As you prepare for another weekend with your friends, you start getting ready for the drive. You pack your bags, load up the car, and make your way through the winding roads of the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah Valley.
Fall colors stretch across the landscape. You pass farms, rolling hills, and small rural towns with gas stations that look like they haven’t been renovated since the 1950s. Eventually, you arrive at the entrance.
Welcoming you to the colorful world of GRiZ.
The Valley of the Seven Stars: A Cosmic Campout returned to Oak Ridge Farm in Arrington, Virginia, for its second year on October 8-11th, 2026. With a lineup featuring Crankdat, Ganja White Night, LSDream, Distinct Motive, and more, the festival brought thousands of electronic music fans to a small county nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The lineup was stacked. The production was massive. The bass was, of course, ridiculous.
But somewhere between the historic farm buildings, the local artists, and the people working behind the scenes, I found myself thinking about something bigger than the music.
For me, Seven Stars became a love letter to Virginia itself.
Bringing the farm back to life
Arrington is no stranger to large-scale music festivals. Oak Ridge Farm was once home to LOCKN’, the beloved jam band festival that helped establish the property as a destination for live music before the event ceased operations after 2019.
For several years, the farm went without a major festival. That changed in 2025, when GRiZ announced the inaugural Seven Stars. The response was immediate, with tickets selling out quickly.
For a property with such a deep connection to Virginia’s live music history, the return of a major festival felt like a new chapter.
And GRiZ and his team had a chance to make that chapter their own.
As Seven Stars returned for its second year, the festival expanded its production, adding more stages, improving accessibility, and bringing more opportunities for attendees to explore the property. Yet some of the most meaningful parts of the experience came from the land itself.
For one former Nelson County resident, returning to Oak Ridge Farm carried a much deeper meaning.
Tyler Miller, whose family owned the property for generations, shared the history behind the farm and what it meant to see music return to the land. His grandfather, George Loving, sold the property to Dave Frey and the LOCKN’ team in 2013. The farm had been in the family since the early 1900s, and George personally restored several of its historic buildings in the early 2000s.
After years away from the property, Tyler returned for the first Seven Stars and saw the work that had gone into restoring and maintaining the farm, alongside the care the festival team put into welcoming thousands of attendees.
He reflected on how much his grandfather would have loved seeing a community come together to enjoy the property and help care for a place that meant so much to his family.
A festival becomes part of the story of the land it occupies. It brings new people into a place with its own history, its own community, and its own memories. At Oak Ridge Farm, those stories now overlap with the memories being made by a new generation of music fans.
A festival that actually felt like Virginia
So, why call this a love letter to Virginia?
Because throughout the weekend, I kept coming back to one thing: GRiZ and his team seemed to understand where they were.
As someone from Eastern and Central Virginia, I’ve always been fascinated by the distinct cultures that exist across our state. Rural mountain communities have their own identities, histories, and ways of life that can feel worlds away from larger cities. Agriculture, small businesses, and the surrounding landscape are deeply woven into that identity.
Seven Stars leaned into those details.
I’ve been to festivals in all kinds of unexpected places, but it’s rare to see a production incorporate its surroundings so thoroughly into the world it’s creating. At Seven Stars, the aesthetic felt like a little Virginia outpost tucked away in the mountains.
There was an actual General Store. An actual Diner named Wubski’s Diner. Tractors scattered around the property that were actually being used. Historic buildings that became part of the festival’s scenery rather than something to hide behind a temporary stage facade.
I mean, they really committed to the country bit.
And it worked.
Walking around the farm, I genuinely felt like someone had asked a question that seems obvious but doesn’t always get enough attention: How do we make this festival feel like the place we’re actually in?
The answer was all around us. The land, the buildings, and the rural setting helped shape the experience. Instead of treating Oak Ridge Farm as an empty field waiting for a production company to transform it, GRiZ Presents made the existing landscape part of the story.
That connection to place also has a measurable impact beyond the festival grounds.
According to the festival’s internal post-event analysis, the 2025 edition generated an estimated $2.5 million to $3 million in local economic impact across Nelson County and surrounding communities. The analysis estimated an average spend of $132 per attendee at local businesses, with nearly half of attendees spending between $101 and $250 at area restaurants, shops, and services. Half visited local restaurants, while 21 percent extended their stay to explore Nelson County or nearby destinations.
The festival also reported generating approximately $85,000 in transient occupancy tax, $120,000 in food tax revenue, and $48,000 in beverage tax revenue. More than 85 percent of attendees reportedly traveled from outside Virginia, bringing visitors and spending into the region from across the country.
Those figures help put the festival’s regional reach into perspective. People travel to Virginia for the music, but their visits can also support the restaurants, shops, lodging providers, and other businesses that make up the surrounding community.
