Levitation 2026: Psych and Beyond, Four Days of Organized Chaos in Austin
Music festivals are a daunting proposition from all angles. Promoters and organizers have to manage unwieldy venues, sound, and staging logistics. Performers have to navigate the vagaries of constricted set lengths and mixes of audience who may only have interest in the closing act. Patrons have to deal with limited food, water, and toileting options. Drop that mix in Austin, TX, primarily in an outdoor venue just at the ripe end of summer where heat still pushes into the triple digits daily and the price of standing anywhere near direct sunlight is a terminal case of heatstroke. What you’ve got is…well…I want to argue, “Heaven on Earth.” Or perhaps a real chance to raise hell? Either way, hopefully you get my point.
Nearly 20 years into this annual celebration of the outer reaches of psychedelic rock, pop, punk, metal, electronic, and noise, Levitation continues to be a space in which the luminaries and legends of the unhinged pop underground mix with up-and-coming noisemakers. It’s an unholy marriage of aural ecstasy. For the 2026 installment, home base was The Far Out Lounge, a multi-stage backyard that wasn't even supposed to host these showcases until Radio/East's late-stage construction delay forced a last-minute pivot back to some familiar South Austin soil. Unlike that other slightly later Austin festival that shall remain nameless, Levitation has not been the beneficiary of a fixed, recurring location, with different venues attempted, included, and reconfigured year-after-year.Instead, it has evolved from a multiday single-site destination fest where the hippies could camp into something of a hybrid. It now takes elements of a standard music festival as well as a more dispersed multi-location Omni shambles like South by Southwest, all in service of shining spotlights on the eccentric edges of the rock firmament.
Die Spitz (Photo Credit: Andrea Escobar Garcia)
Friday, September 11
And, yet…in all its transmutational, liquescent history, Levitation had never had one of the most legendary Texas psych punk figures ever grace its stage (or soil them, if you will). Gibby Haynes is among the most revered and virtuosic sculptors of sonic bedlam to have ever and improbably flirted with mainstream music industry success, and the Butthole Surfers 45 year existence has been a keystone in bridging the psychedelic experimentation of the 13th Floor Elevators and Captain Beefheart with postmodern peculiarities of Gen X.
Pathologically, it seems like he scatologically, audiologically, the Buttholes were and are icons of a type of surreal musical madness and performance-based energy that still gets whispered about in hushed tones by those lucky and intrepid enough to have hazarded their live club shows of their first decade.
Rain, gracious in both its delicacy and the unexpected respite it offered from the blazing Texas sun, was starting just as Haynes and his pickup band of coconspirators materialized on the main stage that Friday afternoon at Far Out Lounge. Billed as “Butthole Surfers Mania,” they proceeded to recreate various instantiations of the unholy racket that the Buttholes purveyed so deviously in those closing decades of the 20th century, including such cacophonous classics as “Cherub,” “Hey,” “Who Was in My Room Last Night?,” and “Human Cannonball” (only months after its boost from placement in that final season of Stranger Things). There were also a smattering of more recent Haynes compositions such as “Big Woman’s Underwear” and “Honey, I Bought a New Rifle” (both recently debuted at his series of Union Pool shows over the month of August) that proved his creative juices (secretions?) are still flowing. After a reimagining of his former group’s well-earned but nonetheless still shocking one breakout mainstream hit, “Pepper,” rendered it all but unrecognizable, guitarist/vocalist Paul Leary, his true Buttholes cofounder, and drummer King Coffey, the other most enduring member of that outfit, joined him for their first live performance of early song “Lady Sniff” in “way more than 30 years, way fucking more than that” as well as another of their early monuments to finding dark humor in global tragedy, always with a Texas-fried angle, “The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey’s Grave.” Already initially purified by the work of local Austin garage psych upstarts Grocery Bag and the Ukraine-by-way-of-London genre-bending rogues in Powerplant, the grounds of Far Out were thus fully-blessed and ready for the remaining rituals of the evening.
These included the incredible set by Japanese noise heroes Melt-Banana, whose Yasuko Onuki on vocals and Ichiro Agata on guitar still put out some of the most incredibly energetic rock-adjacent pandemonium one can see live and inspired the crowd at the smaller stage to throb and coalesce around a compassionate mosh pit that would warm the heart of even the most cynical“rock is dead” adherent. Sweeping Promises, a newer Kansas-via-Boston post-punk trio, brought more focused and tamed energy to that same stage a bit later with their set, which shined with the impressive live voice of singer Lira Mondal.
