Further Future Festival To Take Place At…A Reservation?

After months of building suspense, Further Future organizers have announced that the debut edition of the festival will take place at the Moapa River Indian Reservation outside Las Vegas, Nevada. The three-day event – which is the brainchild of Burning Man camp curators Robot Heart – has already garnered media attention for its (somewhat) invite-only attendance policy and lineup of underground artists.

Additionally, only two days ago did speculation surface that the festival had been denied access to its original location, as Robot Heart hurriedly looked for an alternative:

“[There was] no last-minute change at all,” one of the event’s organizers (who asked to remain anonymous) told We Got This Covered. “We were running several options in parallel; the journalist had just picked up on the fact that we decided to revoke our application for the permit for Anniversary Mine as we had locked our location.”

While Further Future will by no means be the first music festival to take place on a Native American reservation, the implications of such an event on the surrounding community will surely raise eyebrows. As with countless other Native American tribes, the Moapa Paiutes have been marginalized over the course of history by the spread of western civilization – and even now, coal ash from neighboring smokestacks threatens the quality of life of the reservation’s inhabitants. While music festivals can serve to inject money into the economy of their surrounding communities, the loud noise and environmental impact of multiple-day parties can have undesirable impacts on the community as well.

However, Robot Heart professes to share many of the same fundamental tenets as the Burner community with which it’s participated for so many years, one of which being an emphasis on leaving no carbon footprint behind. The organizers have been vocal about their intentions to distance themselves from the negative connotations associated with contemporary music festivals, and the event owes much of its appeal to workshops and keynote speeches centered around social causes. Even the entertainment roster stands out as something of a statement against the status quo; the most widely recognized name on the bill is breakout EDM artist Zhu, and the remaining artists reflect a focus on underground house music with others included for the sake of variety.

While tickets to Further Future are still available, access codes are only granted to attendees approved after messaging the event’s Facebook page with a short introduction. For more information, be sure to check out the official website.