What if a stage wasn’t only a place to observe dwell music, however a portal that pulled you proper into the center of it? That is the promise of Bonnaroo‘s new Infinity Stage, which can remodel the pageant’s Centeroo ambiance in 2025.
The progressive stage, which Bonnaroo claims is “the world’s largest 360° spatial audio experience,” will tower over the opposite six preexisting buildings within the pageant’s central hub. Nonetheless, Brad Parker, Competition Director at Bonnaroo’s organizer C3 Presents, describes Infinity is a “perfect additive” that can amplify the vitality with out altering the occasion’s course.
Parker paints an image of the open-air stage as extra like gas poured on an already roaring hearth, with digital dance music because the gasoline. He says the style is the biggest rising subculture inside Bonnaroo’s storied grounds at Nice Stage Park, underscoring its rising dominance in at this time’s pageant panorama.
“The EDM scene of now is very reminiscent of the jam band scene of the early 2000s, a quiet but powerful underground culture making waves across the entire scene,” Parker tells EDM.com. “Bonnaroo has always been about offering the best in the streets. It’s quite literally the origin of our namesake. EDM is the most popular it’s ever been, and The Infinity will be the most advanced production for soundscape we have ever had.”
The inaugural Infinity lineup boasts a stacked lineup of digital acts, together with a uncommon collaborative DJ set from Of The Bushes and Tape B, who had been named to EDM.com‘s Class of 2024 and Class of 2025, respectively. It can additionally function a extremely anticipated takeover by Specialists Solely, the model launched by dance music famous person John Summit, which was just lately honored as 2024’s finest file label in our record of the yr’s prime business leaders.
The following-gen stage comes from Polygon Dwell, a famend music tech agency out of the UK. It can incorporate spatial audio and a completely synchronized, state-of-the-art lighting system to create a multi-sensory dwell audio setting the likes of which has by no means been skilled by festival-goers, Parker mentioned, citing Polygon.
“When Polygon Live said they could present audio to us at scale in a way that music festival fans had never heard, of course we were intrigued,” he remembers. “The real creative process comes through the programming itself and the artists we are putting onstage. You will hear some once-in-a-lifetime performances from these artists on Infinity because you have never heard their music presented quite like this before.”
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The phrase “immersive” has been crushed into oblivion by the music business, however it appears Infinity has earned the title. Polygon’s ambitions have gotten actuality as they develop the stage’s manufacturing, which can disperse bleeding-edge spatial audio throughout three large hemispherical domes.
“What we are attempting to do with Infinity is to audio what the Sphere is to video,” Parker says.
He realized the outstanding potential of Infinity when he skilled a smaller model of its manufacturing at Thailand’s Wonderfruit Competition again in December 2024. Whereas it felt like dancing inside a state-of-the-art membership, Parker says he was really partying in the course of a discipline, fully swept away by spatial audio that “really makes you feel like you are in the experience, and not at it.”
Polygon Productions
Infinity might function a harbinger of the place Bonnaroo is headed sooner or later. The pageant’s workforce, Parker says, will proceed to study, adapt and push the envelope as they embrace new applied sciences and alternatives to enhance the fan expertise.
He cautions, nevertheless, that evolving Bonnaroo’s onsite expertise should strike a cautious stability between experimentation and reverence for the pageant’s storied legacy.
“Bonnaroo is one of the few festivals that has had the privilege now to serve multiple generations of fans,” Parker explains. “Our biggest task is honoring and thanking those fans that got us through the first 20 years, while also looking forward to curating for the community of fans who will get us through our next 20.”
“This is accomplished by paying modern day homage to our jam band roots,” he continues, “with recent bookings like Goose, JRAD, Eggy and more while also focusing on what the younger generation is interested in, such as Olivia Rodrigo and elevating our EDM programming. Life is all about balance.”
As spatial audio expertise quickly transforms music as we all know it, with even the inventor of the MP3 racing to revolutionize, Bonnaroo is discovering the candy spot between innovation and authenticity. True to kind, the pageant is embracing the way forward for dwell music whereas staying true to its roots: huge azure skies, tenting camaraderie and the type of communal vitality you may solely discover on The Farm.
“Festivals will always be special sacred places and testing grounds for new experiences,” Parker says. “There is something about a festival that can’t quite be replicated in an arena or amphitheater, and it’s our jobs to tap into exactly what this is to stay fresh and keep evolving. There will always be a demand for live music, and we hope to be at the center of that craving.”
“At the end of the day, we build worlds and create communities. If we can do that, we win big.”
You possibly can view the complete lineup for the inaugural Infinity Stage under and buy tickets to Bonnaroo 2025 right here.
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