LIVE, IN PHOTOS: Desert Daze 2017

In addition to our FLOOD Festival Guide presented by Toyota C-HR—which is available for download now—FLOOD will be at all this year’s best festivals to provide you with firsthand reports from the scene.

Held at the Institute of Mentalphysics in Joshua Tree, a spiritual retreat devoted to the “science of the future,” Desert Daze was three dust-covered days of psychedelic exploration, audio-visual immersion, and rock and roll.

Unlike other major music festivals that tend to bill a variety of Top-40 acts and unknowns on the same lineup, Desert Daze was designed to attract a much more niche audience of high-desert dwelling neo-hippies with a penchant for hallucinogens, healing crystals, and unironic bellbottoms. Generations of performers, from unofficial festival elders Iggy Pop and John Cale to ’90s holdovers Thurston Moore and Spiritualized to present day icons Ty Segall and Ariel Pink, all played on three stages spread out across the dusty festival grounds.

With a “Mystic Bazaar” providing everything from guided plant walks and shamanic ceremonies to sound baths and yoga classes, Desert Daze was as much about perpetuating an atmosphere of mysticism and mindfulness as it was an array of psych, metal, jazz, and funk rolled into one. Now in its sixth year, Desert Daze has grown into a well-oiled hidden gem of a festival; while the neighboring Coachella Valley gets all the credit for bringing big names to the desert, it’s Joshua Tree that continues to provide a home for Desert Daze’s otherworldly gathering.