Antaris Project

Antaris Project was never just another psytrance festival in Germany. For many people in the Goa and psytrance world, it became a seasonal coordinate: a place where summer shifted into another rhythm, where an airfield in rural Brandenburg turned into a glowing temporary village of tents, basslines, blacklight decoration, chai, market stalls, long nights and strangers who somehow felt like part of the same moving tribe. Its story began in 1993, when Uwe Siebert returned from Goa with the idea of bringing the open-air spirit of the legendary Anjuna beach parties to Germany. That timing matters. Antaris appeared before psytrance had fully settled into the global festival circuit it would later become, and before the language of psychedelic open airs was familiar across Europe.

From 2005 onward, the festival found its most recognizable home at the Otto-Lilienthal-Flugplatz in Stölln, in the Havelland region of Brandenburg. The setting was never just a backdrop. This was not a generic field rented for a weekend, but a historic airfield connected to Otto Lilienthal, one of aviation’s great pioneers. Antaris built part of its myth on that strange and beautiful overlap: a place associated with early human flight becoming, once a year, a launchpad for another kind of lift-off. Not mechanical flight, but collective trance. Thousands of people gathering in open land, surrounded by forest and sky, letting repetitive rhythm, light, exhaustion and community slowly detach them from ordinary time.

The Antaris experience was physical before it was anything else. You arrived, set up camp, found your friends, lost your reference points, learned where the floors were, checked the market, planned a schedule that would inevitably dissolve, and surrendered to the festival’s own clock. The Mainfloor carried the direct force of psytrance, Goa, progressive, full-on and related psychedelic sounds. Around it, other areas opened different moods: alternative floors, chill spaces, ambient and downtempo zones, food stalls, clothing and jewelry markets, workshops and the Spiritual Circle. This structure made Antaris more than a sequence of sets. It was a whole weekend system: sleep, hunger, sunrise, dust, conversations, recovery, return, another drop, another walk back to the tent.

One of the festival’s defining strengths was continuity. For decades, Antaris maintained a recognizable identity while psytrance itself expanded, professionalized, splintered and globalized. It was able to host veterans, international live acts, progressive names, darker sounds, hi-tech pressure, ambient textures and techno-adjacent programming without losing the sense that it belonged to a specific culture. Its most recent verified edition, in 2024, included a broad lineup with names such as 1200 Mics by Riktam, GMS, GMS & Dickster, Liquid Soul, Burn in Noise, Morten Granau, Earthling, DEKEL, Goa Jonas, Ash Roy, Fernanda Pistelli, Fabian Laute, Klangphonics and TiM TASTE, among many others. It was not a festival built for casual headliner consumption; it was built for people who understood the long arc of a scene.

The Antaris message also mattered. Its identity was tied to friendship, peace, freedom and an anti-war spirit. From the outside, psytrance culture can easily look like visual excess: fluorescent symbols, cosmic language, mandalas, UV installations, bodies painted by night, dancefloors that seem to belong to another planet. But beneath that surface there was always a social idea — international encounter, nonviolent coexistence, temporary escape from everyday hierarchies, and the belief that dancing together can create a form of belonging. Antaris carried that idea for more than three decades, and that is why its meaning cannot be reduced to production, lineup or ticket sales.

The final chapter has made the story more fragile. Uwe Siebert, the founder and central figure behind the festival, died in March 2025. That year, the team announced that there would be no Antaris, describing the pause not as a farewell but as a necessary space for grief, realignment and inspiration. For a while, some listings and community references pointed toward a possible 2026 return, even framing it as a last gathering or closing chapter. More recent information, however, indicates that there will be no Antaris in 2026 either. German local reporting has described the situation in Stölln as the end of an era, and the festival’s own social channels have communicated that 2026 will not host an Antaris edition.

That is why Antaris Project should now be treated as historic, with an uncertain future, rather than as an active confirmed festival. Its importance remains intact. If anything, the uncertainty makes its place in the culture clearer. Antaris helped bring the Goa open-air imagination into Germany and gave it a long-term home. It turned a rural airfield into a meeting point for generations of psytrance dancers, artists, travelers and believers in a different kind of festival life. If it never returns, it remains one of the key memory sites of European psytrance. If it does return one day, it will carry more than a lineup: it will carry Uwe’s legacy, the Gollenberg nights, the old tribe, the unresolved goodbye and the original promise to laugh, dance and gather in peace.