Die Spitz, another young and relatively recent breakout from Austin who have already gained a great deal of attention on the success of their 2025 record, Something to Consume, made the most of the big stage and a huge hometown crowd to scorch the fest with their impressively reinvigorating blend of metal, punk, and, yes, “grunge,” in a performance that very likely converted every one of the attendees who was not already under their spell. The quartet of Ava Schrobilgen, Eleanor Livingston, Kate Halter, and Chloe de St. Aubin spent their time wisely, showing off both their versatility, swapping instruments and roles several times throughout the evening and captivating the crowd with intermittent raucousness and righteous sludge. As they prepare to support Olivia Rodrigo on a stretch of her Unraveled tour, one gets the distinct feel that these ascendant phenoms will soon be rock deities fixed within the firmament.
Of course, this should one day put them in even closer company with Bikini Kill who were the closing act of Levitation’s Friday Far Out showcase. Along with Haynes, they gave the day a distinct air of the sort of punk gravitas that Levitation is so well known for, bringing the best of the cutting edge into contact with the most enduring of our foundational innovators. Aided by the able guitarwork of relative newcomer Sara Landeau, the core trio of Tobi Vail, Kathi Wilcox, and Kathleen Hanna reminded us just how vital, vibrant, and ultimately indelible their music is, even as it stands as the foundational blueprint for the musical coup d'état against the aggressive masculinity of 90s punk subcultures. Dressed to the nines, Hanna’s seemingly effortless (it never really is) 1000-watt charisma shot like a beam of riot grrrl genius over the audience as the band tore through classic-after-classic from their catalogue (“This Is Not a Test,” “Reject All American,” “Alien She,” “Sugar,” “Double Dare Ya,” “Suck My Left One,” the list goes on) with frequent position switches echoing what we had seen with Die Spitz just two sets before. Vail brought the cooler-than-cool aura that she has always conveyed in her turns at the mic for songs including “Hamster Baby,” “In Accordance to Natural Law,” and “I Hate Danger” (complete with humanizing false start when Hanna’s bass rig wasn’t initially functioning correctly). Interspersed were moments of levity and advocacy filled with more nuance and humor than anything one might rightly expecttofind in the home of the unintentionally ironic “comedy mothership.” And, for the absolute cherry atop the glorious sundae that was their set, Hanna made the classiest move of the night, bringing Sweeping Promises’ Mondal to the stage for a riotous rendering of thegroup’s signature missive,“Rebel Girl.”
With already several hours of incredible, mind-expanding music under my belt, I would have been entirely justified in calling it a day, but alas, there was still a bit of new uncharted (for me, at least) territory to explore. Among the several later post-Far Out options on Friday was a show at Elysium on Red River bringing together two emerging musical duos, Austin’s own challenging art country noise act Nudo and the sibling project, Los Thuthanaka, which made huge waves when their self-titled album dropped just over a year ago and became one of the most marveled over releases of 2025 with very little fanfare.
After some fine-tuning of the sonic tapestry through a bit of extended sound checking,
Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton brought out the Wiphala flag, representing indigenous peoples of the Andes across modern-day Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Chile, and Argentina. Among them is the Pakajaqi nation of the Aymara people where from the Cramptons trace their heritage. This act repeated at the close of their set and was not simply a token gesture. Los Thuthanaka is conceived of not as an arbitrary dive into post modern genre-blending. Instead, it is a portal of connection between the messiness of the postcolonial present and the deep roots of their Aymaran spiritual mapping.
Rather than offering a passive, curated glimpse into Andean folklore, Los Thuthanaka utilizes abrasive digital noise, physical distortion, and relentless rhythm as a live somatic technology. On stage, this manifests as an intense, intentional embodiment of sound. Crampton does not merely play his guitar; he writhes and contorts continuously alongside it. His physical movements mirror the serpentine, twisting lines he coaxes from his instrument. It's a sort of lyrical wrestling that translates ancestral memory into a visible, immediate struggle and an extension of what they describe as their channeling of Chuqi Chinchay, the ancient, dual-gendered Aymara deity of lightning, rainbows, and water. This intense, embodied attack mirrors the shape-shifting, non-binary essence of the multi-colored feline protector. By translating the deity's fluid, untamed energy into blistering guitar and tactile stage movements, the duo’s performance becomes living ritual. They firmly entwine modern queer indigenous survival within a sacred, cosmic lineage that completely refuses colonial erasure. Furthermore, it is all anchored in the structural framework of indigenous Andean dance rhythms,especiallythe heavy, foot-stomping pacing ofhuayño. In the hands of the siblings, these rhythms are not treated as relics of a frozen history. The signature pulses are instead weaponized as foundational templates for a vision of political ecstasy.
