Head Trip puts heavyweight dance music on one desert stage

Goldenvoice will bring a new two-day electronic festival, Head Trip, to the Empire Polo Club in Indio on 10 and 11 October. The bill is deliberately compact: one stage, a limited number of acts and a run of pairings that would normally sit near the top of much larger festival posters.

Two days, one stage and very little filler

Saturday is led by Calvin Harris, with FISHER and Chris Lake appearing as Under Construction, Peggy Gou going B2B with Four Tet, and Seth Troxler sharing the booth with Ben Sterling. Sunday moves through Swedish House Mafia, Skrillex, Dom Dolla B2B KETTAMA, The Blessed Madonna and DJ Harvey. Floating Points’ Sunflower Sound System is billed across the full weekend.

A different use of the Coachella site

The Empire Polo Club is inseparable from the scale of Coachella and Stagecoach, but Head Trip uses the same site for a much narrower proposition. There are no parallel stages to chase and no sprawling genre map to navigate. That puts more weight on running order, set length and the transitions between artists — details that can disappear at larger festivals.

The booking also draws several versions of contemporary house and festival electronics into the same frame. Peggy Gou and Four Tet offer a looser, more open-ended pairing; Under Construction has already developed its own language between FISHER’s directness and Chris Lake’s club engineering; Dom Dolla and KETTAMA bring another generation of high-impact house into the equation.

The line-up is the concept

There is no need to manufacture a wider theme around Head Trip. Its identity is already visible in the programming: a small number of very recognisable names, a desert venue with established infrastructure and enough B2Bs to make the weekend feel less like a sequence of standard touring sets.