The return of Pretty Lights was never going to be as simple as getting the band back together. When Derek Vincent Smith brought the project back to life in 2023 following a five-year hiatus, Pretty Lights returned as something different. The live show had evolved, the Soundship Spacesystem gave the band an entirely new creative playground, and a community that had spent years waiting for the next chapter suddenly found itself gathering again. What initially looked like a comeback quickly started feeling more like the beginning of another era. Eventually, that rebirth needed somewhere to live.
Last year, Pretty Lights found that place in Meadow Creek, tucked beneath the Collegiate Peaks outside Buena Vista, Colorado. The inaugural Yahn Dawn brought the music, visual experimentation and technology surrounding Pretty Lights into a natural environment where the community could spend an entire weekend together. Live music was still the centerpiece, but camping, wellness, art and the landscape itself became part of an experience that felt deliberately removed from the typical festival formula.
“Yahn Dawn felt like everything we’d been building toward finally had a place to live,” says Phil Salvaggio, owner of Mammoth Music Group and a member of the Yahn Dawn festival team. “We weren’t really interested in just throwing another festival. There are plenty of those.”
That distinction is becoming even clearer in year two. Yahn Dawn returns to Meadow Creek September 18 through 20, expanding from two nights to three while adding an Early Arrival experience on September 17. On paper, it looks like the natural growth of a successful first-year festival. According to Salvaggio, though, three nights were always part of the plan.
Multi-night runs have long been embedded in the Pretty Lights experience, giving the band room to stretch out, experiment and build a musical arc rather than compress everything into a single performance. Yahn Dawn initially hoped to follow that same model, but its first year also required proving that thousands of fans could descend on Meadow Creek while respecting the land and surrounding community. Salvaggio says the way attendees showed up as guests helped build trust locally and ultimately paved the way for the three-night permit the team originally envisioned.
That additional night arrives at an especially fitting moment for Pretty Lights. He released A Trip Thru Time Fantastic, opening another chapter in a catalog that now stretches across nearly two decades, and Yahn Dawn is turning that history into the narrative of the entire weekend.
The journey begins Thursday evening for Early Arrival pass holders with an intimate opening ceremony featuring Smith alongside Pretty Lights founding member Michal Menert, returning to the genesis of the project before the full band takes over for three consecutive nights. From there, the performances will move chronologically through different eras of Pretty Lights, weaving fan favorites and deep cuts together with new material from A Trip Thru Time Fantastic.
Rather than treating nostalgia and progression as competing ideas, Yahn Dawn is giving Pretty Lights enough time to explore both. The concept turns the festival into something resembling one continuous performance, with each night becoming another chapter in a story that has been unfolding for years.
The world surrounding those performances has been curated with similar intention. Friday brings LP Giobbi’s Dead House set alongside Maddy O’Neal’s MADHAUS, Mikey Thunder, Midicinal and others. Emancipator leads Saturday’s supporting cast with Thought Process, Pheel, WeSelects and a deeper dive into underground bass, while Sunday closes with Gramatik, RJD2, Saturna, Homemade Spaceship, TF Marz and more.
For the Yahn Dawn team, those artists are not simply names filling the hours before Pretty Lights takes the stage. Some are longtime friends, others are artists the team respects, and many have connections to the Pretty Lights community itself. That relationship between artist and audience has increasingly blurred as the PL Fam has developed its own network of musicians, producers, visual artists and creators, giving Yahn Dawn an opportunity to provide a platform for the culture growing around Pretty Lights rather than simply presenting music to it.
The same philosophy carries into what happens when nobody is onstage. Yahn Dawn is expanding its wellness programming for 2026, tapping both local facilitators and members of the Pretty Lights community for group classes and experiences designed to give attendees room to reset throughout the weekend. Live art and other experiential elements will return as well, reinforcing an idea established during the inaugural festival: the hours surrounding the performances matter almost as much as the shows themselves.
Then there is Meadow Creek. Surrounded by mountains and open landscape, the site is more than a scenic backdrop for the festival. The Yahn Dawn team treats the environment as part of the creative canvas, deliberately resisting the temptation to overwhelm a setting that already provides much of the atmosphere on its own. It creates a fitting collision for a project that has always pushed toward the technological future while remaining deeply interested in human connection.
As Yahn Dawn enters its second year, that combination presents the team with a challenge familiar to any beloved grassroots gathering. The more special it becomes, the more people will want to experience it. For Salvaggio and the team, however, success is not necessarily measured by how large Yahn Dawn can become.
The goal is to protect the feeling that made the first year work while continuing to explore how far the concept itself can go. Pretty Lights may remain at the center of the universe, but Yahn Dawn is becoming the place where everything orbiting the project can exist together: music, art, technology, mountains and a community that waited years to gather again.
We caught up with Phil Salvaggio, owner of Mammoth Music Group and a member of the Yahn Dawn festival team, to talk about building a physical home for the Pretty Lights universe, expanding the festival into its originally envisioned three-night format, taking fans on A Trip Thru Time and why getting bigger isn’t necessarily the goal. Check out our conversation below!
Yahn Dawn debuted last year with a very specific identity, less like a traditional music festival and more like a mountainside gathering built around music, nature and community. Looking back at that first year, what did you learn about what Yahn Dawn could become?
That first year really felt like the culmination of the Pretty Lights comeback. The last few years weren’t just about getting the band back onstage, it was a real rebirth of Pretty Lights, creatively, musically, and as a community.
