We were nowhere near reaching the island but the vibe was already flatlining. Our twelve hour drive north from Trondheim to Bodø had started badly after some miscommunication re: the size of our borrowed vehicle. It was a little Renault hatchback and rumours of its boot size had been greatly exaggerated. Certain images are conjured by the idea of a scenic road-trip with friends through Norway, but none of these involve being folded like a stick insect in the back seat of a car with a week’s worth of camping paraphernalia balanced precariously on your lap. I had a tent pole lodged in the fleshy part of my thigh. My girlfriend Eirin was trying to use a Thermos flask as a pillow. We made tepid attempts at category games but the four of us couldn’t agree on what to play. Jim could only name one Spice Girls song, Julie didn’t care about Wimbledon winners past and present. The claustrophobic mood wasn’t helped by the increasingly frequent weather warnings pinging to our phones - the benign yellow warning for strong winds was now a more threatening orange: stay indoors.
The estimated queue time for the ferry was five hours, but there was a chance it might be cancelled altogether. Storms can be apocalyptic this far north of the Arctic Circle, and to get to the remote island of Væroy we had to cross the forbidding Moskenstraumen, a system of tidal eddies and whirlpools that constitute one of the strongest ocean currents in the world. 2 Become 1 looped around my head in an increasingly desperate attempt to quell my neuroses. The view became completely obscured by howling, persistent rain. Eventually, a figure with a walkie-talkie and fluorescent overalls knocked at our window and indicated for us to drive into the belly of the beast. I've seen The Wicker Man and Midsommar. I’ve read And Then There Were None and Shutter Island. How could I have been so fucking stupid?
Soria Gathering's website features sunlit images of dreamy mountain landscapes and golden-white sands:
Our vision is to create cultural content that promotes liberation and human development. We believe that, with the power of the sun, nothing is impossible.
The sun has a special ritualistic status in the Nordics where the seasonal changes are so significant. There will be sun ceremonies and several other rituals one can attend throughout the festival.
This is the area where Hyperion, the father of Greek God Helios, was born. In summertime, the sun never sets on Væroy island. It’s a place where, according to Greek mythology, immortality is possible.
My colleagues who read this over lunch looked at me quizzically. Granted, if I was sacrificed on a stone altar it would make for an interesting Cause of death on my putative Wikipedia page - but what exactly was this festival about, what kind of people were going?
I thought about a friend I once had who went to an ayahuasca retreat in Bolivia run by a non-profit called The Temple of the Way of Light and never quite returned. I thought about hacky-sacks and diabolos and slacklines strung between trees in a park. I thought about Terrence McKenna’s DMT: The Spirit Molecule. I thought about the bugged-out insomniacs with streaming subscriptions to Gaia, about ethnically-ambiguous girls in mandala print harem pants and sinewy guys with psytrance hair - guys who emerge blinking and arachnid at the tail-end of the rave, toplessly convulsing to their own inner frequencies. In England, I’d known someone who changed their first name to ‘Love’ and stopped believing in the concept of money. He super-glued himself to a bank during XR protests and made Instagram reels about the divine feminine. I was about to plunge into the mystic with 500 believers; how weird could it possibly get?
The nose of the ferry pitched comically up and down, the waves like those you see on YouTube videos called The Sea Can Be A SCARY place!! To make matters worse, someone had plugged in their electro-acoustic guitar. A mantra-like chanting circle soon formed of beautifully dishevelled young people, each of whom more attuned than I was to the Goddess energy of the roiling ocean. The sticker on his instrument read This Machine Kills Fascists. My mind wandered to Reinhard Heydrich, The Butcher of Prague, and how he might have felt about my colleagues aboard the boat. Seasickness and anxiety were curdling my brain.
FAQ: What about the weather?
It’s a wildcard! Anything can happen, and all seasons may occur in one day. At Væroy, the force of nature is very much radiant and alive. Feel it, sense it, soak it up. It will re-energise you on a primal level!
I am not historically an outdoorsy person. As a teenager, my friend once spilled a bottle of amyl nitrate in our tent at Leeds festival. The prolonged head-rush combined with the humid intermingling of sweat and drizzle led me to a lifelong aversion to camping. Think about it: the zzzzzzzzzzip sound as you trudge your deconstructed, sodden trainers into the dewy grass; the polyester funk of accumulated body odour; getting dressed without standing up. It was, therefore, a highly-bespoke nightmare that greeted me at the campsite: winds ripping through the long grass, the ocean spraying from the beach like a savage cat. In a few hours, I would awaken to Eirin shouting for my help - she was on her knees, holding the buckling poles between her outstretched arms like Michael Jackson in the video to Earth Song. Within moments, we would learn that there is simply no dignified way to run after a tent. The ensuing melee was cartoonish, a festival of indecent exposure as the wind stripped away everything except the vehicles we’d arrived in. An email alert came through from Soria’s organisers - a rockfall had partially cut off the only road leading to the festival. They encouraged radical self-reliance and reminded us that the arctic environment is a perfect arena to test collaborative exploration. We dived into our friend Ane’s sturdier SUV and crawled back down the windy 7km road, huddling in the car overnight amongst the soaking remains of our possessions. Fyre Festival: Arctic Edition was in full effect.
