Mysteryland, one of the oldest electronic dance music festivals, which originated in the Netherlands, will make is debut appearance in the United States this coming May. ID&T and SFX Entertainment have announced that the 3-day music festival will take place at Bethel Woods, the site of the original Woodstock gathering in 1969.
Mysteryland is set to take place on the sacred grounds Memorial Day weekend, May 23-26, 2014. According to the Huffington Post, tickets will go on sale to the public on Dec. 12th at 10am EDT. A pre-sale will be available on Dec. 11th, and fans are encouraged to sign up for information at the festival’s website. The festival is strictly 21+.
Bethel Woods has multiple stages and 800 acres of manicured grounds, which will serve as campgrounds for the 3-day event. However, the event is limiting ticket sales to 20,000 each day, in attempts to start smaller than ID&T’s (who also put on Sensation) chief executive Duncan Stutterheim’s other debut U.S. festival TomorrowWorld.
According to Stutterheim, via The Wall Street Journal, Mysteryland isn’t focused on what most Americans know as EDM – the energetic, crossover genre favored at Electric Daisy events that Mr. Stutterheim says amounts to “a modern version of pop music.” Instead, Mysteryland showcases some 20 different styles of electronic music, like trance and house, many of which emerged as a backlash against pop music, he said.
“Mysteryland has had a tremendous impact on the music world and it is the logical festival to follow in the footsteps of the original ground-breaking music event, Woodstock,” said Robert F.X. Sillerman, Chairman and CEO of SFX in a press release. “This is more than just a music festival. This is a seminal event that marks the same kind of revolution in society that Woodstock signified. Woodstock changed everything when it took place in 1969 – music, culture, the way we looked at the world. Mysteryland did the same 20 years ago, when it started what is now a tidal wave of electronic music festivals and Electronic Music Culture (EMC), which engages hundreds of millions of people across the planet. SFX is proud to have the honor of producing Mysteryland at the home of Woodstock.”