The longest set Basement Jaxx ever played

On the 3rd day of the Coachella Music and Arts Festival 2025 I decided to take mushrooms to enhance my experience of the latter half of that day’s music. 

Although I’d taken LSD in my youth with generally positive results, my prior experience with mushrooms was basically zero. I had however consumed a miniscule amount a couple of days before and then more from gummies the day before without any noticeable effects. 

Speaking with an experienced friend it was suggested that a larger dose in the range of 6g may be necessary to switch on the effects, although it was also pointed out to me that the chocolates had produced effects in other people at much lower doses than I was planning to consume. 

It was suggested to me to eat the chocolates on an empty stomach, so I'd had no food for approximately 4 hours before consumption, water intake was nonetheless high, due to an ambient temperature of more than 90 degrees Fahrenheit. 

I started eating at about 6:30pm, taking no more than 20 minutes to eat a bar and a half of the chocolate. I couldn’t eat any more, so I gathered myself up and headed into the festival. 

The walk into the festival takes maybe 5 minutes including a short security line and from there maybe another 10 more to get to my intended destination stage, Mojave. Mid-way through the festival area I came to notice that the status quo in my mindset had changed. I became more aware of all the people, and the seeming chaos of their movements. I had an empty water bottle on me and I filled that at a water station and hastened my step as much as possible to get to my destination, keen to be in what I knew would be a more segregated and controlled area (I was eligible for access to the ADA seating area due to wearing an orthopedic boot). The point being at this stage I was still making fairly rational decisions based on an increasingly irrational perception of my environment. 

My perception of time from this point on becomes decreasingly reliable (to the point of absurdity eventually), but thanks to some text time stamps on my phone and known set times from the festival some inferences can be made. 

At 7:15 I texted my friends to let them know where I was and that the drugs were taking effect.  

As I typed on my phone and read the replies, I could see the font changing on the screen. Moving from the standard curved sans serif font to something more angular. The color of the keyboard on screen didn’t change but the depth of the keys seemed to shift. 

At 7:20 I texted that I felt weird, but I was OK. 

Very quickly I wasn’t. I became very aware of the “width” of the music. I recognized the artist and song and knew that I liked it, but it all seemed too big. The sound wasn’t too loud, my ears were fine (I was wearing plugs), but the sound was everywhere, it felt inescapable. I also began to feel nauseous, and noticed a prickly heat on my cheeks and scalp. I took a sip of water and that made my nausea instantly feel worse. 

I remember thinking I’d taken too much, and I was going to be in trouble. I wanted help, but I was afraid I’d be spoiling my friends' experiences. I remember thinking to myself that if I ruined their evening, I wouldn’t be allowed back. 

ADA areas at the festival have a helper whose job it is to ensure eligibility for people to access the area and also to assist with any special needs that they may have. I briefly looked in her direction and decided I didn’t want to risk any trouble and sat back and tried to ride out the nausea and increasing fear of being engulfed by the music. 

The music didn’t stop, the heat kept coming and the nausea was endless. I couldn’t wait it out, I needed help. 

I know now that it had been 5 minutes to go from a weird perception shift to proper distress, but to me that was a very long 5 minutes. 

I took out my phone and decided I needed to be escorted elsewhere. The keyboard of the phone shifted as I looked at it. The keys became crystalline and the light shining into them broke out into shards of rainbows, the background was liquid. I was struggling to focus. 

I asked for help and was able to reiterate my location, my typing wasn’t good but autocorrect did its job and kept me in the game. 

A response from a friend confirming they were coming to me came within 4 minutes according to my phone log. I instantly felt shame, intense self-loathing and fear of being ostracized, I knew I was being disruptive to their time and I knew they’d be fearful for me. I hated having to ask for help, but I needed it, quickly. I sent some texts trying to seem like I wasn’t really losing it, like I wanted help but didn’t need it, but it was getting hard to see the screen. 

I was aware the music was dying down, the set ending, and it brought some relief from the crushing sound I felt all around me, but that brought fear because I was convinced the act I’d gone to see at that stage would be more than I could bear. Basement Jaxx was coming. I began to feel dread. 

I panicked and waived over the attendant to ask for help, the heat I felt on my scalp was nearly unbearable and the waves of nausea kept coming. 

I don’t know what I asked her for, but her response was to ask if I needed medical attention and amazingly, out of a sense of intense fear and shame I said no. 

Stomach pain and heat was all I felt now, I had no concept of what was happening around me. I called again for the attendant, and this time asked for medical attention. I told her I felt sick. 

My friends arrived. What followed, I think, was some assessment by them about how deep I was and what I needed. I think I asked to leave but without any real practical hope of being able to do so. I knew who I was, where I was and why I was in the state that I was, but had none of the reasoning skills necessary to suggest a practical way out of it. 

I was helped, over the course of a few attempts, to get away from the immediate vicinity of the seating area I was in and over to a grassy area just a few feet away. I was coordinated enough to move, but the nausea made it nearly impossible to take more than a few steps at a time. 

I lay on my side on the grass as the nausea continued, my face felt on fire.  

