Insomniac and the Belgians Bring Their Cult Stage to America, and It Belongs Here
Written by Eric Budianto Thornton
Insomniac had done it again. Less than a year after teaming up with Tomorrowland for an unprecedented run at the Las Vegas Sphere, UNITY, the immersive 360° experience that ran from August 29 through October 18, 2025 and almost single-handedly redefined what a live electronic show could look like — the two giants of dance music joined forces again. This time they brought one of Tomorrowland’s most beloved offshoots to American soil for the first time: CORE, a two-day festival that took over LA State Historic Park on May 2–3, 2026, just steps from the gates of Chinatown. 30,000 fans showed up across the weekend.
But first, a quick history. CORE was born in 2017 as a renegade hidden stage tucked into the forest at Tomorrowland in Boom, Belgium. While the main stage went big and bombastic, CORE went deep. With a wooden, nature-rooted sanctuary playing alternative house and melodic techno to fans who treated finding it as a rite of passage. It worked so well it became its own brand. CORE Medellín launched in 2024 and sold out in 48 hours; CORE Tulum followed; CORE Melbourne is set for November 2026. Los Angeles was the U.S. test, and Insomniac picked the right park. If that feels like a meta-rave-ception — Insomniac, the LA-born company behind EDC Las Vegas, importing Belgium’s most exported brand to put on a festival in Belgium’s most exported style, you’d be right. Nobody is complaining.
THE SETTING
LA State Historic Park is one of the city’s quietly perfect outdoor venues. Thirty-two acres of grass tucked between Chinatown and the LA River, with a view of the downtown skyline that looks more cinematic than it has any right to. CORE leaned into all of it. Wide grass lawns let people sit, sprawl, and chill between sets, almost Coachella in feel, while the stages were placed far enough apart that the sound never bled. Maybe it was the open sky. Maybe it was the trees. Maybe it was the kind of crowd this lineup pulls. Either way, people were here to dance and they were here to see something.
Walk in from the Spring Street entrance and you were greeted by Mano — Spanish for hand, and the stage is exactly that: two enormous sculpted forearms, leathered and textured, crossed at the wrists to form a wide arch with the DJ booth tucked underneath. A short walk past the trees got you to the CORE main stage, the festival’s centerpiece. Two colossal stone faces, eyes closed, leaned forehead-to-forehead, with a vertical LED panel running between them like a gateway. By daylight, the faces looked like weathered classical statuary. By night, the production engineers turned the entire structure into a kinetic light sculpture: those iconic Tomorrowland fountains we see at their show dancing to the music on each side of the stage, CO₂ jets, pyrotechnics, and, twice across two days — bubbles. Yes, bubbles. At first glance you assume someone in the crowd brought a wand. Look closer and they’re spilling out of the stage rig itself, drifting across thousands of dancers in synchronized chaos. Loop back behind Mano and a tree-lined path delivered you to Origo, the harder, faster third stage, programmed for the wing of the lineup that came to dance heavier.
“It felt like a Tomorrowland forest had been transplanted, brick by brick, into Chinatown.”
DAY ONE — HONEY DIJON, DIXON, AND A FOUR TET REVELATION
Saturday opened gently and ramped fast. Late afternoon belonged to Honey Dijon on the CORE stage, who played the kind of grown-and-sexy house that gets a crowd dancing without ever needing to go hard as the disco-tinged grooves, perfectly sequenced, with the downtown skyline catching pink behind her and the giant CORE faces still half in daylight. It was one of the prettier sets of the weekend.
Dixon followed with a melodic techno set built for sundown, the Innervisions co-founder doing what he does better than nearly anyone, telling a story across two hours, swaying behind the decks while the crowd swayed back. Over at Mano, Mall Grab brought a heavier, more textured house set that pulled half the festival into his orbit.
But the day belonged to Four Tet. Kieran Hebden is the kind of producer DJs and producers themselves stop to watch, and his Saturday-night closing set on the CORE stage was eclectic in the truest sense. House, techno, dubstep flickers, melodic ambient, lo-fi, even a few left-field surprises threaded into one of the most cohesive runs of the weekend. By the time the lasers started splitting the night around the stone faces, it felt less like a DJ set and more like a piece of architecture. He drew the biggest crowd of the day; the field in front of CORE was a wall of phones for the final twenty minutes.
@insomniacevents Four Tet under fireworks at CORE LA. @fourtetkieran #insomniacevents #tomorrowland #corela #ravetok #edmtok @Tomorrowland
DAY TWO — HARD TECHNO, A WOMAN’S WORLD, AND THE PRYDZ FACTOR
Sunday felt visibly more crowded, partly the lineup, partly the gravitational pull of the festival’s biggest closer. Mija and Kevin de Vries pumps up the crowd late in the afternoon, with Kevin’s hard-edged melodic house pulling early dancers off the grass and into the front of the CORE stage. The Ukrainian duo ARTBAT came on next and did exactly what their fans came for, euphoric drops, recognizable hits like “Dance” and “Coming Home,” big-room melodic techno that reads like communion when the crowd is singing back the synth lines.
