In 1996, somewhere in the interior of the state of São Paulo, a small group of people gathered on a farm site and threw a rave. They had not yet named it XXXperience. The original name was The Rave XXXPerience, and it ran the way psytrance parties in that era ran — a specific crowd, a specific sound, a site chosen for its distance from anything that might object to what was happening there, music running through the night and into the morning and not stopping until something made it stop. That single night quietly refused to end. It came back the following year, then the year after that, travelling across Paraná, Santa Catarina, and São Paulo, growing a permanent home in Itu, growing a community that nobody had planned and nobody could stop. By the time Tomorrowland locked the home venue on an exclusive contract running to 2034, XXXperience had already run more than 150 editions and earned the title the Brazilian scene gave it freely: the mother of all Brazilian festivals. In 2026, it came back for its thirtieth anniversary with the largest psytrance lineup ever assembled in the country. The mother was not finished.
A Rave That Became an Institution
XXXperience spent its first decade moving — between venues in Paraná, Santa Catarina, and São Paulo, between communities, between versions of itself. Find a space, set up quickly, run all night, move on. Those years built something nobody planned: a Brazilian psytrance community. It took the global psychedelic trance movement filtering in from Goa, Israel, and the UK and made it its own. Warmer. More communal. Built around the idea that a rave was a space where the usual rules did not apply.
Then came Parque Maeda. The site in Itu, São Paulo, changed everything. More than 300,000 square metres of open space meant the festival could stop moving and start building — permanent scenography, camping infrastructure, a hospitality operation that actually worked. XXXperience stopped being something people attended and started being somewhere people went. Tomorrowland Brasil chose Parque Maeda for its 2015 and 2016 editions. That tells you everything about what the site could hold.
From approximately 2006, the festival started diversifying. New stages for house, techno, drum and bass, and electro arrived alongside the psytrance that had built the place. Calvin Harris played XXXperience. Deadmau5 played XXXperience. Richie Hawtin, David Guetta, Armin van Buuren, The Prodigy, and Steve Angello all showed up. The psytrance community that built the festival in the nineties now shared it with an audience that came through the commercial electronic music boom of the late 2000s. XXXperience managed that without losing what it had been. That is harder than it sounds.
The 2018 Format Shift
The most interesting decision in XXXperience’s history came in 2018. The festival killed the main stage. Gone — the headline act, the headline stage, the single peak moment that most festivals organise their entire evening around. In its place came a circular layout where every stage carried equal weight, equal production, equal billing. Audiences stopped moving toward a climax and started circulating. The Union Stage ran techno, Peace Stage ran trance and the Joy Stage ran tech-house. The Love Stage ran whatever it wanted. Nobody told the crowd where to be at midnight — the crowd decided.
This made sense for a festival that started as a psytrance rave. In that tradition, the music runs continuously and no single moment sits above any other. The peak arrives wherever you are standing when it finds you. The circular format brought XXXperience back to that feeling — something closer to the original farm site gatherings than anything its scale might have suggested.
Thirty Years and Back to Essence
The 2024 cancellation stung. Parque Maeda was locked into a Tomorrowland Brasil exclusive and XXXperience had nowhere to go. For the thirtieth anniversary in 2026, the organisers found Fazenda Santa Rita — km 18.6 of the Rodovia do Açúcar, Itu, accessed from the same road as Parque Maeda. The theme was Back to Essence. The meaning was plain: go back to the psytrance roots, back to the community that built the festival, back to the open-air rave at the edge of the city where it all started thirty years ago.
The lineup delivered on that promise fully. Astrix, Infected Mushroom, Vini Vici vs Blazy in a world premiere show, Ace Ventura, Alpha Portal, Paranormal Attack, Neelix in a retro set, Sesto Sento, Blastoyz, GMS, Ekanta & Swarup, Captain Hook, Phaxe, Morten Granau, Aura Vortex, Burn In Noise vs Altruism, and 1200 Mics in a DJ set. More than forty artists. Gates at 2pm. Music running through to the first hours of April 26. These names span all three decades of the festival’s history — the artists who helped build Brazilian psytrance culture sharing stages with the ones who arrived after the foundation was already solid.
Two stages framed the day. The Heritage Stage carried the classic psytrance sound that defined the festival’s first twenty years. The Future Stage ran LED panels, lasers, and pyrotechnics around a programme of contemporary psychedelic music — the visual not decorating the sound but becoming part of it. The dancefloor was a living organism and that is exactly what the original rave in 1996 was reaching for, rendered at a scale its founders could not have imagined.
After Tomorrowland Took the Venue, XXXperience Took It Back
XXXperience is not the largest festival in Brazil. It does not have Tomorrowland Brasil’s budget, Rock in Rio’s global recognition, or Virada Cultural’s civic weight. What it has is thirty years of trust with a community that built it from nothing on a farm site in São Paulo’s interior — and the authority that comes from being the place where Brazilian psytrance found itself before anyone else was paying attention.
Tickets for 2026 started at R$175 through Q2 Ingressos, with pista and backstage options, half-price entry, and a social tier requiring a 1kg donation of non-perishable food. That sliding scale is not a marketing decision. It is a thirty-year philosophical position — this music and this community belong to everyone willing to show up.
Gates opened at 2pm on April 25, 2026 at Fazenda Santa Rita, km 18.6, Rodovia do Açúcar, Itu. The music ran through the night because thirty years is a long time to keep a promise but XXXperience kept theirs.