The next twelve hours were dimmed by the ambient gloom of low-pressure headaches, dehydration and muscle fatigue. We had a choice to make: catch the ferry back that evening or wait it out until the next day, Saturday, when the weather forecast promised 20 degrees and uninterrupted sun. The rain had abated a little overnight, and we had a renewed desire to reclaim something from the sunk cost of our travels. After a morning of knocking around a supermarket cafe, we headed back to the festival site - it was early afternoon and there were long-haired dudes in windbreakers and flip-flops banging bits of plywood together on the beach stage, a stack of Funktion 1 speakers had been wheeled through under a tarpaulin and some food vendors were hesitantly setting up their stalls. There was the slightest sense that something might be happening here. Buoyed by this seedling of optimism, we returned to the campsite and tried to erect our tent, its warped frame now resembling a piece of conceptual art. By Friday evening, the sun had emerged and the island began to look as resplendent as it had in our imagination - and so began the most beautiful 48 hours of my life.
**
Things got strange. There was no reality, no longer solidity. All things merged, one into the other. Time had stopped. Clubs are temporally bound - 2am gives way to 4am, 4am gives way to 6am. Eventually, you know in your heart of hearts that it is time to go home. But here we were at the end of the earth receiving the most sanctified promise of all: the eternal moment. The sun, beating down high above the horizon, moved to us only in a gentle circle - not night giving way to morning, but night giving way to yet more night - except ours was endless and taking place under the dazzling glare of the sun - immortality is possible.
Here’s a thing you’re immovably struck by when certain 5-HT2A receptors are sufficiently stimulated: the quiddity and fullness of everything, the acute this-ness and that-ness of every dandelion seedhead, every dew-soaked blade of grass. We witnessed a pair of midnights, one after the other. How long had we been here? There was no telling. The environment was mad, turning one’s head from one vista to another was like scrolling through Windows desktop wallpapers: bucolic green grasslands, marshmallowy sands, marble-smooth pebbles, odd geometric scarring on ancient cliff-faces, an infinite fractal of shadowy Mt. Rushmores.
There was music of course, but it was difficult to tell whether it was coming from the speakers or the earth itself. Julie and Ane rushed over to tell us they had found a particular piece of grass that we simply had to sample. They led us uphill through what appeared to be Teletubbyland, the light a vivid electric gold, and we joined them in their special spot - except that wasn’t it. Ane was sure it was further along. “Where is it?” she asked, “What’s it?” we wondered, standing in an expanse of grasslands, looking for a particular spot of grass - “Here,” she said, collapsing with laughter, “This must be the place!”
The grasslands and beaches seemed populated with video game characters - a bricolage of larger-than-life, surreal, otherworldly creatures who moved without a trace of inhibition. Viking Gods in fur coats, German surrealists in Mercury 7 space-suits, steampunks, nudists, bodybuilders, psychonauts, Zen Buddhists, old-school ravers and angelic Danes in white tunics. Dancing was as natural as breathing, with DJs on both the Sun Gate and Beach Stage locked-in with everything from rolling Detroit techno to hypnotic Goa trance and deep, muscular house. When Laurent Garnier’s classic Crispy Bacon dropped I could have ascended to join Helios himself. The festival program offered so much more than one person could possibly partake in - sound baths, yoga, meditation, saunas, hikes, introductions to the Wim Hof method. Like all the best festivals there was a fleeting glimpse into a possible utopia.
And then, a very simple realisation:
Everyone can do what they like.
Consider the pernicious psychological state that emerges in adolescence but is never fully left behind: that of the imagined audience, of persistently viewing yourself through the hypothetical gaze of others. I am guilty of this on both ends - a struggle against being judgemental and critical stemming from a deeper sense of anxiety and self-consciousness. A difficulty with simply just being. But here this weed was pulled from the root. Looking around, it felt like everyone was imbued with a quasi-mystical sense of total freedom. Unbelievably to me, there were families with children here - children in butterfly wings pirouetting to vibrations in their tiny feet. I could feel my brain recalibrating in real time - a richer understanding of Metta practices of loving-kindness than I had ever been able to attain before. My thoughts turned to Sit Around The Fire, the final piece of Jon Hopkins’ Music for Psychedelic Therapy.
Start to love that which you can love
And just keep expanding it
You love a tree
You love a river
You love a leaf
You love a flower
You love a cat
You love a human
But go deeper and deeper into that love
'Til you love that
Which is the source of the light behind all of it
And there it was, unfurling like a flower before me: the light behind it all. We went back to the campsite to find the electro acoustic guitar player camped next to us. He played a chord progression through a loop pedal and gradually added layers of real-time field recordings into the soundscape - voices, footsteps, laughter, distant songs ringing out over the tranquil Norwegian sea. He smiled at us, the face of someone completely at peace within himself, and wished us a good night.