Twelve grounds, and no main stage

The programme is published as twelve areas rather than as a list of names, and that alone says what sort of week it is. The music grounds are the Dance Temple, the Alchemy Circle, Sacred Fire and The Gardens. The others are the Liminal Village, the Being Fields, Spaceship Earth, Art and Installations, the Envisionary Art Gallery, Performances, Young Dragons for children, and a Bike Village.

The Dance Temple is the one people mean when they say Boom. It stands by the lake and its architecture draws on sacred geometry and ancient symbols. In 2025 it held 61 slots, and more than 44 per cent of them went to artists playing Boom for the first time.

That figure is policy, not accident. For 2027 the festival has stated that at least 70 per cent of the projects on all its music stages will be ones that did not play in 2025, and that it is inviting a higher proportion of local and global artists under thirty. An event that sells out could book the same names again and again. This one has published a commitment not to.

Sacred Fire is the opposite building. It is woven by hand from natural materials, braided willow among them, shaded and set among trees, and it is the home of live music: musical traditions from across the world, and for 2027 special live shows of psych rock and dub as well. The Boomers Council gathers there in a circle. The festival calls it a stage built by many hands.

The Gardens is the slow ground. Downtempo, dub, ambient, psychill and organic midtempo, with the lake behind it and planting all around. The regenerative permaculture gardens are on the same land, which is the festival making a point about where music happens as well as what it sounds like.

The Liminal Village has been Boom's knowledge hub since 2002: talks, panels, masterclasses, workshops and films. The Being Fields is bigger than the name suggests: more than twenty stages and activity spaces for meditation, breathwork, yoga, martial arts and bodywork, with hundreds of therapists and facilitators. Anyone who expects a psytrance festival to be a dance floor with camping attached will find that this part of the map corrects them.

One request repeats at the foot of these pages, phrased as a request rather than a rule: leave national flags, selfie sticks and camping chairs out of the programme areas, and let your phone rest while you dance. The festival's reasoning is that at Boomland no one is a nation, an image or a spectator.