Sustain Release: A Field Report

The drive up was its own set, its track stretching across hours of asphalt and a train-whistle mix. Daniel Rincón’s Cowboys and Trains rattled through busted speakers that buzzed like loose teeth, Jack’s car groaning with every incline, incapable of breaking fifty unless gravity gave us mercy — every downhill a gift, every flat a punishment. Pete was in the driver's seat, giving play-by-play commentary like some washed-out F1 announcer: “And they’re off … crawling into Turn Two at a blistering forty-seven miles per hour, the crowd is on its feet, history is being made.” 

We laughed until our ribs hurt, until anticipation itself had replaced oxygen, and by the time the Taconic curved us into trees, we weren’t driving anymore. We were arriving, hallucinating speed blurred into being, the weekend already breathing around us.

We arrived by three o’clock, had tents pitched by four. Pine needles collapsed under every step, hammocks drooped like cobwebs, a sagging “Just Married” banner strung between trunks for no one in particular. Pete zipped into his mesh tent like a prophet in waiting, the air sticky with sap and smoke, basslines faintly rumbled like distant thunder. Sustain doesn’t declare itself with billboards or branding. Sustain seeps. It’s not a festival screaming its scale; it’s a house party that outgrew its walls, a mystery that grows stronger the closer you get. Other festivals chase hype and die by it. Sustain runs on whispers. Mystery is the lifeline.

Thursday bled with energy. The Gym rattled under Sharlese, bass crawling up the walls until the room itself vibrated, condensation dripping from beams onto shoulders mid-dance, Byron Yeates sharpening the space further, kicks hammering like punctuation. The Grove breathed softer: Lovie weaving R&B silk into techno’s spine without snapping it, K Wata gasping jagged life into machines, Loidis stretching into fog-warm vapor. Programming here is never random. It’s a novel unfolding, arcs instead of sets, intimacy and psychedelia braided tightly — the twin engines that drive everything forward.

Basketball was everywhere, Thursday especially. Every walk to the Grove became the long way – the ball way – a mandatory detour. Pete limped along on his wrecked Achilles but refused to sit, hurling bricks, grinning like a zealot, me half-scolding and half-converted. I had already realized ball wasn’t optional; it was a ritual, another rhythm running parallel to the bass.

Friday started not with music but with smoke and prophecy. Morning air sharp, lake glassy, Ari, Sofia, Rowan, and Pete all half-collapsed, voices spinning shop talk while I sparked a joint, sun already biting into my skin. My phone buzzed. I turned to Pete and said the only words that mattered: “Amy is coming.” The announcement leapt out of me like a secret I’d been waiting my whole life to release, my whole body jolting awake, elation tearing through me. Pete grinned, nodded, then dropped the line that turned the whole weekend mythic: “When they’re together, no one is Robin; they’re both Batman.” Everyone laughed, but I carried it like scripture. Amy wasn’t even here yet and already she was bending the air around us; her name alone rewiring the day.

By afternoon, the lake boiled with garage — Conducta b2b DJ Swisha scattering rhythms across water, bass ricocheting off the bouncy slide. Sun merciless, heat pressing me flat. I felt the need to faint creep up — slow and certain, not sudden but inevitable — and lowered myself into the order pick-up line before collapse could humiliate me. The health crew appeared instantly, pressing water into my hands — unnecessary due to the issue being low iron, not thirst, but holy anyway, metallic and sharp, the best water of my life. Then the burger — grease and char dripping into my palms, outrageous in its perfection, eaten flat on my back under a tree. A nap claimed me after, heavy and absolute, while lying butt naked in my tent and feeling the bass throb from the other side of the lake.

