There’s a particular feeling of relaxation that Kochi gives you the moment you touch down. There’s a sense of calm at the Cochin International Airport. Just as you are out the airport, one of the first things you see is the massive Kappa CULTR Line-up. In that very moment the excitement begins. It was like the town of Kochi had declared, ‘You’re in for one hell of a time’. The whole of Kochi seemed to be in on it. And then, just as the car rounded the bend toward Bolgatty Palace, the CULTR stage came into view across the water, massive and almost audacious in terms of its scale. Before I’d even been handed my pass, the excitement had already set in.
Now in its third edition, Kappa CULTR has become one of Kerala’s ‘most-looked-forward-to’ electronic music festival. The festival returned to the well-known Bolgatty Palace anchored in a manifesto that reads Same Same But Different. A cheeky nod to the festival’s DNA: familiar enough to feel like homecoming, bold enough to keep you on your toes. And across three days and two stages, it sure delivered on that promise.
Day One | Scouting the Festival Grounds
The first day of any multi-day festival is always a negotiation between curiosity and restraint, between wanting to see everything and knowing you have subsequent days to pace yourself. I arrived in the evening, giving myself the luxury of reading the grounds before letting the music take over.
The venue is perfectly chosen, Bolgatty Palace, with its riverfront setting and colonial-era architecture, lends Kappa CULTR a grandeur that feels its own. The two stages: the CULTR Stage and the Kappa x Maushi stage were positioned far enough apart that the sounds never bled into each other, each holding its own sonic universe intact.
For Day 1, music was definitely the priority. I’d made my way to the CULTR stage specifically for Ezequiel Arias, the Argentine progressive prodigy who has been building a reputation as one of the most exciting selectors in the progressive house and melodic space. With the spacious stage grounds allowing the sound to breathe, his set unfurled. He reached for Dream Controller, his own track, which hit exactly as expected; but it was his drop of Alive Again by Guy J that genuinely caught me off guard. Anish Sood a.k.a. Anyasa closed out the CULTR stage, whose reputation for emotive melodic techno sets with a pinch of what India sounds like, took over the crowd.
Day Two | The Grounds Open Up
If Day 1 was about finding your feet at the festival grounds, Day 2 was about losing them entirely. Which I did.
Coming straight to the CULTR stage and landed right in the middle of Anushka Menon’s set. For anyone who hasn’t caught her yet, her Boiler Room Goa recording is essential homework. She moved through her selections with authority.
Then came Solee. The German artist has an ability to suspend time. His music doesn’t so much build as it envelops, wrapping you in an unhurried haze until you realise you’ve lost track of where you are. Mariposa was the moment that crystallised it: a track that seemed to stop the air around it.
Curiosity eventually pulled me away to the Kappa x Maushi stage, where Kohra was locked in a b2b with Midnight Traffic. The contrast was immediate. It was tighter, more intimate pocket of energy, the kind of set where the DJ feels close enough to look you in the eye.
Then Bart Skils closed day 2. He is a core figure on Adam Beyer’s Drumcode Records, responsible for some of techno’s most definitive anthems. Skils arrived at the CULTR stage with the measured confidence of someone who has played enough rooms to know exactly when to detonate. His set was relentless and precise, a tightly wound machine that kept the dance floor in a collective forward lean. By the final thirty minutes, the sky above Bolgatty had other ideas. Droplets began falling, softly at first, then with intensity. I looked up and the lasers were cutting through the dark above us, rainfall catching the light like scattered prisms. The crowd didn’t try to find shelter. If anything, they leaned in harder with their dance moves.
Day Three | Kerala’s Devotion for Psytrance, Delivered
The Kappa x Maushi stage on Day 3 had a surprise awaiting. Racing Nokia, who proceeded to dismantle any remaining expectations with hard-hitting, unrelenting techno that felt more like a physical event. There was no way you could not dance to those beats. The kind of set that makes you re-examine your entire weekend in hindsight.
Back at the mainstage, Tim Taste, Carbon and Liquid Soul shared the day’s billing, and between them, they covered almost every emotional register a festival closing should. Carbon’s set moved with purpose, to get the crowd in. But, it was Liquid Soul who the audiences had been quietly building toward all weekend. A pioneering figure in psychedelic trance and active since the late 1990s, his appearance felt more like a culmination of the three days. The psytrance faithful — and there were many, Kerala has always had a deep connection to that sound, came completely undone. The dance floor became a single, heaving organism.
Kappa CULTR’s founders, Devika and Mayura Shreyams Kumar of Mathrubhumi, had spoken about positioning Kerala on the global festival map. Watching that closing set, their aspiration and their vision for the festival felt fully realised.
CULTR Beyond the Stage
What separates Kappa CULTR from other music festivals is its insistence that the town itself is part of the experience. The festival coincided with the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, at Fort Kochi. Following the grounds’ lead toward art felt like the most natural thing. At Kashi Café, I stumbled across the abstract faces by Vajira Gunawardena — layered works that held you the same way a good DJ set does: long enough to make you feel something you hadn’t expected. Nearby, Riyas Komu’s Systematic Citizen demanded a different kind of attention. Totemic disassembled figures formed pillar-like structures, it represented displacement, with a focus on the disenfranchised youth. Political symbolism and quietly devastating. In a city that wears both its Portuguese colonial history and its contemporary creative ambition simultaneously, this kind of art felt specifically right.
Back at Bolgatty, dotted in between were the touch-points of what the festival calls its cultural ecosystem. CULTR Food, the Arcade CULTR gaming zone by Versus. Also, the Fashion CULTR hub by Strada Sutairu, and an Art corner that quietly rewarded the curious. At the centre of it all stood a towering Kappa structure, a sculptural anchor that the grounds seemed to orbit around. The food village curated by Alex Jo Scaria, featured over 30 stalls and a diverse spread of world cuisines. It offered its own kind of cultural vertigo. Coastal Kochi flavours alongside Mexican street food, and other kinds of street food; enough variety for a post-gig dinner scene.
Same Same, But Unmistakably Different
Three editions in, Kappa CULTR has done something quietly commendable. It has built a festival that feels rooted in Kerala without being limited by it, and international in its ambitions without being indifferent to where it stands. The production, the sound quality, the curation all of it pointed toward a team that takes the music and experiences seriously. The crowd of 10,000 people was as eclectic as the lineup. Locals from across Kerala alongside international travellers, psytrance veterans alongside first-timers, all of them moving to the same pulse by the end of it.
There’s a line from the festival’s own manifesto that keeps returning: sound shapes movement, food becomes ritual, fashion becomes identity, art transforms space. Across three days in Kochi, every one of those promises held. The backwaters shimmered, the lasers cut through the rain, the bass carried across the palace grounds and for a few days at least, Kochi felt like the centre of something.
