The continuation of a groundbreaking year and the culmination of a summer tour on the East Coast and the Midwest, Phish made a triumphant return to its festival territory this weekend with Mondegreen, a four-day festival at The Woodlands in Dover, DE. Phish delivered eight unique sets featuring 75 different songs, totaling nearly 14 hours of music, including a special late-night set featuring soaring improvisations behind a veil of cascading projections.

Mondegreen was Phish’s 11th festival. Since the band’s inaugural festival – The Clifford Ball in 1996 – Phish has had a long and influential history of organizing summer events that have become prototypes and inspiration for music festivals across the U.S. and beyond.

Beyond Mondegreen’s main events – four concerts by Phish – the weekend offered festivalgoers a unique, immersive experience with a dizzying variety of interactive art installations and performances, exclusive pop-ups, a 24/7 live radio station, on-site DJ and comedy sets, and much more.

The art directors and curators of Mondegreen, TRIADIC – a creative house and cultural engine based in New York, London and Vienna – have collaborated with Phish to put together a series of large-scale, interactive installations, immersive site-specific commissions and improvised performances.

Rising in the centre of Mondegreen was the Heliograph, a retro-futuristic beacon that invited fans to climb its octagonal tower and enjoy the panoramic views. The Heliograph hosted nightly DJ sets from artists such as Made Of Oak (Nick Sanborn of Sylvan Esso) and a special Sunday set from the one and only DJ Questlove.

Leigh Fordham Hall – a circus-like tent and theatre – hosted bespoke live game shows such as ‘Mondegreen’ (where contestants tested their lyric knowledge and singing skills by deciphering some of the most notorious misheard song lyrics) and transformed daily into a comedy club for ‘Here Come The Jokers: Live Comedy at Mondegreen’, featuring sets from Rory Scovel, Dave Hill, Jordan Jensen and Gianmarco Soresi.

Nestled in the nearby forest, The Cerealist Bowl speakeasy offered a world of strange and surreal encounters, where interactive performances by absurd groups of costumed entertainers and a secret sake bar – For God’s Sake – continued late into the night.

The parallel reality of Nova Heat by artists Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe was housed in a multi-room architectural structure, at the center of which was a planetarium where a kaleidoscopic film projection took viewers on a journey through time and space.

Other installations included “Museum Of The Moon” by Luke Jerram, a floating 6.45-meter-high replica of the moon featuring a NASA map of the lunar surface, “Dodge Ball” by Lars Fisk, and “Eggcident” by Dutch artist Henk Hofstra, who addressed climate change with humor and urgency by using giant fried eggs sizzling on the concert field.

Towering above it all was Olivier Grossetête’s monumental City Hall – a 25-metre-high masterpiece made of recycled cardboard and tape, inspired in its shape and size by the nearby Baltimore City Hall. The City Hall was built with the help of festival volunteers and later dismantled and recycled.

Other highlights included The Bunny, Phish’s now legendary festival radio station that aired live 24/7 all weekend on SiriusXM’s Phish channel, The Daily Greens newspaper, the 103rd Runaway Jim Memorial 5K road race that drew nearly 3,000 runners, a farmers market, spa, tattoo parlor, and the Bizarre Bazaar, a custom marketplace featuring exclusive pop-ups from artists such as Double Wonderful, famed Phish illustrator and printer Jim Pollack, the JEMP Records Basement, where fans found limited edition, festival-only vinyl pressings of their favorite Phish albums, and nonprofit organizations The WaterWheel Foundation, Divided Sky Foundation, GrooveSafe, and PHRE.

While the range of activities and attractions at Mondegreen was simply stunning, the real highlights of course came from Phish, who delivered a weekend of incredible music, capped off by an unannounced third set on the main stage late Friday night.

Obscured by an opaque shell onto which swirling animations were projected—courtesy of Moment Factory, who last worked as co-creative directors with Phish on their performance at the Sphere in Las Vegas in April—the band built on an ambient theme that slowly crescendoed over the course of an hour as the visual effects gradually rolled in.

The set, like the sights and sounds of the entire weekend, was an unexpected treat for Phish fans. And Mondegreen – the band’s long-awaited return to the festival stage – provided a dreamy memory that many won’t soon forget.

Phish will end its summer tour with its traditional Labor Day weekend performance at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park in Commerce City, Colorado, and return for four nights (August 29-September 1). For full details and ticket availability, visit phish.com/tours. Looking ahead, Phish has announced its return to the stunning beaches of Mexico for the 8th annual Phish: Riviera Maya, set for January 29-February 1, 2025. Packages are available now at phishrivieramaya.com.