Future Forest: Beautiful Chaos

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Festival Addict

10 min readApr 12, 2017

Tucked deep in the backwoods of rural New Bruinswick, you will find this small electronic music festival nicely placed on the cusp of an amazingly large lake near Fredericton. This festival goes by the name of Future Forest.

After you drive through the utter chaos that is Fredericton and start to get more in touch with the great outdoors the sheer beauty of the rolling hills and large bodies of water really gets you amped up for this awesome weekend of festivalling.

Upon entry to the festival, you get bombarded with adorable signage with whitty sayings and cute symbolism to help ease you into the festival mood. Beware however, the road is rough. You are literally driving through the woods on a bumpy narrow dirt road and should not go any faster than 10–20 km/h. Just crank up the tunes and get ready!. Also there is no cell signal on the road but there is (some) at the festival so don’t panick!

Once you get through the lineup and enter the gate, you then are thrown into your first set of chaos. Our gate experience seemed somewhat unorganized as they ran out of decals that we needed to buy for 30$ in order to bring our car any further. You also had the option of parking in the free parking lot located right at the gate which was quite a walk from anything resembling camping. Luckily we only had to wait a few minutes. Our other counterparts needed to wait almost 2 hours because the people at the gate ran out of bracelets. They did give out very nicely designed schedules and a map, which proved to be very helpful.

Once you got past the gate, the chaos seemed to get more intense but it added an amazing sence of bewilderment and fun to your experience. Being such a narrow road with cars all parked on one side and so many people walking all over the road with makeshift camp sites literally in the middle of the forest, you cannot help but get excited. It was amazing!! All of these ravers and festival goers literally in the middle of the woods, coming together for the love of festivalling.

Once we got in, we found the most amazing place to set up, right next to the prism stage, where we may or may not have been given permission to camp. I could not have asked for a better set up, surrounded by hammocks, again provided by hanging hugs and so central to the music, vendors and crowds.

Once we got set up, we checked out the stages. The prism stage was the closest one to us and we considered it to be the main stage as this is where most of the headliners played and it had the biggest dance area. It was beautifully put together in a diamond / prism shape and would light up beautifully by projectors throughout the evening. It also had an area to the left of it with performance artists which was also stunning. This part of the festival was so beautifully organized with having it all completely outlined in the handouts, as well as being displayed on big wooden signs at each stage.

After the prism stage, we went immediately went out on a hunt for the beach. We heard that it was close by and the map showed it as near. On this short 5 minute walk to the beach, you walk through the Nest Stage. The nest stage was designed like a giant owl and was also very intense in the night time when the projectors and laser lights were going. I did not get any pictures of this, you will have to come and see it for yourself. Our only issue with this stage was at times, it seemed like it was not nearly loud enough. We heard that there was numerous noise complaints so this is somewhat understandable. As soon as you get through the crowd at the Nest, you are almost immediately at the beach, which was perfect for the hot afternoons when you work up a sweat dancing. I think this is one of the main selling features of Future Forest. In all my years of festivalling, I have never found a festival in North America with such a nice little beach so accessible from the stages / camping area.

The third and final stage at Future Forest was the Mushroom Forest. This was designed amazingly with their very clever use of props like little glowing mushrooms, giant mushroom lights and an abundance of huge white mushroom shaped projection boards. This stage was exotic to see in the day and then AMAZING at night!

Future Forest also had an enormous amount of workshops which is great to have that other aspect so well engrained into a festival. We attended one on harm reduction and caught the tail end of one on natural medicine. Word around the forest was that the breakdancing one was quite banging as well.

The Tea Hive collective put on the Harm Reduction workshop and did an amazing job at helping people feel safe and teaching us how to better look after one another. I think this is an amazing thing to have at the festivals as I have seen first hand what can happen when people are not knowledgeable in terms of what they might be experiencing while at these festivals. This is an initiative that is near and dear to my heart and I love the way that it is growing in the east coast festival scene. They are not at Shambhala levels yet, but are definitely heading in the right direction.