They ultimately conceptualize and realize their music as a rejection of the folklorization of Aymara and other indigenous cultures by actively blending ancient ritual textures with the digital filters and affordances of the hyper-online present. In doing so, they assert that indigenous identity is fluid, forward-looking, and actively generating hope in the face of ongoing postcolonial structures. Experiencing their work as a final ceremony in a long but fulfilling Levitation Friday left this reviewer feeling surprisingly revitalized at a time when it seemed more likely that I would have been flagging.
DITZ (Photo Credit - Pooneh Ghana)
Saturday, September 12
The sheer density of Levitation’s lineup is both a selling point and an ominous hurdle. How possibly, after a Friday packed with back-to-back performances across multiple stages and venues, could I have been so enthused to go back for another similarly impressive slate of Saturday offerings? The answer is “quality and curation.” A major reason why Levitation has grown into such a respected destination festival is the consistent quality of the acts they book and the thoughtful approach the organizers take in sequencing and arranging them. If Friday had been a bit more focused on psychedelic routes in punk, noise, and garage rock, Saturday’s main event at Far Out was a far more dance-focused, albeit via goth, synthpop, and darkwave, with some major legends of those arenas brought together with younger upstarts.
But, before we could get to the music on that Saturday afternoon, the skies had a different idea and put things on pause at the venue for nearly an hour, just as Dallas-based Novulent was winding down their set, dark clouds developed and surprisingly vigorous winds swept through signaling a fairly significant storm cell that eventually led to later set times being pushed back and adjusted some. Much like the precipitative blessing Friday’s proceedings but more voluminous, we chose to embrace this as a moment of cleansing before fully moving into our evening of sinister rhythms and sounds.
Peter Hook & the Light re-opened things on just the right notes, dedicating their set to Ian Curtis and bringing to life a series of Joy Division classics from “No Love Lost” to “Isolation,” “She’s Lost Control,” “Dead Souls,” and, of course, the crowd-galvanizing singalong of “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” They also provided a glimpse of Hook’s New Order days with their rendition of “Ceremony,” all of which got the audience moving as clothes, hair, and ground dried from the unplanned baptismal interlude.
Brighton’s DITZ raised everyone's pulse with their post-punk assault. Frontman Cal Francis commanded the audience, at times literally conducting us to open and close space for mosh pits and occasionally convening the requisite crowd density to properly surf above us. Though jagged and angular, the band still brought forward enough of that dance energy introduced by Hook, readying us for our appointment with an even deeper connection to the origins of electronic dance music in the form of industrial godfathers Cabaret Voltaire, for whom Levitation served as a date in the final run of shows that surviving founding members Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson announced last year.
First formed over 50 years ago, the Sheffield combo were at the forefront and bleeding edge of sonic experimentation for much of their first two decades. Long before sampling became an industry standard, they were using William Burroughs-inspired tape cut-ups and stark drum programming to build a rhythmic asylum that helped define electronic body music, techno, electro, and, of course, industrial as genres. Stepping onto the stage at Levitation, they pulled off the ultimate live alchemy by making a half-century of music history feel immediate and occasionally even dangerous. While we stood in awe of the sheer legacy before us, the performance refused to feel like a museum exhibit. The transition from the hypnotic, mechanical throb of “Yashar” into the body-moving, industrial-funk architecture of “Sensoria” transformed The Far Out Lounge from a festival ground into a sweating, unified twilight rave. It was a bliss-inducing masterclass where deep historical reverence completely gave way to spontaneous, unadulterated joy.
Following this up with a slot on the smaller stage might have been a problem for most bands, but L.A.’s Automatic is not most bands. Hot off their 2025 juggernaut Is It Now?, the trio of Izzy Glaudini (synths/vocals), Halle Saxon (bass/vocals), and Lola Dompé (drums/vocals) operates with a. razor-sharp attack and fiercely minimalist chemistry. Their gnarly, droning synth layers, motorik drumbeats, and driving dub rhythms unfurled like tendrils reaching forward from Cabaret Voltaire’s own soundscape, with Saxon’s funky, fuzzed-out bass lines locking us into an infectious churn. Their deadpan, harmonized vocals smoothly conveyed modern alienation and anxiety, not bringing down the energy of their taut compositions but rather opening them up. Their delivery mobilizes their lyrical themes for both subtlety and maximum impact. In songs like “Too Much Money” and their latest album’s jagged title track, “Is It Now?”, Automatic takes sharp aim at corporate burnout and consumerist brainwash, but instead of yelling these critiques with punk-rock rage, their dialed-down affect serves as a mirror to modern numbness. They sound like unbothered observers cataloging a simulation that’s steadily breaking down, letting the ice-cold commentary float effortlessly over such remarkably hot, kinetic grooves.
