TRON, Superluminal, and Kabayun will no longer perform at Texas Eclipse Festival.
Update, Monday, April 8, 8:00am PT: Texas Eclipse Festival’s organizers have announced that the gathering must end early due to extreme weather forecasts. Read their full statement.
Update, Thursday, April 4, 12:15pm PT: Disco Donnie aka James Estopinal has sent EDM Identity the following statement: “We are working on a once-in-a-lifetime cosmic performance, I am reaching out to these artists personally to resolve their concerns and bring them to the festival.”
Previously: Texas Eclipse Festival is set to commence at Reveille Peak Ranch in Burnet, Texas from April 5-9, but three artists billed to perform have shared that they must pull out over disputes with the organizers.
Mexican psytrance artist TRON announced on March 18 that he was forced to cancel his Texas Eclipse appearance. “I was really looking forward to experiencing this event with all of you but hiccups between some of the production layers and my management have made it impossible for me to perform,” he wrote in a Facebook post.
Yesterday, April 3, Sangoma Records artists Kabayun and Yasmin (who perform together as Superluminal) jointly issued a similar statement. The US psytrance duo’s Facebook post reads, “Sadly we are forced to cancel our performances at Texas Eclipse due to the organization not meeting their commitments.”
In a comment on Superluminal’s post, TRON elaborated on his disagreement with the festival’s organizers. “The ‘deal’ was a very low amount of fee which didn’t even cover the flights,” he wrote. “The rest of the fee was supposed to be tickets to sell. The organization was mute till 3 weeks ago. About 2 weeks ago they released the codes for our extra tickets which by that point would be nearly impossible to sell.”
TRON said that his grievances didn’t end there. He continued: “The main organization team would say one thing, the other organizer another. Main org team expected me to pay for a $1k USD tent, and was not even offering shuttle from airport. Emails took about a week to come back with this kind of replies.”
Neither Texas Eclipse Festival, TRON, or Superluminal immediately responded to EDM Identity’s request for comment.
Texas Eclipse promises an all-ages event featuring six celestially themed music stages as well as art, technology, and wellness activations. It coincides with the full solar eclipse on April 8. The totality path includes the festival grounds, meaning that attendees will get to see the sun fully obscured by the moon.
Headliners include Barclay Crenshaw, Bob Moses, Charlotte de Witte, and The String Cheese Incident. TRON, Superluminal, and Kabayun’s solo set had all been booked on the festival’s Sun stage.
Co-promoting Texas Eclipse Festival are Disco Presents (aka Disco Donnie Presents) and Probably Nothing. Also involved are outfits like Symbiosis Gathering and Bass Coast, who partnered on similar eclipse events in Oregon in 2017 and Patagonia, Argentina in 2020. The latter drew controversy when it refused to cancel or issue ticket refunds despite COVID-era travel bans preventing it from taking place as planned.
With only a day to go before Texas Eclipse Festival is set to take place, it remains to be seen whether additional performances will be canceled or rescheduled.
