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This Magda Hot Air Balloon Set is Why Festivals Need to Be Brought Back down to Earth

The Polish DJ flew 6,000 feet in the air with a 360°​ video camera.

In February, THUMP took a moment to step away from all the festival announcements to ask: why are do all line ups look the same? The facts are hard to deny: lots of the same artists are playing the same kinds of festivals, which all tend to offer pretty similar kinds of experiences. Festivals have to scramble to get you to notice them, and the results aren't always on the money—consider, for example, the $1 million dollar-per-ticket festival in Iceland.

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These hyper-competitive conditions make sense, though. We all know the EDM's bubble has burst/is bursting, as exemplified by the very public struggles of dance music conglomerate SFX, which filed for bankruptcy back in February, and the ugly fallout that has followed.

While obviously all dance music isn't EDM, it's hard to talk about the monetary aspect of dance music without acknowledging its pervasive influence. With this in mind, Swiss event production company MDRNTY was probably thinking about how they could make themselves stand out when they huddled around the drawing board for this year's Caprices festival in Crans-Montana.

MDRNTY says on their website they specialize in "ephemeral events at unique locations," and their previous work with Caprices has involved a transparent festival tent designed to emphasize "panoramic views". So it's not necessarily surprising that they decided to send the Polish DJ Magda (real name Magdalena Chojnacka) up in a hot air balloon with a 360° video camera.

The question we're left wondering, though, is: why? When does a high-tech, excessive display start to overshadow the music, which is supposed to be the main appeal in the first place?

As you can see in the video above, Magda set was irrefutably excellent—as hers usually are; you can tell by her fine-tuned narrative pacing that she's been telling rollicking stories with house and disco-inflected sounds as a DJ for a long time. However, the lengths (6,000 feet in the air, literally) MDRNTY goes to create a spectacle here are a little intense. It makes you wonder: maybe some bubbles are meant to burst.

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