Goldenvoice has shared the first look at the stage design for Head Trip, its new two-night electronic music event landing October 10-11 at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, CA.
The build comes from Romain Pissenem and his creative studio High Scream, who designed the structure to draw on the Coachella Valley’s desert landscape and the rows of vintage Airstreams parked around the Empire Polo Club grounds — a detail Pissenem has said he remembered from an earlier visit to the venue for Coachella. The goal, in his words, was for the structure to feel almost science-fictional, “as though something had landed in the desert,” while still belonging to the landscape it’s built into. Reflective materials are designed to catch the desert light and surrounding palm trees, and rather than treating architecture, screens, lighting, lasers, and video as separate elements, High Scream built them into a single connected visual system.
That system doesn’t stop at the stage. Lighting and lasers extend out across the festival grounds using the site’s own infrastructure to build what Pissenem calls a “forest of light,” with metallic structures functioning almost like electronic trees scattered through the crowd — the idea being that fans feel inside the show no matter where they’re standing, while each artist still gets room to bring their own visual identity into the larger production.
Unlike a typical multi-stage festival, Head Trip runs on a single stage with zero overlapping sets — a setup built specifically for this one-time-only production and not meant to be repeated.
Pissenem brings serious credentials to the project. Beyond founding High Scream, he’s the creative force behind some of the biggest rooms in dance music, including [UNVRS], Ushuaïa Ibiza, and Hï Ibiza, along with large-scale productions like the Paris 2024 Olympic Games closing ceremony, shows at Madison Square Garden, and Tiësto’s 2025 performance inside Egypt’s Giza pyramid complex.
Saturday, October 10 is headlined by Calvin Harris, with FISHER and Chris Lake reuniting their Under Construction alias, plus back-to-back sets from Peggy Gou and Four Tet, and Seth Troxler and Ben Sterling. Sunday, October 11 brings Swedish House Mafia, Skrillex, Dom Dolla paired with KETTAMA, The Blessed Madonna, and DJ Harvey. Floating Points’ Sunflower Sound System runs across the full weekend, marking its U.S. debut inside a mycelium-paneled dome tent decorated with artwork commissioned from artist Josephine Chime, built around 10 custom speaker stacks for an immersive listening experience separate from the main stage.
Additional details: artists perform in the order listed on the poster, doors open at 3PM both days, and the event is 18+. Free parking opens at 1PM each day, with car camping and shuttle passes also available. Official hotel packages bundling festival passes with local lodging are available now as well.
Tickets and more information available at HeadTripIndio.com.