And then I felt the grass on my face, not a single continuous solid object, but as a million tiny cool pin pricks of ice, sucking the heat from me. I spread my fingers and tried to push myself into the cooling sensation. I remember closing my eyes and seeing rainbows rising, but not all colors, just reds through yellows, repeating, rising and expanding. 

I have no concept of how long that lasted, but what followed was a repeating cycle of drifting off into colors and confusion and being brought around by heat and nausea. I asked for water repeatedly, I think sometimes it was given other times it was not. I know at times I couldn’t be understood and I put my hand to my mouth and to my head to show I wanted to drink and dowse myself in water. At some point I poured juice over my head by mistake. 

During one of these cycles I became aware that my nose was running. I asked for tissues, I have no recollection of their arrival, but later I became aware that I had a sick bag in one hand and a wet cloth in the other. 

I heard people talking, I made paranoid assumptions about the content but kept them to myself. I would become aware of my surroundings, but couldn’t work out the scale of the world I was in. I could see a water bottle, but couldn’t reach it because it was beyond my grasp only to find out it was in my hand. 

The sick bag was ever present, I knew in my mind that if I held onto it tightly, it would keep me safe. 

Somebody leaned into me and said “this is going last another 30 or so minutes”. I think I tried to make some acknowledgment, but I may have just thought it. 

I became aware that more of my friend group were there, and that they were coming and going, if I roused and saw no one I would briefly panic until I attracted someone’s attention at which point I would ask for more water and then promptly drift back away to a world of nausea and heat. 

Somebody told me to act more normal, and to stop yelling, I wasn’t aware I had been. I gripped my sick bag tighter and held it to my mouth, just in case. 

At some point I became fascinated with a piece of trash paper blown into my lap by the wind. The crispness of the paper was intensely pleasing and I was content to keep it, until told to let it go. I wasn’t pleased to give it away, but did so as I felt it necessary to keep on the right side of those upon who I felt so reliant. A second piece of trash paper blew into my lap and I remember laughing. 

Basement Jaxx started playing. I became aware of it and felt good. 

I was encouraged to sit up, told to start experiencing what was happening and listen to the music. I felt the song, I felt it. I didn’t know if I was still where I was supposed to be, I didn’t know how much time had passed but I felt like I was safe. I knew I’d been rescued. 

And then I was gone again, lost in a swirl of confusion, hearing words but not conversations, seeing people right next to me from a long distance, through a tube. 

And then I’d hear the music, and feel elation. I asked who was playing, and get the same answer as the last time I’d asked, the answer always brought me joy as I began to realize I hadn’t lost much time at all, except I couldn’t square this with my perception that so much was happening in between my periods of awareness. Time was non linear. The music lasted for seconds and the gaps for hours, but the music kept coming back. 

This cycle repeated for an eternity, truly in my mind I would have thought days had gone by, I was amazed at every time I was told the same band was playing, sometimes the same song I had previously asked about. 

At some point I began to have what I thought were conversations, but was told that everything I was saying was essentially garbage, “nobody was buying what I was selling”. I tried to hold in my thoughts, fearful of what I had already said and what I might still say. People asked questions and I said what I thought they’d like to hear, but I think I wasn’t really making sense. I was aware that when I tried to say anything negative, about myself or anything really, people would steer my back to good vibes. 

Eventually my attention was brought by a friend to a song she knew I would want to hear, and everything clicked. “Where’s your head at?” was playing. 

Nothing mattered to me except that song, in that moment. I was surrounded by it as I was earlier, but this time I wasn’t being suppressed by it, I was being filled by it, lifted by it. I needed to move, I felt child-like, in awe of something I had heard so many times before but had never felt this way about. I wanted people to feel the way I did at that moment, I wanted to share, I looked around and nobody looked like they felt it too, but I didn’t care I just doubled down, sure that this was right. The song lasted forever, I drifted away and came back to the same song several times. 

Approximately 3 and a half hours had passed since ingestion. 

Things started to calm down for me after that, I still was experiencing gaps, and people tried to help me maintain my senses and talk to me, Kraftwerk started playing and again I was brought to joy. 

I was able to stand and with the help of a supporting wall, dance. My sense of time was still completely gone, but this time seemingly in the other direction, within the space of a few seconds the entire set had finished. 

As a group we moved away from the Mojave stage and on towards the Outdoor Stage, to witness Pollo and Pan, by this time I had no fear of navigating the crowds, I felt happy to be with my friends and confident I would come to know harm as long as I kept them in eyesight. 

I would describe the next hour or so as a slow, joyous slide down into normalcy. I spent time on the ground, marveling in the texture of the grass, I still had some moments of confusion, seeing the moon and unable to determine if it were such or a stationary balloon, I tried to touch a star. 

I was more able to converse and interact with my friends, but for the most part I wanted to be by myself to soak in the rapidly declining wonder I felt. I wanted to hold on to it.  

At some point I’d traded in my sick bag for a water bottle, I held it for comfort. 

As the music ended, I finished my introspection and brought myself into conversation with my friends, and laughed about the longest set Basement Jaxx had ever played.