A growing community of festival-goers is discovering that sobriety doesn’t have to diminish the euphoria of live music—it can amplify it.
From folks who’ve never touched substances to longtime ravers in recovery, more people than ever are choosing to experience festivals with clear minds and open hearts, creating authentic connections that last long after the final set.
Today, the non-profit Harmonium operates sober tents at dozens of festivals nationwide like EDC, Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Governor’s Ball, Austin City Limits, Beyond Wonderland, and many more. This growing community is proving that it’s not only possible to rave sober, but that it comes with many benefits.
Within Harmonium and Consciousness Group meetings, attendees and volunteers sit in a circle and share their experience, struggles and hope around sobriety in a non-judgemental space. Meetings sometimes start with a topic, or are more open, and usually end with the serenity prayer. The meetings are not affiliated with any 12-step programs, but many of the volunteers come from those spaces. Some of the attendees idenitfy as alcoholics or addicts, while others idenitfy simply as sober ravers.
What started as a desperate phone call from two young men in recovery has grown into a movement that’s redefining what it means to experience rave and festival culture. Patt Ochoa, a veteran of the Los Angeles rave scene since 1992 and co-founder of Harmonium, never imagined that his journey from promoting Insomniac’s earliest parties to creating safe spaces for sober festival-goers would help save lives and challenge the assumption that drugs are essential to the rave experience.
As a raver since 2011, and a sober raver since 2020 who has volunteered with Insomniac Consciousness Group (a branch of Harmonium), I was excited to have the opportunity to sit down with Patt to discuss how the movement has formed over the years. Here’s what he had to say about the origins of the Harmonium and Consciousness Group, their growth, and the future of sober spaces at festivals.
ELECTRIC FEELS
What was your introduction to raving?
PATT
My first rave was in South Central Los Angeles in 1992 then after-hours called “What”. I was also at Insomniac’s first party on a Friday night 1993.
I did a lot of promotion work back then. We handed out flyers, standing in the corner at parties and raves and pass out flyers for upcoming raves. I did that with Pasquale Rotella (founder and CEO of Insomniac) for a long time and so we had a relationship.
ELECTRIC FEELS
Can you tell us a little bit of background about Consciousness Group? How did it come about?
PATT
I was sober in a 12-step fellowship, nameless, of course. And I was sponsoring a couple young men. They got sober at 17 years old, so they were young and new and sobriety. And, you know, they were looking to have fun and recovery. They were going to raves in Los Angeles, probably four nights a week, and fun and recovery came about to be more important than the recovery process.
And so they were getting, I guess, sicker and sicker. They were starting to lose self esteem, you know, feeling depressed, feeling anxious, and the rave culture and PLUR and all that was had given them some sense of belonging and purpose. Unfortunately, with the getting more depressed and the anxious feelings and the low self esteem and being engulfed in a culture that has a lot of drugs and alcohol, it was making it more challenging for their recovery.
They were at a rave one night, both of them were in a bad spot, but neither of them really knew it. And as they were leaving at two or three in the morning, they met a guy in the parking lot, and that guy happened to have two years of sobriety in recovery as well. And so they had what they called a 12-step meeting in the parking lot, and they had a spark, and they had a fire, and they called me the next day asking me if I would be willing to call Pasquale, to start to have the ability to have meetings at raves.
So when they asked me to call him, I thought that’s the most craziest thing I’ve ever heard. Like, not interested in that, you know, I’m just going to kind of keep to myself over here doing what I’m doing. So one of their dads, who was in the music industry from the 60s all the way up into the current call, when he called me, he said, “Hey, I want to help my son stay sober. You know, would you help him stay sober if we created this opportunity?”.
I said yes. From there, I made a call. I contacted Pasquale and within three weeks, we were at Nocturnal Wonderland, which was 12 years ago now. That’s how it started from the first call. Probably took about two or three days, and we created Insomniac Consciousness Group. We came up with the name, and determined what we needed in order to do it.
ELECTRIC FEELS
How did it expand to festivals outside of Insomniac?
PATT
The sober guy’s dad who convinced me to start Consciousness Group was friends with the owner of Bonnaroo at the time. He said, “why don’t you come meet him?” And so we went out to Bonnaroo and their sober tent was called Soberoo. We met him, you know, we kind of saw what they did and from there, we created the nonprofit Harmonium.
ELECTRIC FEELS
How has Consciousness Group and Harmonium grown since it started?
PATT
When we started there were a lot of overdoses. It was before Ground Control came. A lot of overdoses, a lot of paramedics. You know, it was like, non-stop. I think over the years that with harm reduction, and stuff like that, things have changed tremendously.
As a simple all-volunteer group, we were really focused on grassroots communication at the tent. So it’s been a slow grow, and right now it’s really vibrant.
We provide a clean and sober tent where we have three support meetings a day. At our table, there’s candy. People come up and want candy. We ask them to tell us a joke or tell us a secret or donate to our nonprofit. And so they’ll do that, and then that starts the conversation on who we are and what we are, and from there amazing things happen.
People will be like, “oh my God, my friend is sober,” and they go get their friend and they bring her over. Or they say things like, “my friend was going to come to EDC, but he just got sober, and he didn’t think he was going to be able to stay sober. If he would have known you guys are here, he could have come.”
We have a friend who came to the tent for three years, and his words were, “I always went to the tent because you guys were kind to me, like I wasn’t sober, and you guys had no judgment.”. And he ended up selling ecstasy to an undercover cop, and sitting in the cop car, he said, “Man, those guys at Consciousness Group can stay clean and sober, I can too.” By the next year, he came back with his one year coin and thanked us for helping him into sobriety.
