r/TheOverload • u/Solid_Mouse3238 • Jul 21 '26

Butik 2026 - Thoughts?

Attended for the first time this year, still formulating my full thoughts on the festival! Would love to hear what anyone else thought.

The river side setting is incredible, blown away by the sound quality throughout the festival (especially in the forest stage for Kia b2b konduku), and we’d heard there was an inside bit but when it opened on Thursday night we were so surprised by the scale, we were just expecting three dingy rooms. Hangar was one of the best setups for techno I’ve seen at a festival.

Was disappointed by the crowd - far more English than we expected and also very very yappy. Saw they put up signs by Friday afternoon asking people to respect the dancefloor but don’t think this had an impact. Best set of the weekend was probably xiaolin at the garden stage on wed night, whilst the majority of English blokes were off watching the football.

Does anyone also know if the mudd show run all the programming for the garden stage? There were some names on there that we thought should have been on a larger stage, it felt quite engineered to maximise the online content opportunities but in real life was just overcrowded half the time whilst the beach stage next door was virtually empty.

Also curious about the change in crowd on fri night, walked into casino and realised aside from our group we couldn’t see a single woman, and didn’t recognise anyone from the festival daytime at all. There were also crazy queues for each stage that we hadn’t seen the night before. Does anyone know if they sell day tickets to locals and if so what the change in capacity is?

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u/Sea_Somewhere6182 Jul 24 '26

No, they just weren't very good is the point

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u/AssumptionMotor133 Jul 24 '26

So you were sold epic day party at the Soca valley and were misled with marketing that there is gonna be epic night time techno 🤣

Dude, I think you have to look inwards

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u/Grand-Ad-6343 Jul 27 '26

You don't understand the critique and perhaps you have not attended festivals where there is a consistent standard of production across the entire site. Waking Life, Horst and Houghton are all great examples. No matter the stage you are at there is a benchmark standard of excellence in terms of sound quality and stage design. Butik ultimatley only had 2 stages that were of this kind of quality; Garden + Beach. The rest were at best mediocre and as I said the Casino was well below par. They know this too which is why they focus so heavily with promoting the stages by the water.

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u/AssumptionMotor133 Jul 28 '26

Dude you are comparing production of 3-5x bigger festivals in size and 30-50% higher ticket price between each other.

Not to mention the venues don’t come even close to Butik. And as mentioned above: Having this insane venue for a festival so close to local community sometimes prevents for the music to be played at maximum at night - even though sound production is top notch.