HORST Festival is Belgium’s dance music laboratory

Each of the nine stages at HORST Arts and Music Festival in Vilvoorde, Belgium, appears to be premised on a question.

What happens when you plop an actual pit in the middle of a large dance floor, the Weaving Weeds stage seems to ask. It turns a crowd into a swirling cauldron of dance — especially when British-born, Berlin-based synth philosopher Barker is weaving his own sonic yarn and hypnotizing the crowd into a state of bleary-eyed revelry.

The Le Soleil Rouge stage, which greets festival goers with a huge red circle that reflects the bodies dancing beside it, asks how the presence of a mirror changes one’s experience of dancing. On Friday, as I moved to recent FADER Mix alum Jump Source’s bouncy HORST set, it occurred to me that the reflection’s blurry quality seemed more an invitation to forget oneself in its red haze than to stare at my reflection.

The nine stages, each so different and populated so closely together in Asiat Park’s six-acre campus, give the entire festival experience a kaleidoscopic feeling. One can go from the dark misty club spaces of the Strato or Circus stages, to the wraparound light display of the Ring stage, to the outdoor ritualism of the newly built and designed HoRAbaixa stage, built around a wooden tower, all in the same surreal hour. Sets at HORST range from the brain-tingling and abstract (Ehua) to the hard-edged and thumping (Andy Garvey), mirroring the surrounding environment’s penchant for variety.

HORST Festival, located a short drive from Brussels, has been running since 2014 (longtime attendees are eager to tell me of the “castle” where it started). Since 2019, it’s taken place at Asiat Park, a former military base that’s now home to year-round programming from HORST who also works with local tenants and community members to utilize spaces and structures within the Park. The Festival is the apex of HORST’s activity, hosting around 12,000 visitors each day.

Rooted in the local Belgian scene, HORST Festival has become an expo for both musical design and performance-based experimentation since its inception. Unlike other festivals, which foreground big-name bookings to attract festivalgoers, HORST prioritizes world building above all, working with a variety of global design firms — like the Paris and Zurich-based architecture company BRUTHER that designed the Le Soleil Rouge stage — collectives, institutions, and artists to make Asiat Park a true sensorial ecosystem.

Its environment-focused ethos creates a tantalizing vision of what a festival can (and, in my opinion, should) be: not just a “bang for your buck” chance to catch as many of your favorite acts at once, but a world (or worlds) unto itself, a chance to ruminate in something different for three days of hypnotic dancing. Evidence of the audience’s faith in the experience was made clear in the rush to buy tickets this year; all but some Thursday tickets to HORST Festival sold out ahead of the lineup announcement. Eventually, the entire festival sold out: the first time since HORST began.

HORST’s architectural focus doesn’t mean that the festival’s musical curation is an afterthought, though. This year’s edition featured notable names from the global electronic scene, including the trumpeting maestro Takuya Nakamura, London stalwart selector Tasha, rising Brooklyn-based selector Akua, Dan Snaith’s (Caribou) dance oriented project Daphni, and L.A.-born vinyl maestro and FADER Mix alum 1morning. Remarkably, nearly half of the bookings were made up of local Belgian artists this year, meaning out-of-town visitors found themselves in a local-scene crash course.

“A lot of my friends who were booked this year were extremely honored and shocked,” Antonia Torfs-Leibman, an anthropologist and resident of Brussels’s local Kiosk Radio told me, referring to their friend Wife Mandala. “He thought it was a scam, because he thought he couldn’t be booked for HORST, being in the scene for over 10 years and now finally being recognized.”

Torfs-Leibman added that she often sees the people who run Horst at the bar in her neighborhood on weekends. The festival’s decision to book so much local talent is a chance for it to prove that its environment and reputation is enough to attract faraway festivalgoers and have them willing to encounter something new.

As I chatted with local Belgian attendees, many of whom were longtime HORST festivalgoers, I noticed an echo between the festival’s multiplicity, its variety of sounds and worlds, and the surrounding country and city itself.

Brussels is at once the capital of the European Union, a hub for diplomacy and business, and the center of a trilingual country. It’s also a quick train ride away from other European cultural epicenters like Paris, London, and Berlin, its storied techno scene still looming. And in addition to its longtime residents, it’s populated by a large migrant and asylum-seeker community from North Africa and the Middle East and European and foreign artists, who come in and out, possibly attracted by Belgium's relatively generous artist subsidies.

In a musical context, this mishmash of peoples has resulted in few large institutional clubs and a unique local scene powered by “small collectives in unusual or temporary locations,” DJ AliA said. “There’s still a need for more permanent small venues, but they also bring a raw creativity to the scene.” To him, this is what gives Brussels its distinct character.

One feels a rawness in HORST’s overgrown, DIY, yet still sprawling production, which, with a bevy of volunteers running much of it, still manages to encompass and create so many worlds at once. It's rare for such simultaneity to flow in such a euphoric fashion, where a constant state of shifting feels enlivening rather than disorienting. It's that energy that made HORST among the most exciting and engrossing festival experiences I’ve ever had.