Magnetic Fields

Magnetic Fields is a three-day weekend inside a desert palace in Rajasthan. It now occupies Abheygarh, on a hill at Khetri, in the Aravalli belt, within Shekhawati. The building is sandstone, with towers, corridors and courtyards. Music is spread through those rooms: a dance floor, a platform facing the hills, a stepwell for slow pieces, a sunset terrace and a club at the end of the maze. The same weekend holds electronic sets, live bands and musicians from the region. People sleep on the grounds. It is a stay, not a there-and-back day from a city.

You arrive by road to Khetri and climb the hill. The late-winter sun warms the facade by day. At night a jacket helps, even if a T-shirt was enough in the middle of the afternoon. Between one room and the next the walk is a corridor or a stair, not an open plain of several kilometres. The East room is the home of the dance. The West sends live music and electronics toward the hills. The Stepwell drops the pace: ambient, without the rush of the large floor. On the Sundowner the evening falls on the stone. The club closes the route, already inside the building. Food, water and rest sit on the same hill. Someone stepping out to a railing still hears the neighbouring room. The grounds fit on the hill: one gate, several rooms and the return to the same courtyard. There is no loose campsite in another village and no second site that needs a bus. The weekend admission opens the rooms and the bed. By day the courtyard takes the sun on the sandstone; if the sky closes, the corridors cover the walk. Between two pieces a stair is enough. Water is in the same building. After dark the terrace looks over the Shekhawati hills without leaving the wall. Someone arriving late on Friday finds the same rooms, because the programme sits in three days inside the house, not in a field that takes twenty minutes to cross. A jacket on the railing and a T-shirt in the courtyard handle the February contrast. The dust of the road stays on the shoes until the way out. The late-winter light stays on the facade into the afternoon, and the club at the end of the maze is still a short walk from the stepwell.

The origin is another palace, a short stretch of desert away. In 2013 Magnetic Fields opened Alsisar Mahal, a seventeenth-century fort in the village of Alsisar, also in Shekhawati, a land of havelis and painted walls. The family of the mahal lent the house. Sarah Elizabeth Chawla, a co-founder, has said the project was not chasing the biggest platform or the largest crowd. The date was in December, three days, with music under roofs and in courtyards, and with room for yoga and for staying over. For ten editions the name and that mahal were the same thing.

A day at Alsisar began in a courtyard of frescoes and could end on a roof when the sun came up. The village dust got into the shoes. The village went on beyond the wall, with its havelis. Two winters, 2020 and 2021, stayed empty. When it returned, the mahal was still the home, December after December, through 2024. The grounds grew tight for a crowd that was coming more for the dance floor than for the bill. The team wrote a farewell to the mahal staff and the village, and closed that chapter.

The new chapter was held from 13 to 15 February 2026 at Abheygarh. That weekend’s bill mixed Rival Consoles, Auntie Flo’s band and Vieux Farka Touré, a Malian guitarist who had already played Alsisar in 2022, with Barker in the slow room and with Manganiyar musicians — kamaycha, morchang, khartal, dholak — inside a live piece about the desert. There was no published minute-by-minute account. What the reviews set down is the hill, the rooms and that crossing of electronics and folk.

Magnetic Fields is known by sleeping in a palace and walking from room to room for three days. Alsisar remains the house of the first decade, with its Decembers and its dust. The home now is the Khetri hill: sandstone, a well for slow music, a terrace for the last light and a floor aimed at dancing. You come in through the desert, listen between walls and leave with the same dust on your shoes. The team supplies the name. The Shekhawati hills stay around it.