don't they play this on the main stage?" "This is the kind of music I came here for." "This music fills me up so deeply." "Is this your music? I love it. This is what people need here." The words of a few hundred people encouraged me to sit down and write a DJ Manifesto instead called Beyond Entertainment, reminding all DJs to be more conscious of WHY people came here. Then I was invited to open a festival on the main stage with my music. Wow. In two weeks. But I am DJ. I have clue how to work the turntables. To make a long story short: With the help of a sound magician I created a pre-designed incredible journey set called "Welcome Travelers" that demonstrates what I mean by intentional electro music and brings to life what my DJ manifesto speaks about. But unfortunately the music was only half the answer to the zone. The other half I found with a notebook. AfrikaBurn 2026. I suddenly find myself back in the zone — and this time, instead of simply enjoying the state and hoping to stumble into it again someday, I observed myself. How did I get here? Where was the door I had accidentally walked through? I recorded a video and took notes. While dancing. Somewhere out there is footage of a middle-aged man conducting field research on his own ecstasy. Three things stood out: cannabis, ketamine, and intentional electronic music. Everything else — the light, the movement, the clothing, the loosened grip of normal life — helped the three of them work. Then I went home. One ordinary day a few weeks after the Burn, I wanted the festival feeling again. It is winter in Cape Town and the next real festival is months away. My living room was available immediately. It was a day when my partner and I had a big reason to celebrate, but we weren't in the mood. Everyday chores, stress, challenges put us into a very different state of mind. Everyday chores, stress, challenges put us into a very different state of mind. So I ran the experiment. I invited my partner to our own little festival in the evening. She looked at me with one eyebrow raised. At sunset, I put on festival clothes. I transformed the living room with coloured lights and projectors until it became a spaceship. I chose the music carefully. I recreated the state I had observed at AfrikaBurn — a joint and a medium amount of ketamine. Then I put the headphones on both of us. Fifteen minutes later, we were in the zone. We had the best party of our lives. Better than at any festival. It was beyond what I can describe here. The main part was: we were totally unhinged, free and available to the moment, the music and to each other. That surprised me more than anything else in three years of research. I had filed the zone under desert, giant sound systems, thousands of people and the right DJ. And here it was, at home on an ordinary weekday. I tested it with my partner. Then alone. Then with friends. Every time, people entered the zone. After eight or nine versions, I trusted the pattern enough to give it a name — and to send invitations. Which brings us back to **YOU ARE OFFICIALLY INVITED TO BE DRUGGED AND KIDNAPPED.** I chose those two words deliberately, and they mean exactly what they say — just much friendlier than they sound. Drugged changes how much of you the music can reach. Kidnapped changes which world gets your attention. Part 2 takes the night apart for you, piece by piece: both words, the floor, the outfits, the substances, the three-colour headphones, so you can recreate this at home and enter the zone reliably instead of occasionally. Like this Rethink? Give it a thumbs up. ## Worth passing on? WhatsAppFacebookEmail Une série en 3 parties ## Drogue et enlèvement 1. Part 1 · Oct 2026 · **You are here** **Arrêtez de chercher le set parfait aux festivals. Il existe un moyen direct d'entrer dans la Zone.** 13 min 2. Part 2 · Oct 2026 **Sous l'emprise de drogues et enlevé : Comment organiser une fête qui vous transporte** 11 min 3. Part 3 · Oct 2026 **Drogues et enlevés : Nous avons à peine parlé toute la nuit. Nous ne nous sommes jamais sentis plus proches.** 8 min Next in this series**Sous l'emprise de drogues et enlevé : Comment organiser une fête qui vous transporte** Continue with the next part Un e-mail lorsque le prochain Rethink est disponible. Rien d'autre. **Le Repenseur** Lis-le