This past weekend, Bethel Woods Performing Arts grounds, the site of the original Woodstock Festival in the summer of 1969, found itself in a similar state of musical celebration with this year’s installment of Mysteryland. This year’s festival featured Steve Aoki, Kaskade, Moby, Flosstradamus, Dillon Francis among many others. A Dutch company produced the event by the name of ID&T, which is now owned by the entertainment company SFX Entertainment. The Mysteryland electronic music festival prides itself on being the longest running electronic festival on the planet, since it began in the Netherlands in 1993. This year, 2014, marks the first time the festival has been held in the United States, due mostly too the increase in demand for electronic music in America, and the festival culture fully penetrating the millenials and younger generations.

Music lovers throughout the U.S. have been pushing to hold new and larger festivals in the United States. Fans of electronic music were hoping for Mysteryland to come over, but winning the spot wasn’t easy. Other electronic festivals were vying for the opportunity to fill the void, like Electric Daisy Carnival, Electric Zoo and Ultra Music Festival. Mysteryland may have risen above the rest because they market themselves as something a bit more than just electronic dance music.

The stages do not only have DJ’s, they offer more, and include a great deal of artistic beauty. This year’s main stage, for example, was fashioned to look like a psychadelic version of Disney’s Magic Kingdom, but themed as essentially a House of Cards. Additionally, the Vinyl stage was adorned with a highly precise decorative display of vinyl records, essentially built to create the skeleton of the tent itself. They really want to provide the full experience for those that attend. Their aim is to “create a multiple day life and interactive art experience…in between the commercial dance events and the real off-site creative festivals like Burning Man” according to ID&T co-founder Irfan van Ewijk. To make that experience come to life the festival ground sported whimsical decoration, offered yoga classes, workshops with sushi chefs, and of course the musical artists.

The performances this year were pretty fantastic for the most part. Dillon Francis’s set was about as cookie cutter as you can get, with not much in the way of inspiring transitions or remixes of many of his original songs — typical Dillon Francis. Moby’s set was surprisingly impressive, with a laser-focused light show that perfectly collaborated with his DJ style. However, the highlight was most definitely both the Shpeigal tent and the Vinyl tent, both featuring deep house style DJs such as Justin Houston and Victor Calderon. The great thing about these kinds of sets is that they aren’t made up of individual songs, the way that most DJs these days perform. Instead, the deep house DJs simply play, and transition between songs fluidly, keeping the sound going the entire time, while also keeping the audience guessing as to what is going to come next.