Yahn Dawn felt like everything we’d been building toward finally had a place to live. We weren’t really interested in just throwing another festival. There are plenty of those. We wanted to take what had been happening on tour, the music, the people, the energy around this whole comeback, and put it somewhere where it could breathe a little differently.
A big part of that is also this intersection of nature and really tech-forward art. Pretty Lights has always existed in that space where music, technology, visuals, and experimentation all feed off each other. Being able to bring that into this incredible natural environment and build something immersive around it opens up a lot of possibilities for where Yahn Dawn can go.
I think what we learned in year one is that Yahn Dawn can really be its own thing. It can obviously stay rooted in Pretty Lights and this community, but it doesn’t have to be defined by the normal festival playbook. The mountains, the music, the art, the technology, the people, all of that is part of the canvas.
Last year gave us the foundation. Now the goal is to keep building on it without losing our conceptual intentions.
For year two, Yahn Dawn is expanding from two days to three. What gave you the confidence to grow the festival this quickly, and what opportunities does having that extra day give you to deepen the experience rather than simply add more programming?
Three nights has really always been part of the Pretty Lights playbook. When we go into a city, we like having the time and space to build something over multiple nights rather than trying to fit the whole experience into one or two.
What gave us the confidence to grow this year was really the way our community showed up in year one. Our fans were incredibly respectful, caring, and professional about being guests in that environment. I think that went a long way with the county and the local community, and this year we were granted the three-night permit we originally hoped for.
So in a way, it doesn’t really feel like we’re expanding as much as we’re getting to fully realize the original idea. That extra day gives everything more room to breathe. Derek and the band can take their time musically, create different arcs across the weekend, and give people more opportunity to explore the art, the environment, and the community around them without feeling like everything has to happen at once.
The goal isn’t just to add another day of programming, it’s to make the entire experience feel deeper and more complete.
Meadow Creek feels inseparable from Yahn Dawn’s identity. What was it about Buena Vista and this particular setting that originally made it feel like the right home for the festival, and how much does the landscape influence the way you build the weekend?
The site really speaks for itself. There’s something about Buena Vista and Meadow Creek that immediately felt like the right home for Yahn Dawn, the mountains, the openness, the landscape surrounding you in every direction. You don’t need to overproduce a place like that, you let the environment do a lot of the work. The landscape has become part of the identity of the weekend, and we try to build everything around it rather than on top of it.
The lineup feels distinctly curated rather than simply assembled, moving from LP Giobbi’s Dead House set and MADHAUS to Emancipator, Gramatik, RJD2 and a deep collection of underground artists. What connects these artists within the Yahn Dawn universe, and what are you looking for when deciding who belongs in that environment?
A lot of the lineup comes from wanting to invite our homies to come experience these surroundings and be part of what we’re building. At the same time, there are so many talented producers and artists who exist within the Pretty Lights fan community, and it’s important to us that they have a place to bring their talents and participate in the celebration. We held our first community event in Denver this past February, and it was a huge success, so Yahn Dawn feels like a natural opportunity to keep expanding that idea, bringing together longtime friends, artists we respect, and people coming directly out of the community itself.
“A Trip Thru Time” turns Pretty Lights’ history into a journey across the entire weekend, beginning with Derek and Michal Menert on Thursday before moving chronologically through three nights of live performances. Pretty Lights has built such a deep catalog, mythology and community over the years, and the concept arrives alongside a new creative chapter with A Trip Thru Time Fantastic. How do you balance celebrating that history and giving longtime fans those deep-cut moments while still using Yahn Dawn to push the project forward?
We felt like this was a really unique opportunity to take the audience on an actual trip through time, rather than trying to fit that story into a single show. Across the weekend, Derek and the band can pull select tracks from each era of Pretty Lights, while weaving in and out of new material and letting the whole thing evolve naturally from night to night. It gives the music and the history room to breathe, and we’re really excited to see what they put together.
One of the defining ideas behind Yahn Dawn seems to be connection outside of the music itself, whether through wellness programming, live art, the campground or simply giving people space to spend a weekend together in nature. How intentionally do you think about the hours between sets when designing the festival experience?
The curation of the wellness side runs pretty deep. We tap into both the PL Fam community and local facilitators to create a range of wellness activities, group classes, and experiences throughout the weekend. We want people to have opportunities to rest, reset, and feel healthy and grounded, so when it’s time for the Pretty Lights performances, everyone feels refreshed and ready to really be present for the music. The hours between sets are a big part of the experience for us, not just downtime between shows. Shout out to Irene Jones for putting together this years wellness line up!
There’s an interesting tension in building something like Yahn Dawn: the stronger the community becomes, the more people will naturally want to be part of it. As the festival evolves, how do you think about growth without losing the intimacy and sense of belonging that made the inaugural year feel special?
For us, growth has to be intentional. The goal isn’t to make Yahn Dawn as big as possible, it’s to make it as special as possible. A huge part of what worked in year one was the intimacy and the sense that everyone there was contributing to the experience, so as we evolve, protecting that feeling is always going to be at the center of how we make decisions.
If Yahn Dawn continues for years to come, what do you hope ultimately defines it? When someone tries to explain this festival to a person who has never been, what do you hope they say made it different?
We hope people walk away saying there really wasn’t anything else like it. It’s not about trying to be the biggest or checking all the festival boxes. It’s music, art, technology, nature, and a community of people who genuinely give a shit about being there. If we can keep that feeling intact and have people leave thinking, “you kinda just had to be there,” then we’re doing something right. You will never be in such a perfect setting to see a concert.
All Photo Credit @brizzzzzle
