nature set designs inside time warp techno music festival
Time Warp draws design inspiration from ice caves, plant cells, and hexagons for the stage designs inside the techno music festival. An annual event since 1994, the event takes place in different cities, including Madrid (October 10th and 11th, 2025); Mannheim, the founding place (November 7th and 8th, as well as March 21st), and New York City (November 21st and 22nd, 2025). In an interview with designboom, Time Warp festival’s technical director Anatol Fried says that the design team wants the audience to feel fully surrounded by the stage settings and not just by the techno music. ‘It was natural for us to try to surround people with light and scenography along with the music,’ he tells designboom. There are five stages in the Time Warp techno music festival, and instead of going traditional by adding lights on the ceiling, the team spread more than 200 lights around the floor, audiences, and performers, lighting them up from all directions. ‘For us, it somehow worked,’ adds Anatol Fried.
Across the five stages, the theme of nature comes through, but Anatol Fried sees the word more as what everyone can see every day rather than just only greenery. He worked with different designers per stage inside the Time Warp techno music festival, all of which followed a fluid brief on nature. Take The Cells designed by Greg Sullivan and The LED Cells by Valentin Lüdicke and Anatol Fried. The former looks like a simplified visualization of plant cells, while the former mimics the lines and visuals of a leaf under a microscope. ‘These stage designs’ impact is the volume they add to the room. The sheer amount of surface you can play on with lights, and the contrasts you can generate with lights and shadows due to the 3D elements, is stunning. Standing underneath it, the audience can feel what I meant before about being surrounded by an experience,’ Anatol Fried shares with designboom.
The Cells | all images courtesy of Time Warp | photos by Marko Edge, unless stated otherwise
Caves and meteors as artistic influences for the spaces
Natural phenomena also appear as a theme that runs through the stage designs in the Time Warp techno music festival. Inside The Meteors, an ensemble of rock-looking fixtures hangs above the audience as they party, glistening as the hundreds of lights shine their beams on them. The Cave, designed by Valentin Lüdicke, resembles an ice cave through a series of suspended semi-translucent white cloths. ‘The idea here was to shape a room and create the perspective you have looking into an ice cave, but it also offers perspectives from positions other than the perfect angle,’ says Anatol Fried. Because of this undulating design, the stage design moves as the breeze comes in.
Valentin Lüdicke has created a second version of this space in the Time Warp techno music festival, rightfully naming it The Cave 2.0. Here, the idea has slightly changed, while still following the brief on nature. Above the audience are seemingly singular panels depicting a wavy form. When the light shines on it, the sculpture, made of a black material typically used to block out light in the agricultural industry, comes alive, appearing to move through the lights. For the technical director, it feels as if the audience were looking up in a forest and seeing the sky through trees and leaves. ‘The impact is the strong contrast between the upper lit side of the silver fabric and the pitch-black lower side that doesn’t catch any light,’ Anatol Fried explains to designboom. ‘With the huge amount of LED lights above it, it almost looks like the room moves.’
The Cells resemble a honeycomb structure
Replicating geometry, space and nature in music festival
In the other rooms within the Time Warp techno music festival, Anatol Fried has (co-)designed the spaces, from Chaos, where the style resembles patterns of strobe lights, to Strings, a wire installation he created with Valentin Lüdicke, inspired by the ideas of mathematics, geometry, even-sided triangles, and hexagons. ‘We are currently working on a design called Einheitskreis, which will hopefully come to life soon,’ the technical director shares with designboom. Instead of starting with the materials, the team leads the stage designs in the Time Warp techno music festival with an inspiration, which is nature in this case.
That is the underlying, connecting theme between the spaces, even if they look distinctive from each other. ‘These stage designs were all inspired by some looks or details we found outside the event industry – like nature, space geometry, or mathematics – that we tried to replicate and put inside a venue. If you look up in a forest on a sunny day, you can see a strong contrast between sky and leaves. That’s basically the effect of ‘The Cave 2.0’, for example, so when we knew the look we were seeking, we started looking for a material that suited the look, instead of the other way around,’ says Anatol Fried.
The Meteors | photo by GuilleGS
At times, designing the stages in the Time Warp techno music festival is a bit challenging, and Anatol Fried gives The Cells as an example. Here, the ceiling resembles a honeycomb structure, lighting up in patterns through the LED strips. Instead of the normal LED lights, the design team uses a series of tailored aluminum ones. The idea, as the technical director tells us, is to emit light in two directions. ‘An indirect source of light to the structure above and the direct source of light visible from below,’ he adds. ‘This was not available on the market, and therefore we produced an aluminum profile that had space for three LED light sources and also had the cord edge profile in place.’
This stage may be the most complex they’ve done so far since manufacturing the structure above the LED lights had to come from 700 differently shaped pieces of blackout fabric. But it was all worth it in the end because the audiences attending the Time Warp techno music festival feel the music while experiencing the performative stage designs instead of these two being separate. At the moment, visitors who want to see these spaces can first-hand experience them in Madrid (October 10th and 11th, 2025); Mannheim, (November 7th and 8th, as well as March 21st), and New York City (November 21st and 22nd, 2025).
a cluster of rock-looking sculptures suspend above the audience
Optics stage design
swirling patterns sit on the ceiling in this set design
Glass Dome
the Glass Dome has transparent windows above the visitors
The Cave 2.0
the sculpture is made of a black material used to block out light in the agricultural industry
project info:
name: Time Warp | @time_warp_official
technical director: Anatol Fried
designers: Anatol Fried, Valentin Lüdicke, Greg Sullivan | @voll_lustig_licht
upcoming dates: Madrid (October 10th and 11th, 2025); Mannheim, (November 7th and 8th, as well as March 21st), and New York City (November 21st and 22nd, 2025)
photography: Marko Edge, Tyler Allix, GuilleGS | @marko_edge, @tylerallix
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