BORAT MEETS THE MATRIX

Ancient folklore meets the cybernetic future at Ozora, a psytrance festival in the Hungarian woods

Hallo from Berlin, where I have gotten caught in the drag net of immigration bureaucracy and am temporarily blocked from returning to Los Angeles. There is no guestlist at passport control honey! Still, it’s a potent time to be adrift in Berlin, especially with so much political turbulence in the air: Ravers for Palestine and Strike Germany are leading a boycott of some of the city’s baddest clubs due to their alleged censorship of pro-Palestinian artists, leading to DJs and influential labels like Pan cancelling their gigs at Berghain. The strike has been picking up major press, although as The Guardian noted this week, the club simply replaced the acts, and people still queued to get in.

There is always a rift between emotionally charged online chatter and more messy on-the-ground realities, but a different piece of hype news that I’m surprised hasn’t made more of a splash on the streets is the legalization of weed in Germany. Probably this is because selling cannabis is still prohibited, so dispensaries or dreamy riverside lounges aren’t yet a thing—and unlike Thailand, for example, where DIY weed shacks were thriving when I visited last spring, most of the action in Germany is taking place behind closed doors, in members-only community clubs. In fact, legal weed doesn’t seem to have made much of an impact on Berlin’s polydrug party culture at all. (“Who cares…” drawled a fashion gay I met at weeeirdoes, Lolsnake’s Thursday night party at Saule. “Everyone just wants to do 3-MMC…”) Anyhoo, I’ll be reporting on this more shortly!

What brought me to Europe in the first place was an invitation to speak at The Chambok House at Ozora festival, which is second only to Boom as the largest psychedelic trance gathering in the world. While a psychonaut once described Boom to me as “one of the world’s largest open-air drug markets” thanks to Portugal’s drug decriminalization, Ozora takes place in Hungary, which has some of the most repressive drug laws in the EU under its right-wing government. I felt the state’s scrutiny as soon as I stepped off the plane and was pulled aside to have my bags rifled through by stern-faced soldiers, and was also warned by festival staff that further police stops were likely en route to the festival.

Perhaps this is why, after miles of driving past endless cows and watermelon stands through the Hungarian countryside, getting deposited at Ozora’s gates at golden hour felt like such sweet relief.

The first thing that struck me was how stunning the festival site looked. Unlike most music festivals that rely on pre-fab constructions from plug-and-play production companies, Ozora’s structures—including at least eight stages, plus dozens of bridges, towers, stairways, tea shacks, gardens, and healing huts—were architectural marvels painstakingly hand-crafted by artisans over its two-decade lifespan. Even more remarkably, these structures remain in place throughout the rest of the year because the festival owns the bucolic forested grounds where it takes place. This has allowed the site to evolve into a whimsical, wabi-sabi wonderland, like if Burning Man didn’t have to tear everything down and was allowed to build upon itself each year, endlessly mutating into ever-more intricate forms.