We all belong here and Fusion makes that felt before you even step foot on their hallowed grounds. Germany – through the lens of Fusion – showed me a version of community where music united us across time & space, melding multiple languages and cultures with no corporate or capitalist stains on the living, breathing, evolving organism that is found in pure unadulterated freedom. This is how things could be. This is how things are going to be, thanks to a community of people doing the work.

If Burning Man is a swirling fever dream of sand and scale, Fusion is its stoic, spell-casting cousin from the Black Forest – a Grimm’s fairytale reimagined with subwoofers and spraypaint. It’s less “leave no trace,” and more “build the future in the ruins of the past.” The difference is in the details. I’ve seen other festivals lean into chaos for chaos’ sake, but Fusion wields its chaos like a scalpel – surgically precise, obsessively intentional. Nothing is accidental here, and yet, everything feels free & spontaneous. It’s in this paradox – precision giving birth to wildness – that the artistic eruptions happen.

And nowhere was this more evident than on Friday morning when I stumbled upon one of the most unforgettable and heart wrenching moments of the weekend. The performance unfolded like a ghost story told in flesh & fabric. Three women – topless sirens in long black dresses – were suspended in the air, 20 feet (6 meters) above our heads, somehow attached to bending bamboo poles. They moved slowly on their harnesses, doing pirouettes and undulating with the heavy clouds that colored the sky, their movements wrenching with the wind, screaming without words, evoking more feeling in a heartbeat than I’d felt in an eternity. Their silent whispers, echoed in French prose from the stage in the background through a palette of ethereal soundscapes, scorched the filament separating their imbalance between the spiritual world and us humbly seated on the ground in our perceived real worlds – their bodies wavering like brushstrokes in the air. Their movements were sharp, aching, deliberate, and undeniably beautiful. They danced, but it was clear they were revealing something sacred.

There were no more words. Just motion. Just mourning. Just a haunting sense that this wasn’t performance, it was ritual. A spell cast for all of us. I don’t know what loss they carried, or whose pain they pulled from the dust, but I felt it. We all did. I sat there, weeping silently among strangers. And somehow, in that unspoken grief, we were united. We wept for our sisters, mothers, and daughters. For the immigrants, the marginalized, and the forgotten. For a world full of potential but still stuck in the broken systems of the past. But more importantly, we wept in hope for a new generation hellbent on actual change. I cried not just for those lost in the perpetual battles, but for those saved through our collective efforts. It all matters more than we could possibly know.

This is what makes Fusion different. It’s not just the scale or the stages – it’s the space it gives to the unmarketable, the sacred, the devastatingly human. It allows sorrow and beauty to exist side by side. It makes room for what cannot be explained, only felt. It entertains as much as it transforms.

Which is why it was so special to be there with Crescendoll – who, full disclosure, I manage (thanks Sarah!) – for her set at the Tanzwüste stage. After touring with her for a few years, this was certainly the biggest set of her blossoming career. The rain was still falling, but she opened the set like a ray of poetic post-punk light: a Nick Cave invocation, haunting and holy,

What followed was a carefully architected journey – psy-leaning, driven, pulsing with intention. She played with the music, stitching her originals with equitable sounds from her contemporaries that literally brought the dancefloor into a state of hallucinogenic mass euphoria. She wove a tale. She cast a net of sound across the sandy floor, and the crowd – drenched, locked in, electric – stayed and danced until they transcended. I’ve never been so proud.

Before her, Unknown Concept had set the stage with a flawlessly executed set of psy and techno textures that seemed to bend time. I was reminded of his set at Sisyphos a couple years earlier, grateful that I got to return to witness his evolution. Our conversations about a new heightened focus on his music & purpose were realized in real time before my eyes. Hours later, I watched his humble persona uproariously light up when Yuli Fershtat – a revered elder of the scene – played one of his tracks. He turned to his partner in excitement, who beamed beside him and held him in celebration. That moment, quiet and seismic, said everything:

It’s where legacy is witnessed, and the future gets a name. How could we be so lucky?

This was the spirit of the weekend:

And now that I’m closing this chapter, I realize that I didn’t cover a fraction of what I set out to cover. Or see but a small portion of what this festival had to offer. But like their communally shared ethos of ‘no photos’, the incredible sets I witnessed by the likes of Frida Darko & Atric, Dela Moon, Tom Baker, Armen Miran, Freedom Fighters, Anja Schneider, Victor Ruiz, & Jedidiah, just to name a few amongst the many… I must let these memories live in my mind. I will most certainly be back to capture more. Fusion is unequivocally the place where dreams are realized and retold – re-envisioned for those that understand its ineffable necessity.

Until next time.

I am forever grateful.