If Automatic provided the soundtrack to a sleek, neon-lit So Caldystopia, the transition to Molchat Doma felt like stepping directly into a monolith of Soviet brutalism, albeit without veering too far from the sounds of post-punk-oriented dance music. The L.A. trio’s darkwave undertones, hidden just beneath those bouncy funk rhythms, served as a perfect sonic gateway for what was to come. As the sun by now had definitively set, the atmosphere appropriately shifted from sun-bleached, robotic cool to the stark coldwave bleakness of the Belarusians. Where Automatic made us dance through the modern anxiety of consumer culture, Molchat Doma plunged us headfirst into industrial concrete, transforming the Austin venue into a cavernous Eastern European underground club.
With set times pushed back a bit, it was only by the luck of a quick, well-timed exit that I made it over to Austin club The 13th Floor (In Roky They Trust) just in time to see the first act of a double late-night Levitation bill. While I’d long been a shy admirer of Pearl and the Oysters’ recordings, I had never been able to see them live before, and what a difference that made. The collaborative project of Juliette Pearl Davis and Joachim Polack, two longtime musical and romantic partners who have channeled their love of space age lounge, Latin jazz, and French chanson, among others, into an indie dream pop sound that unerringly gets me grinning ear-to-ear. Aided by an able guitarist and rhythm section, Davis and Polack charmed their way through a set of songs from across their catalog, with some special attention to their latest release, Monkey Mind. Cuts like “Mandarin Moon” and “Stratford & 52” materialized before us like a series of vintage tropical postcards come to life and helped wipe away any sense of depletion one might feel from hours on their feet spent moving to the beat amidst the radiance of the Texas heat. The A/C in The 13th Floor may also have been a factor.
However, Pearl was no mere palate cleanser to help restore us intrepid fest goers from our experience sweltering under the open sky. In addition to the music’s transcendental buoyancy, the visuals provided by Cosmic Dommy filled the intimate interior of the club with vibrant washes of color and fascinatingly undulating patterns that never quite hold still. Projected both over the musicians and audience, it created an appropriately hallucinatory aura for the night, as many other visual artists including El Dripcuts did for other bands and venues throughout the fest. The synergetic boost from Pearl and the Oysters and Cosmic Dommy set the psychoactive scene perfectly for the arrival of Ali, the Indonesian psych funk combo who had just last year made their US debut in 2025 at that other, even more sprawling springtime Austin festival, SXSW. Simultaneously embracing the hybridity of global music and the deep ties between their home in Jakarta and Arab culture, guitarist Absar Lebeh’s Middle Eastern guitar scales drive their melodic hooks which pair traditional Western funk rhythms with Eastern modes, and his riffs mimic the ornamental patterns typically played on traditional stringed instruments. They effectively transformed the Austin night into a hypnotic, borderless dance floor. It was a performance that perfectly encapsulated Levitation’s treatment of psychedelic music not as a static genre frozen in 1960s nostalgia, but a living, transnational language. As the band's final locked-in groove echoed out into the still warm Texas night air, we dispersed in those wee hours of Sunday morning, sonically rewired, profoundly elevated, and completely spellbound by a masterclass in global musical translation.
Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats (Photo Credit: Robert Hein)
Sunday, September 13
If Saturday night proved how wide Levitation’s global net could be cast, Sunday felt like an entirely different beast. Fest goers once again trekked down to The Far Out Lounge for a final round of sonic assault. Whether this gravel lot remains the festival's permanent anchor or just a reliable safety net is anyone's guess, but on the final day of 2026’s installment, it transformed into an absolute monolith of fuzz and mayhem. The danceable polyrhythms of the night before evaporated, replaced by a dense, down-tuned slate of metal and stoner rock built specifically to pave the way for doom icons Sleep.
