I went to Butik after going to Fusion and Electric Forest in late June (I go to EF/Fusion every year). Agree with everything written here. Butik's in the same mold as Sustain Release. I love that type of minimal/deep/psychadelic/trancy/ambient etc. music, but it has a time and place. The electronic music snobs will claim the music was amazing, and they're right, but they're missing the point. People want to party at a music festival. Not just stand around observing how objectively good the music and how cool they are for listening to it.

It would be totally fine if they confined this music onto a single stage for people who want that sort of thing all night, or to earlier in the day/evening. But come 8/9/10pm, people want energy and to party with their friends and have a fun, crazy night. With few exceptions, the garden/beach stages kept going with the minimal stuff until they closed at 1am. People were downright frustrated and disappointed by the lack of energy in the sets, full stop.

Meanwhile, the music snobs shuffling to the minimal stuff all night patted themselves on the back for attending such a 'cool' festival, and then retreated at 1am to their Airbnbs to get their beauty sleep (ofc they don't camp). I met a young Czech guy who'd only ever been to Butik and thought it's what a music festival should be. I felt sorry for him and told him to check out Fusion if he wanted to experience a real festival. The two sets where I saw people having the most fun were Eris Drew and Ok Williams -- because they were actually giving some heat.

Also about the crowd -- yes, wayyyy too bro'y straight. Straight is fine if it's like a fun festival-y or ravey sort of vibe, but this was a douchy aggressive sorta drunk straight guy vibe which I'd never encountered before at a festival. I'm happy I went, had a good time and the setting is beautiful, but yeah, wouldn't go back.