The festival’s commitment to the region extends to environmental stewardship, too. Its reported initiatives include recycling and waste diversion, free water refill stations, food donations, and support for regenerative agriculture across Virginia.
It’s one thing to say you care about a community. It’s another to show that care through how you use its land, support its residents, and contribute to the local economy.
Giving Virginia’s underground a stage
The love for Virginia extended beyond the landscape. It reached the people helping shape its electronic music scene.
Large festivals can introduce thousands of people to new artists, businesses, and creative communities. Seven Stars used that platform to spotlight regional talent alongside its internationally recognized lineup.
Rhythm City Collective (RCC), a Virginia-based music collective that also performed at the inaugural festival, returned for 2026 with an opportunity to open the festival’s new Satelittle Stage during Thursday’s pre-party.
The lineup featured Virginia talent including Air Castles, Jack the Giant, MACK, and other DJs from Central and Eastern Virginia.
For local artists, opportunities like this matter. Sharing a festival with internationally recognized acts gives regional talent a chance to introduce their sound to new audiences while representing the communities that helped shape them.
Throughout the weekend, independent vendors and collectives created additional opportunities for local artists to connect with festivalgoers. Nomad Coffee, for example, transformed its coffee trailer into a platform for renegade DJ sets, building on a smaller open-decks setup from the previous year.
Working with Seven Stars’ vending coordinators and DJ Syed Kamal, known as Kamaloscope, the team organized slots for a mix of talent, including artists who had never performed in front of a crowd before.
Joshua Davies, who runs Nomad Coffee, described the experience as an opportunity to bring people together in a new way. Some of the most memorable moments came from watching attendees dance while waiting in line for coffee or holding their drinks as they listened to the DJs.
“One of the main reasons I got into the coffee business is that I try to unify people,” Joshua explained.
The renegades offered a different way to experience the festival. Attendees could grab a beverage, catch a set, and find themselves dancing alongside strangers in a space where everyday festival life and Virginia’s underground music community intersected.
Joshua also reflected on how Seven Stars has helped bring different parts of the local scene together over the last couple of years.
For a festival built around a massive lineup and immersive production, those smaller moments can be just as meaningful. They give emerging artists a place to play, help attendees discover new sounds, and allow independent businesses to become part of the culture surrounding the music.
Even The Broccoli Bar, a vendor traveling from Vermont, contributed to that effort by providing a platform for Virginia artists such as; MyMyMy, and Kamaloscope, Upper, Intellectual Rebel and more. Their involvement was another example of how businesses from outside the region could help create opportunities for the local scene.
A thriving music community depends on more than headliners. It needs collectives willing to create opportunities, businesses willing to support artists, and spaces where people can discover something new.
For a state with distinct regional identities and music communities spread across cities and smaller towns, those connections are meaningful.
Seven Stars brought people from across the country to a Virginia farm and gave local talent more ways to participate in the experience. The festival’s reach created room for regional artists to share their work with new audiences, while the businesses and collectives supporting them helped connect the dots.
And that’s the balance I want to see more festivals strike.
Taking care of the land that brings us together
Of course, no festival weekend is perfect.
The weather was less than favorable, and the elements reminded everyone that a farm in the Virginia mountains is still a farm in the Virginia mountains. You can plan the production, build the stages, and create an entire universe, but you can’t control the weather.
What stood out to me was how much care for the festival extended beyond the music itself. Production and event staff, security, medical teams, volunteers, vendors, and local supporters all played a role in keeping the weekend moving.
For a festival in its second year, putting on an event of this scale while navigating difficult weather was a significant undertaking.
The experience also reinforced something I kept noticing throughout the weekend: the people who make a festival possible are part of its story, too.
That includes the team building the stages, the vendors serving attendees, the collectives creating opportunities for local DJs, and the people whose families have called the property home for generations.
Each contributes something different to the experience. Together, those contributions shape what the festival means to the place where it happens.
Virginia has its own rhythm
We have artists building their names in Richmond, Virginia Beach, and beyond. We have collectives creating their own spaces, independent businesses supporting the scene, and communities showing up for music that brings people together from across the country.
Seven Stars gave all of that a place to intersect.
The festival brought people from all over to a small Virginia town, gave them a weekend inside the GRiZ universe, and reminded them that the place surrounding that universe has a story of its own.
For those of us who call Virginia home, that’s something worth being proud of.
When the stages come down, the campsites empty, and the last bass note fades into the mountains, the land is still here. The communities are still here. The artists, businesses, and collectives are still doing the work of building a culture that extends far beyond one festival weekend.
That’s what I hope people carry with them when they leave Oak Ridge Farm.
Memories of their favorite sets, absolutely. The friends they made, the music they discovered, and the moments that made the trip worthwhile.
But also an appreciation for the place that made those memories possible.
Virginia has always had its own rhythm. This October, GRiZ and his team gave the world another reason to listen.