The Forest Is a Culture Story: Tinsel at Electric Forest 2026

Every June, a ranch resort in Rothbury, Michigan disappears under a canopy of light. They call it Sherwood Forest — a hand-built tangle of lanterns, string, and sound where tens of thousands of people walk in and agree, for four days, to belong to the same improbable town. Electric Forest tends to get filed under "EDM festival," which is a little like calling Coachella a concert. It's really one of the largest temporary communities in the country, and like any community, it runs on stories.

So this week, we're going in. Tinsel is setting up in the Forest — a recorder, a pack of Polaroid film, a backstage pass — and over the next four days we're sitting down with 10 artists. We're a mixed crew: some of us have lived in this music for years, and one of us mostly comes for the art and the people, back for his second Forest. That split feels right for a place that refuses to be just one thing. And even before we've hit record, the striking part is how few of these artists are really about dance music.

They're about reinvention with nothing left to prove — Kaskade staging a multimillion-dollar production at 55; Claude VonStroke selling the label he spent 17 years building and starting over from a bedroom. They're about building your own machine so no one can tell you no, which is more or less what GRiZ did when he answered a career crossroads with his own label, his own festival, and his own charity. There's a producer who spent his whole career treating the human voice as an instrument and finally found the genre that speaks his language (T-Pain). And there's a Connecticut jam band, named after a friend it lost to addiction, that's turning the most hedonistic corner of live music into a place where people talk about grief and staying clean (Eggy).

Line them up and the genre label stops meaning much. What's left is a culture — people remaking themselves in public, the odd persistence of craft in an age built for shortcuts, a crowd the size of a small city deciding for one weekend that a forest is worth building by hand. That's our beat. The loud soundtrack is a bonus.

One more thing. We don't think the sharpest questions only come from the person holding the recorder. So before we sit down with anyone: if you could ask one of these artists a single question, what would it be? Tell us — the best ones are coming backstage with us.

The Interviews

We'll add each conversation here as it publishes — check back through the weekend.

• Eggy — The jam band growing up: improvisation, grief, and what it means to carry the name of the friend you lost. (first up)
• T-Pain — The producer's revenge: how the most-mocked voice in pop became music's great shape-shifter.
• Kaskade — The economics of reinvention at 55.
• DJ Diesel — The global icon who went looking for the one room his fame couldn't buy him into.
• GRiZ — The artist who walked away, then built an ecosystem.
• Claude VonStroke — What it costs to sell the thing you built, and why you'd start over small.
• Eli Brown — The reinvention that meant deleting his own name.
• Levity — From an Ableton free trial to the main stage.
• Close Friends Only — The first festival act built like a group chat.
• Nitepunk — The accent in the bass: a foreign ear in a scene that rewards sameness.

When to Catch Them

Set times for the 10 artists we're sitting down with, all Eastern. Pulled from Electric Forest's published 2026 schedule — times can move, so treat the official EF app as the last word.

GRiZ plays two sets, so he appears twice.

The Forest will be packed up and trucked out of Michigan by the time most of these run. The conversations stick around.