There’s been situations where we’re able to help people and get them connected back home. A lot of people we help are people coming to the tent that just found us and needed support. We go out to a set with them, and they go back and they tell ten of their friends or their therapist.
We used to hear a lot of times that therapists or 12-step sponsors or counselors would say, “you got to change everything”. A lot of people are like, “I’m not changing my love for raves and festivals”. So they go back to raves and they find us, and then they go back and tell their counselor, therapist or sponsor that there’s a sober community called Consciousness Group. Then we start getting a lot of referrals from counselors, therapists, and sponsors to us.
So it’s definitely growing. It’s been a slow, slow grow. At EDC this year, I think our smallest meeting was 40 people at our meeting. The biggest one was, I think, 75. I think I saw probably over 500 people throughout the weekend who were sober.
ELECTRIC FEELS
Folks have told me when you started it was only a handful of people sitting in those meetings at EDC. Amazing.
PATT
I want to add that a lot of times people will be like, “You’re sober?! I didn’t know you can stay sober and rave.” I’m older, I mean, I’m 50 now, but at Nocturnal I was dancing to some dubstep in my shorts and my sandals, and this young kid, he’s 19, he goes, “What are you on?” And I’m like, “I’m sober 20 years,” and he’s like, “What? How old are you?” I said, “old enough to be your dad,” joking around. But we rave harder sober than we did before, and we remember it.
There’s a huge community of people that are sober. Some never really even had a problem with drugs and alcohol, but, they’re sober today, or have always been sober. So the word is definitely getting out, it’s good.
ELECTRIC FEELS
Yeah, I’ve had very similar interactions, both when I volunteered with Con Group and just going to raves. People are like, “You’re sober? How do you do that at raves?” Some people will be astounded or not believe me when I have a huge smile on my face, going hard, vibing out in the crowd completely sober. Others folks say words of encouragement, like a lot of folks who are not sober but are open and accepting that I am. I’ve also met many folks at raves who want to get sober and will ask me how I did it.
PATT
Right.
ELECTRIC FEELS
Does Consciousness Group tend to attract a specific age group or is it pretty diverse?
PATT
Honestly, I would say all ages, you know. I think that at Insomniac festivals it depends, but usually adults of all ages. I’ve met a guy in the tent who was older than me.
With Harmonium we do other festivals like Outside Lands in San Francisco, and that one tends to be an older crowd. It just kind of depends on the festival.
We haven’t done any statistics in Consciousness Group, so I can’t answer with any data. But it is said that the new generation is, you know, not drinking as much, or more people are smoking weed rather than drinking.
ELECTRIC FEELS
How do you think more festivals can adapt to the need for more education, harm reduction and sober spaces?
PATT
Well, I think it’s the openness. I mean, first and foremost, festivals need to be open to the idea, and not just open, but also generous. Everyone from Consciousness Group and our Harmonium sober tents are volunteers. We volunteer our time, we volunteer our travel, we volunteer our housing and our food.
Insomniac is really generous in the sense that they give us catered food so our volunteers can eat. They provide a space for us too. We don’t pay for it, they provide it for us. They provide us with credentials. They really open their hearts in order for us to do this with openness, and generosity. But not all festivals are like that.
So I think the future is openness and generosity. It takes a good heart. It takes somebody with a good heart that wants to provide solution to an epidemic. Fentanyl is killing so many people a day. We gotta keep the festivals safe with more education, and more opportunities like this. The goodness that we’re putting into the community, I think it’s very important.
When you start to get into harm reduction, and it raises a lot of political flags. The federal government provides free Narcan. They provide federal funding to nonprofits. So depending upon whatever administration are they going to believe in harm reduction, or are they not? A lot of nonprofits right now are closing doors because they’re not going to be able to get the funding they need. So it’s a pretty big animal to tackle.
I’m an abstinence-based guy. I’m not a suboxone harm reduction maintenance guy. You know, I think there’s a lot of politics that go along with suboxone as well. Big Pharma is making money.
ELECTRIC FEELS
Does there need to be some kind of connection or communication from harm reduction into recovery spaces at raves and festivals?
PATT
Is it the festival’s responsibility? I mean, I don’t know. I think it’s their responsibility to keep the festival a safe place.
We just happened to hit the scene at the right time because we provided a message that was going to be different than what the news was projecting out from all the people overdosing and dying. So, you know, from a business standpoint, it made good sense for festivals to bring us in.
Our mission statement is to provide a clean and sober safe space. End Overdose, a nonprofit that hands out free Narcan and provides training at Insomniac raves, has a different mission than us. There’s some people at End Overdose that are sober that individually benefit from the services we offer. At Consciousness Group many of us are Narcan certified.
At the same time, we’re here to provide a clean and sober space, and as volunteers in a non-profit we don’t want to get outside of our mission or purpose. So if someone in the crowd is having a difficult experience on substances, we contact Ground Control, or we offer them over to Oasis (Ground Control’s dedicated safe space) to get the support they need. We really are hands off, you know, because of our liability.
ELECTRIC FEELS
Anything else you want to convey?
PATT
Yeah, we just want to be able to help. Want to be able to serve and have conversations like this. I liked your last question about communicating. Communicating is important. And I think when the when the right hearts are aligned, and the synchronicity happens, it’s beautiful. You know, I’m a big believer and loving heart forward, so I try to align myself with that.
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