@sasha_booo Best set of the weekend at #CoreLosAngeles @ARTBAT @corelosangeles 💥💥💥 #tomorrowland #insomniace #edm #losangeles
Then a walk over to Mano, where Scotland’s own Hannah Laing made the case for why she’s become one of the most-talked-about hard techno DJs in the world. Her set was fun, dark, and brilliant. pop and dance-pop hits flipped against hard techno drops, the kind of pacing that turns hard-techno skeptics into converts in real time. For a genre most casual listeners say they don’t like, her hour was the easiest entry point in the festival.
@hannahlaingdj Core Tomorrowland Los Angeles wow thank you 🇺🇸 @Tomorrowland #electronicmusic #tomorrowland #corela #hannahlaing
Nina Kraviz followed to close the stage, and brought the sort of performance-art presence that has made her one of the most distinct figures in the genre. With smoke from her cigarette trailing from one hand, dancing behind the decks like she was scoring a film only she could see, her own crooked, lo-fi strain of techno played with absolute authority. The crowd packed in twenty deep. It was the most Mano-stage moment of the weekend.
It is worth pausing on the gender breakdown here, because it’s striking: across two days, CORE’s bookings skewed heavily female. Honey Dijon, Mija, Hannah Laing, Nina Kraviz, TSHA, Annika Wolfe, Leisan, sim0ne, Masha Mar, Ignez, set after set led by women who are either defining their genres now or have already defined them. For a discipline that historically hasn’t given female artists their flowers in real time, CORE’s curation read like a pointed correction.
THE PRYDZ FACTOR
And then Eric Prydz closed it out.
If you don’t follow electronic music closely, here’s the elevator pitch: Prydz is one of the most respected producer-DJs alive, a founding figure in the Stockholm progressive-house circle that gave the world Swedish House Mafia, but he never officially joined the trio — partly, by his own account, because of a long-documented fear of flying that kept him largely on a tour bus through his peak years. The story is the stuff of dance-music lore; DJ Mag has chronicled the moments that defined him, and he opened up about the phobia in extended interviews including a much-discussed sit-down with Zane Lowe on Apple Music’s Beats 1. When he announced he’d finally conquered his aerophobia, and had spent the months since putting that on his calendar. His fans have been openly elated.
Prydz also operates as a one-man genre lab, releasing music under at least three distinct identities: as Eric Prydz, the progressive-house architect behind “Opus” and “Pjanoo”; as Pryda, his more melodic and uplifting alias; and as Cirez D, the harder, percussion-driven techno project on his Mouseville imprint. The show productions are the other half of the legend — EPIC (Eric Prydz In Concert, his arena-touring rig that’s gone through six escalating iterations); HOLO, the holographic live experience that’s headlined Coachella, Tomorrowland, and Creamfields; and the HOLOSPHERE 2.0, the eight-meter, near-five-ton, 806,000-LED transparent video sphere. Together they’ve raised the ceiling for what a DJ show can look like.
CORE LA didn’t get the full HOLOSPHERE rig, but it didn’t need to. When the lasers opened, a full, near-aerial fan of beams shooting up out of the stone faces at the back of the park. Prydz worked through Pryda anthems, Cirez D peaks, and that signature, melancholic-but-uplifting piano line he’s been chasing since “Pjanoo.” Behind him, the visuals on the central LED morphed from snow-capped mountains into deep cosmic geometry. It was the closest thing to a Tomorrowland mainstage moment LA has ever hosted on its own soil. Of course tickets sold out.
BEYOND THE STAGES
What separated CORE from a normal Insomniac-branded festival was, unmistakably, the design DNA. The wayfinding signs looked like Tomorrowland wayfinding signs. The merch — including a printed lineup tee that became Sunday’s most-photographed accessory, sold through both days. Vendors were curated more like a European market than an American festival lot, and food, while not the point, didn’t insult anyone. People moved between stages without ever feeling herded.
SEE YOU IN 2027
Festivals at their best feel like communal dreams, well-orchestrated, expensively produced, and briefly real. CORE Los Angeles, on its first U.S. run, felt like something rarer: a festival that already had a soul, imported intact from another continent and gently remixed for its new home. The faces, the hands, the bubbles, the lasers, the trees, the LA skyline glowing pink behind it all, they didn’t add up to a copy of Tomorrowland. They added up to CORE’s own thing, just dropped into a Chinatown park.
The festival’s official site is already telling fans to sign up for 2027 lineup, dates, and ticket info. Melbourne gets its turn this November. Medellín returns next year. And LA, as of Sunday night, is firmly on the map.
See you next year under the faces!
CORE Los Angeles 2026 took place May 2–3, 2026 at LA State Historic Park. For info on CORE’s global editions and the 2027 lineup, visit core.world, or follow on Instagram. For info on Insomniac’s other LA-area festivals — including EDC, HARD Summer, and Skyline — visit insomniac.com.