Night cracked sideways. Adobeprincess wove glitch into dusk, the Grove flickering alive, then Vlada and the panic blooming, acid logic unspooling coherence. Hood up, sunglasses on at one in the morning, Damien from Mean Girls gone feral, and worse than the disguise was the mission: no one at camp could know I’d left, no one could see me falter, so I bolted. The Grove pulsed behind me, but I slipped away, back through the trees, back to the site, alone. That’s when Gab called — lost somewhere in the dark — and I raised my phone, flashlight stabbing into the trees like a lighthouse, beam cutting through black, guiding her stumble by stumble until she collapsed laughing into camp. Acid paranoia and human reunion colliding in the same breath, but the mission wasn’t over. 

I darted back out, looping between Grove and camp and Bossa, ducking into the tent just long enough to prove I’d been there all along, bolting back before the lie unraveled. Acid logic turned cover story, paranoia made ritual. At Bossa, Voice Actor’s drones finally cocooned me, low hums like wires under soil, static wrapping until the mission dissolved, until I stilled, until panic melted into sound.

Saturday was a baptism. The pool boiling with bodies, BASHKKA b2b Gabrielle Kwarteng slamming bass into chlorinated water, sunscreen and sweat slid into slick sheen, Sedef Adasï climbing darker, handholds stacked into delirium. Bubbles rose like omens, beers bobbed like buoys, strangers kissed waist-deep, someone lit my cigarette and I kissed them back in thanks. Then, Amy, like a prophecy being fulfilled, found me on the hill by the pool shaking what little ass I have, and suddenly I was twice alive — gremlin and saint in the same body, the Batman pairing completed. Pete’s words from Friday morning rang true in my skull: both Batman – zero Robin – a force field of elation humming around us. 

The Grove was a cathedral that night. Masda’s sermon ran three hours on five ingredients: minimalism infinite, groove relentless, stank face permanent. Pete later compared it to buttering toast — simple, elemental, genius — and he was right. Vladimir Ivkovic followed with trapdoors and corridors of shadow, OK Williams carried us into dawn with skeletal rhythms. Programming was story rather than lineup: surprise and delight written into flesh, arcs stitched into bodies.

From 11 to five, I didn’t stop. Amy and I felt feral together like gremlin saints at the edge of dawn, hands up, ass down, hugging everyone, kissing friends, laughing like prophecy had delivered us into itself. Safety to be yourself wasn’t a principle. It was law.

Basketball dwindled but didn’t die. Between ramen bowls and an accidental fire, between pool delirium and Grove liturgy, we still detoured, still took the long way. Pete dragging his wrecked Achilles through every shot converted me entirely. I craved the ritual, knew every tangent was sacred. Ball became the secret fourth stage – a mirror arc to Grove and Lake and Pool and Bossa – Thursday obsession, Friday insistence, Saturday stubbornness, Sunday limping ritual.

Morning coffee steamed in paper cups, me mute, Pete sermonized Masda again. He always has that morning clarity, the kind that lets him dissect a night down to its frequencies — how the bass carried, how the highs cut, how the crowd bent with or against it. A true sound nerd, he could spend a whole day just talking about the way a set sounded, the way a room received it, and that morning he did, replaying Masda in full detail while I sat wordless, letting it wash over me like one last ambient set. 

Sustain’s genius isn’t growth. It’s refusal. Hype would have killed it, mystery kept it alive, presence was the only price of entry. The hardest work is sustaining Sustain’s intimacy alive, psychedelia intact, underground DIY forever, trust braided into labor, labor braided into love.

By noon on Sunday, the camp was dismantled with absurd efficiency: hammocks unstrung, tents collapsed, ramen bowls stacked like artillery shells. Every motion sharpened into choreography, efficiency so tight it could be studied. Out by 12, the forest shrinking in the rearview like a curtain falling on a stage, home by three.

Festivals usually die ugly – bloated by hype, strangled by sponsors, rebellion sold as experience. Sustain runs the other way. Brakes on, never gas. Stranger each year, tighter, more intimate, refusal at the core: refusal of scale, refusal of polish, refusal of spectacle. A house party in the woods that refuses to end. Intimacy and psychedelia married under pine. Underground forever. DIY forever. Ball forever.

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