As far as the music went, everybody killed it. Everything was so beautifully laid out that it was just seamless. It was a little different from other festivals I have been to as they had the most awesome banging house music all afternoon each day with some breakbeats thrown in to keep it interesting and then seemed to switch to the slower bass music and actual bands in the night. I was a little taken back by this at the forest, but now that I went through it, I know that this is the way to go!. I had so much fun dancing during the days that it let me easily get some rest when the time came at night. The forest also provided amazing shade for when you got too warm and helped amazingly at being able to sleep in or grab a quick nap. No more scorching hot tents!

Friday night, I had a great time dancing to Mark Instinct of course, especially when he dropped some hard as nails drum n bass. This was a great way to kick off the festival. I cant think of a better way to spend a Friday night at midnight. Construct also played a great set and drew in a good sized crowd, playing in the area where he originated from.

Royal Kush Band was the perfect start to the day with their super fun rhythms n rhymes and was everybody’s background music while they slowly crawled out of their tents and getting breakfast foods from the food truck. They brought in a bit of a crowd as their memorable songs drew people in from the vendor village.

Saturday for us dancing raver kids started with Tommy Knuckles playing some banging house music which seemed much different considering the only time I ever see Tommy play is when he is closing down the Synergy stage at Evolve on Sunday night / Monday morning. He played a similar style but it was given a much different vibe by the ambient surrounding of smiling faces in the sunshine.

Next up was the legendary DJ DVD who absolutely killed it by playing some of the most banging breakbeats I have ever heard. I haven’t heard music like that since 2006 and his set really hit me right in the feels. I am so happy I had the opportunity to dance to The Freestylers — Push Up since the freestylers disappointingly never played it the week before at Evolve. Thank you Dave.

At about that time we went down to see Mark Harmsworth playing as Def Child down at the Nest and he was absolutely killing it. He played everything from Glitch Hop to Jungle and the crowd loved him. He really knew what the people wanted and he gave it to them. After all that dancing, we went for a dip at the beach and got ready for the night.

MARTEN HØRGER played an awesome set here as well, which was similar to when I seen him at Astral Harvest a few weeks before. At both of these sets, he started out by playing his signature tracks and huge hits but then finished it off by playing some of the best and most classic drum n bass around. This was obviously my favourite part of his set.

When deciding to go to this festival, I was probably most excited to see Sonny D as it has been at least 10–12 years since I seen him last. He always played some of the most classic house music and I was so hoping to hear some of the classics. He did not disappoint. Every time I was to hear one of my favorite DJs play some classics, I am slowly learning to not get my hopes up since it seems like so many of them are converting their style to the trappy bass music that has become so popular as of late. I admire someone like Sonny D for sticking to their roots. Thank you! I was so happy to have the opportunity to talk to him about this prior to his set.

I was most pleasantly surprised by one artist who goes by the name of Art Official. He played such a wide assortment of the most banging beats we heard all weekend. He played hard electro, fidget, even drum n bass. Every track sounded like the best track I ever heard and he mixed them together so seamlessly. I was just blown away. I hope to hear more from him soon.

In a similar style, I was also blown away by the Real Malloy. Not only at Future Forest, but also at Evolve, The Real Malloy played some of the most high energy, fun as hell beats and I had the best time dancing to them. I think this guy should be in charge of closing down the last stage of every party. He sure as hell knows how to keep the party energized and make people smile.

I cannot say much negative about this festival as I think they did an outstanding job at putting it on. The only area they need to work on is getting more food options. It seemed like almost every time we went to eat, all of them were closed. It was okay for us veterans because we brought a camp stove with food and like 5 boxes of protein bars. All of which were gone at the end of the festival.

All in all, future forest was a nice change change for a festival with their abundance of shade and closeness to great swimming. The Future Forest team did an amazing job at pulling it off and sold out the day of the festival, which means it was the perfect size and price point. I would definitely recommend this festival to anybody looking for a different kind of festival experience. If you like shade, swimming, good vibes and great beats, this is the place for you.