Psychedelic Forest

In 2017 I led creative production of the main stage at Subsonic Music Festival—designing an enchanted mushroom forest rooted in local fungi and botanical inspiration, environmental storytelling, and collaborative worldbuilding.

The stage played with scale, colour, and perception: LED wall coverage, two Barco F90 laser projectors, and projection mapping integrated with lighting to create a cavernous band space where audience attention could shift between focal points across the weekend.

An elevated side-stage DJ position—“The Lab”—took the form of an Art Nouveau apothecary conservatory: a fervent sorcerer’s workshop where changeover sets and narrative-driven visuals unfolded, cued on media servers from a vision brief developed with VJs, animators, and content creators.

A custom double-raked catwalk cut across the stage, allowing performers to move from full height down into the crowd. Asymmetrical structure, décor, and lighting plots de-paired fixtures and tucked technology behind scenery so the forest felt alive—Mythos, Magic Panels, Scenius Unicos, mapped RGB sunstrips, and movers delivering immersive psychedelic lighting throughout.

Produced collaboratively with over a dozen contributing artists, the stage balanced bands on the main platform with glitch-hop and electronic programming from the lab—supported by Full Throttle’s asymmetrical delta sub array and a tertiary performance platform above the flown arrays.

The result was an environmental narrative experienced in real time: a forest that breathed, shifted, and held a festival audience across three days of music, performance, and spectacle.