Elements Music & Arts Festival

Elements began beside rusting cranes and warehouse walls, not in the Pennsylvania forest with which it is now associated. In September 2013, BangOn!NYC founders Brett Herman and Timothy Monkiewicz took the energy of their warehouse parties outside to the Gowanus Bay industrial waterfront in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The first event was essentially a one-day experiment in how much could happen around electronic music without turning the site into a conventional concert ground. Four dance floors represented Fire, Earth, Air and Water; aerial performers used existing industrial structures, art cars moved through the crowd, flames and projection mapping altered the waterfront, and the remains of heavy industry became part of the visual language. Those element names were initially broad creative devices, almost a useful excuse for artists and designers to interpret a theme. More than a decade later they have become the festival’s organisational DNA. Elements still avoids presenting one universally accepted main stage. Different audiences can build entirely different weekends around the four realms, which is unusual for an event now drawing more than thirty thousand people.

The New York editions moved through increasingly unusual industrial environments, including Hunts Point in the Bronx, but 2017 created the version that defines the modern festival. BangOn! launched a three-day camping edition at a summer-camp property in Lakewood, northeastern Pennsylvania. Around 4,000 people arrived for Tipper, Liquid Stranger, Baauer, Claude VonStroke and a long programme distributed through forest, fields and lakeside spaces. Cabins, swimming, camping, interactive structures and hidden environments changed the rhythm completely. Instead of leaving at 10pm and returning to New York nightlife, attendees lived inside the event for a weekend. Fire gradually became associated with high-energy house and bass-driven club music, Air with deeper house and techno, Earth with heavier low-end and psychedelic sounds, while Water often carried brighter daytime energy, disco and melodic programming; none of those definitions has remained completely rigid. The important idea is that each element should feel different physically as well as musically. A stage is therefore designed as an environment before it is treated as a billboard for whoever happens to headline it.

The Lakewood era also produced the most difficult chapter in Elements history. The festival returned in September 2021 after the pandemic hiatus just as the remnants of Hurricane Ida had saturated northeastern Pennsylvania. Damaged parking lots, deep mud and overwhelmed transport systems led to extreme entrance delays, stuck vehicles and widespread complaints about sanitation, water access and organisation. Elements apologised, and attendees later pursued a class-action case. It became a defining reputational crisis precisely because the festival’s marketing had always emphasised community and care. The team responded with a detailed operational plan and a venue move. In 2022 Elements relocated to Pocono Raceway in Long Pond, a NASCAR facility that might sound fundamentally incompatible with its forested aesthetic. The contradiction turned out to be useful. The raceway brought roads, parking, drainage and infrastructure proven under large crowds, while the festival itself could occupy extensive woodland behind and around that infrastructure. Campers gained easier vehicle access, the arrival process no longer depended on the same shuttle bottlenecks, and the creative programme retained enough forest to keep the sense of discovery that Lakewood had established.

Long Pond allowed Elements to grow at a rate the old summer camp could not have supported. Attendance reached roughly 18,000 across the 2023 weekend and then climbed to sold-out crowds of 33,000 in both 2025 and 2026. Yet the most interesting expansion has not been numerical. Vibe Villages let attendee groups design their own themed camp communities; the Neon Forest uses large-scale installations as navigational landmarks and playgrounds; the Fun Factory deliberately fills time with strange performances and games that would make little sense on a normal concert schedule. Zen Den and Healing Garden create slower spaces for wellness, while the Eco Hub mixes environmental education with playful ideas such as a Swap Shop where collected waste can become currency for reusable goods. Those details place Elements within the broad American transformational-festival tradition, but its musical centre remains emphatically electronic. It can host a huge dubstep crowd, a serious techno set, drum & bass, experimental bass and accessible house on the same night without forcing all of them into one mainstage hierarchy.

The ninth camping edition ran from 7–9 August 2026 and sold out at 33,000 attendees for the second year in succession. More than 150 artists performed. Subtronics, Excision, GRiZ, CloZee, Of The Trees, LSDREAM, SVDDEN DEATH and LEVEL UP demonstrated the depth of the North American bass audience; Chris Lake, Cloonee, Walker & Royce and KETTAMA covered several shades of house; Charlotte de Witte, I Hate Models and Boys Noize gave techno a substantial presence; Above & Beyond, Porter Robinson, Big Gigantic, Louis The Child and Sub Focus expanded the emotional and stylistic range. Earth and Fire received major new designs, continuing the original insistence that each element should have its own physical character. Elements will return to Long Pond on 6–8 August 2027, with loyalty tickets already launched. It is now vastly larger than the waterfront party that began in Brooklyn, yet the festival still works best when size briefly disappears—when a path through the woods leads to an installation, a tiny community camp or a stage that one person will insist is the “real” main stage while someone else has spent the entire weekend somewhere different.