While Sunday’s main stage line-up promised a master class in scale, the smaller side-stage offered a more intimate, subgenre-specific itinerary that clearly resonated with the die-hard riff-worshippers in attendance. Austin’s own The Well laid down their dependable, eerie psych-doom. They were followed by Italian outfit Messa, whose jazz-tinged occult rock had the front rows locked in a reverent head-nod. Just before the ultimate headliners of the evening, Primitive Ring tore through a loud, proto-metal set heavily indebted to classic '70s fuzz. This relatively newly formed power trio features members who also serve in Frankie & the Witch Fingers, Fuzz, and Hooveriii, among other garage and psych projects, and it was clear that the depths of their collective resume were on full display.These acts ultimately served as excellent intermezzos, maintaining just enough ambient heat between the main stage eruptions.
The first of these geothermal events came in the form of the kaleidoscopic chaos of Psychedelic Porn Crumpets. Any lingering mid-afternoon festival fatigue was instantly incinerated the moment Perth’s premier fretboard maximalists took over the main stage. They welcomed us in with opener “Juice a Jumbo Jet,” the newly released second advance single from their forthcoming full-length. Throughout the set, they offered a relentlessly shifting kaleidoscope of hyper speed guitar work and math-rock precision with classic tracks like "Found God in a Tomato," “Cornflake,” and “Cubens is Lenses,” with their often frantic shredding sending massive shockwaves through the grounds, frequently whipping the lot into a sprawling mosh pit of flying beers and beaming faces. While the early side-stage acts offered a steady, reliable comfort food of classic doom, PPC brought a chaotic, kinetic bite that shifted the day's momentum into overdrive, proving exactly why they remain at the vanguard of Australia's psych-rock explosion. It was several shots of pure, unadulterated adrenaline that helped set a beautifully manic baseline before the evening took a dark, theatrical turn into the shadows.
As dusk firmly transitioned into supremely black skies, the festive, neon-drenched kineticism of the afternoon was subsumed by the grimy, occult swagger of Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats. Kevin Starrs and his crew treated the main stage like a seedy altar in a nunsploitation flick, bathing us in a hazy wash of blood-red lights while Mothpowder Light Show projected vivid colors and bleeding textures laid over grainy, vintage exploitation film clips that perfectly mirrored their sonic identity. It pulled us out of any sense of a standard festival setting and submerged us entirely into a claustrophobic, hypnotic pulp-horror trance, making the performance feel like a live score to some lost cult classic. The band’s execution was dialed in, delivering a masterclass in sinister hooks where the melodic, dual-guitar harmonies of classic metal collided head-on with a grim, '70s proto-doom stomp. Catalog staples like "I'll Cut You Down" and "Pusher Man" felt less like traditional rock songs and more like cabalistic incantations, while the newer offerings like “House by the Grave” (soon to be included on Shapes of Midnight) drew us into a hypnotic, rhythmic march toward a future certain to be filled with schlocky pulp-horror aesthetics. Levitation had once again curated brilliantly our descent into the dark with Uncle Acid’s display of atmospheric, retro-macabre theater that effectively cooled the sweat of the mosh pit and primed the collective subconscious for the tectonic devastation still to come.
And so it was stoner doom behemoths Sleep took the stage, carrying the immense structural weight of an entire sub genre on their shoulders. Returning to Austin as undisputed icons, the legendary trio brought a thrilling new chemical element into the equation with Melvins titan Dale Crover occupying the drum throne. His notoriously heavy-handed, caveman-thump injected some raw, primal swing into the band's seismic rhythms. At the center of the storm was Al Cisneros, whose thunderously resonant, sub-bass frequencies didn't just vibrate through the Far Out Lounge; they physically rattled the sternums of all who were in attendance. It was the low-frequency religious experience that many have noted from their shows in the past. With Matt Pike's wall of Orange amps roaring to life, I felt the band’s sound achieving the colossal gravitational pull for which they are rightly celebrated. This being my first time, I was a bit overwhelmed. Once I could settle in, it was clear that the band’s signature sci-fi iconography and space-travel mythos were no mere lyrical themes. Instead, they became a literal vehicle for Levitation’s final act. The crushing, repetitive weight of their riffs felt less like a downward force and more like a collective launch pad. Their set was a slow-motion propulsion system, lifting us as an exhausted, dust-covered crowd out of South Austin and casting us directly into the cosmos. So much for arguing over heaven or hell. It turns out Levitation just skips that debate and sends you into orbit instead. Let’s just hope we break free in time to touch down for Levitation 2027.
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