The friendship between two intergenerational Bay Area dance music crews proves that real culture prevails through generosity, exchange, and good taste. GrooveWell’s festival, Vacation, returns to Hopland, California, for its second year on June 18–22 with an impressive lineup including faves like Danny Daze, DJ Holographic, Eddie C, and dozens of established and emerging talent.
Photo Credit: Ryan Schmidt and Robyn Rusell
If Instagram taught us one thing, it’s how every authentic style of art, music, or fashion eventually gets imitated and flattened into a one-dimensional version of itself. That includes algorithm-led festival experiences where lineups are predictable, partygoers are perfectly curated (and perfectly forgettable). If there was once a groundbreaking vision, the moodboard was copied too many times, leaving no understanding of the original intent. This is how great ideas lose their soul. Vacation offers another possibility. Some things are easy to copy, but cultural stewardship of underground dance music isn’t one of them.
Set among the rolling hills of Mendocino County, about ninety minutes north of San Francisco, the 750-person gathering shares characteristics that have become synonymous with Bay Area party institutions: adventurous programming, immersive art, wellness offerings, and camping under the stars, all for an audience more into dancing than documenting.
Founders, Chris Ledet (DJ Ledet) and Jake Gonen (J Key) of East Oakland’s GrooveWell collective had already been throwing parties in the Bay Area and Sayulita, Mexico, years prior, and their hand-crafted event sensibility shines through in a few ways when studying Vacation’s unique traits.
First, artists and mathematicians will rejoice to learn that the festival grounds were designed with the Fibonacci sequence in mind. Second, GrooveWell will be debuting their own sound system, Rapture, made in coordination with the creators of Traction Sound, UK. This system will premiere at the Vacation stage, where daytime groovers alternate between dancing and easy dips in the pond to escape the dry, summer heat.
The Voyager stage has its own flavor too: a down-tempo, all-vinyl affair, while Nightflight is what you would guess, where headliners like New York’s Bradley Zero and LA’s Warehouse Preservation Society give your sneakers a run for their money.
Despite its next-level setting and music lineup, what’s most interesting about Vacation is how it came to be. It exists partly because of what another generation of party builders built before them (and were willing to share the knowledge about).
Sunset Sound System has been shaping Bay Area dance floors since the mid-1990s through countless daytime park parties, Halloween boat cruises, and the beloved annual Sunset Campout in Belden, California, officially on hiatus since 2025.
DJs Galen Abbott and Solar Langevin learned both the practical and philosophical realities of building community over thirty years: taking chances on artists people don’t know (but would soon love), making spaces that encourage participation over consumption, kindness over ego, and managing all the logistics and permits that most festival-goers never think about.
Despite the twenty-year gap in the founding of their dance parties, Chris, of GrooveWell, invited Galen, of Sunset, to play The Howl, the New Year’s Eve underground, then in its third year in East Oakland. Chris explains the early relationship:
“Jake and I had gone to a couple of the Sunset parties prior, but it was 2019 when we really began to understand Sunset’s influence on the West Coast underground house scene. By the time we created The Howl, we felt like we had a proper offering and knew that it would be a great time to invite Galen. It felt very natural having him DJ there. The party was great, and it was the start of what has been a very inspiring and kindred relationship.”
Galen was impressed with the event too: its music, people, and production. As Sunset Campout’s 2023 edition took shape, the invite was reciprocated to the GrooveWell crew: DJ Ledet, J Key, Soul Funky, and Fusion, who played the Beach Stage perched atop the Feather River at the beloved weekender that year.
Some longtime Sunset loyalists raised an eyebrow at unfamiliar local names on the bill. That’s pretty standard in most scenes, since every generation believes it discovered authenticity first. But standing in front of the decks, looking out at a hillside populated by veteran ravers and DJs, some of whom may have been dancing before his peers were born, DJ Ledet glanced over and joked to a friend:
“No pressure.”
Then the music started.
The GrooveWell crew quickly earned respect as each DJ held their own, delivering the layered, soulful selections that had earned them devoted local followings in the first place. Skepticism softened and collaboration replaced distance. Two communities separated by a bridge and a couple of decades became regular fixtures at one another’s parties. That’s when the fun really began.
As Galen, who now serves as Vacation’s Operations Co-Director and Production Advisor, explained, the relationship between the two communities is easy to misinterpret.
“This isn’t about ‘passing a torch.’ It’s more about connecting frequencies.”
It’s clear that Sunset is not “sundowning.” That’s evident from their at-capacity showing in downtown San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens this past April. But bringing Galen on as an advisor for Vacation is an intentional alignment of past and future. The result is a tangible reinforcement of underground values, music, and knowledge that now has a chance to live on in a new generation of Bay Area ravers. The world of dance music needs more examples like this. Meanwhile, Sunset and GrooveWell can’t imagine it any other way.
“If you’re crazy enough to start your own festival, the first thing to think about is the importance your community plays in its success,” Chris said.
“Everyone plays a crucial role in a true grassroots festival, and cultivating trust and opportunities for everyone to express their creative gifts will manifest something that is unique and pure.”
Chris then added, “It can’t go without mentioning that the quality of music will also set you apart.”
And this lineup lives up to the charge, spanning house, disco, techno, ambient (and the other unnamed genres that get played at a vinyl-only tent, draped with red velvet fabric).
One of the headlining posts goes to Mungo Sound Machine, the celebrated West Coast house duo who quickly transitioned from Los Angeles to a global stage with their signature blend of minimal yet dub-influenced house cuts on labels like Limousine Dream. But music anticipation comes in many flavors whether that means pulling up to Solar’s seamless collage of techno, house, and electro surprises or booty-shaking beats from Papa Lou, Anthony Mansfield and Jimmy B. Buzz also abounds for emerging artists like Mr. Matias as well as those from GrooveWell’s orbit such as &ndMore and Good Question– the former of which I recently saw and she provided good reason to come back. Finally, there’s a refreshing balance between male and female artists, a detail that, unfortunately, still feels worth mentioning in 2026, with Masha Mar, DJ Kerry, Dev Cloud, and Lyja representing a rich selection of sound by way of the California coastline from LA to SF.
If you want a taste of Vacation this summer, capacity is running low on weekend tickets, but you can request an invite here. A Sunday ticket will also be made available – and it’s a strong day of programming– including PillowTalk’s Shane One, Lloyd, Eddie C, and Detroit’s DJ Holographic. As evening deepens, the Nightflight stage welcomes Rachel Torro, Galen, Warehouse Preservation Society, and DJ Ledet himself, who gives us one final dance floor stomp to the wee hours before Monday’s afternoon reality check sends us packing.
As you pack for whatever journey you’re on this summer – the rave variety or otherwise – allow the Sunset and Vacation crews to be a reminder that scenes remain healthy when they evolve with new energy. Good taste is about who you are and does not come with an age requirement.
Even the ticketing process reflects this philosophy. Attendance is intentionally limited and community-vetted. It ends with a short, thoughtful questionnaire that hopes to positively frame why we want to attend parties in the first place. This practice was apparently debated internally, but it seems fair enough since festivals can always grow bigger but rarely grow smaller.
You only get one first chapter. And maybe that’s why Vacation feels special beyond the supercool lineup. Its existence suggests that the soul of a scene isn’t preserved through nostalgia or replicated by beautiful stage décor. It survives in “the exchange”, the less glamorous – and sometimes difficult “stuff” that comes from building an event with friends: lost phones, borrowed gear, difficult conversations and the willingness to show up for someone else’s vision as enthusiastically as your own – even if that vision also includes conversations about where porta-potties should go.
New commercial festivals will always enter the chat, but so will the people who care about doing the deeper work. Since culture isn’t inherited automatically between generations, it’s all of our responsibility to not only teach people where the best parties are but also how to make them.
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