Bear Stone is a meditation on community, forged in a place where phones don't work

Held at Donje Primišlje, a rocky canyon where the emerald hills meet the lush blue waters of the river Mrežnica, the land has been used for psytrance festival Mo:Dem since 2013. And it was here that founder Marin Lalić dipped his toes in the world of music festival planning.

Joining the crew at Mo:Dem festival at age 18, Lalić was put in charge of arranging security and medics, mostly because he didn’t care for psytrance. “I understood the importance of the toilets and the bars before I went into the genre of the music that I wanted to do,” he laughs.

While he was raised with your everyday dad rock (The Beatles, Rolling Stones), it was as Lalić grew into a teen – around 2007-08 – that he developed a taste for thrash metal, starting with Metallica. But the sounds that define Bear Stone – psych, desert, and stoner rock – arrived much later, just before Covid, in fact.

It was during the lockdown that Lalić discovered artists such as Red Fang, Fu Manchu, 1000 Mods, and Colour Haze. Getting lost in the sub-genres, particularly the genre-hopping likes of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, this newfound obsession would ultimately spark Bear Stone.

In the hopes of sharing his love of the “fuzziness, that sprinkling of something outside of the usual Marshall Mesa Boogie amp distortion,” as Lalić puts it, he decided to give the strong-arm sounds a home. “There isn't a proper festival that's completely dedicated to this kind of music, at least, not in an outdoor way, so that's where the idea for Bear Stone came.”

In 2021, Lalić and his wife were living in Zagreb after finishing college before moving back to his parents in Slunj – the nearest town to the festival site. It was as he was spending his pandemic days here that the ball started rolling. Lalić had long wanted to make greater use of the Mo:Dem festival site. Combining this ambition with his newly discovered love of those sub-genres, as well as the unexpected time afforded by the pandemic, the conditions for Bear Stone finally aligned.

But, having not actually attended a festival before working at one, Lalić was thrown in the deep end. “This was definitely a crash course in doing a festival,” Lalić says. The closest he got to a gathering as such was a Metallica gig in 2010 that held 45,000 people. “Living in a country that doesn't have as big of a scene. It wasn't something that I was used to going with friends in my teenage years to a festival. It was way more club show oriented.”

With the concept taking shape, 2022 became the test run. Lalić calls it the “year zero” edition, “I always pull the analogy, if you're opening up a bakery, the first thing you do is make a bunch of croissants and hand it out in front. So, the idea was to make a party that we could use for promos for the next year, for 2023,” he says.

The rough concept for the festival was drawn up on 24th February, 2022 – the day Russia invaded Ukraine. “That was my first scheduled call with an agent, so I woke up all cheerful, Yeah, we’re doing this!’ And then I opened up my cell phone, and okay, we could be invaded in a couple of months. That was not ideal,” he laughs now. Pulling everything together over the next five months, they went on to announce it, plastering it all over social media to “inject Bear Stone festival into the scene’s consciousness.”

Local bands, unsurprisingly, embraced the idea. With few options for festivals, let alone one that celebrated their micro-genres, the small tester packed out its lineup as much as feasible. “We really had, in my opinion, among the best bands in Croatia,” Lalić beams. “Out of 10 bands, four were from abroad, and six were from Croatia. The idea was always to have it foreign-oriented, because I knew that we couldn't depend solely on the regional visitors.”

When Year Zero came to an end, Lalić recognised its success. “We managed to do something that's good that people resonated with, even though it was free entry, it had its pluses and minuses.” While making sure that appearances were kept, as if this was a well-oiled, regular machine rather than a long list of firsts for its organiser, it also became a double-edged sword of being more of an attraction to curious on-lookers, rather than the ember-filled hot-bed for his beloved scene.

Moving on from Year Zero to Year One was a relatively seamless affair. Though Marin admits there was a learning curve for himself when it came to selling tickets. He has presumed, “That's it. We're set up for a sold-out festival every single edition, and that's definitely not what happened.” As the iterations of the festivals have equally come and gone, the crowds have steadily grown, “by about 15%” each year, Lalić reckons. But, for a festival that continues to go from strength to strength, all brought about by the bored mind of a twenty-something 5 years ago, he’s created a haven for the riff lovers and drum smashers, with the small congregation that descends upon Slunj quite literally doubling its capacity.

As for which year offered the greater understanding of where he wanted Bear Stone to end up, either Year Zero or the inaugural edition, Lalić ponders for a minute. “Excellent question, year zero was definitely an eye opener, primarily in terms of budget and how to manage it. It definitely blew up at least twice what I was expecting,” he says, exclaiming the point with his hands. “So that was a crucial experience going into 2023, when it was certainly on a bigger scale. Our headliners that year were Orange Goblin and Monster Magnet, which was an extra stamp on what we did in 2022. We made that graph go up, to put it in simple terms.”

The magic of the festival is in the circumstances in which it places its attendees. Deep in the canyon, mobile signal is nigh on impossible, which creates an idyllic scenario where people are thrust into a world without the internet. “I can always feel when it's someone's first time there, because you can just see that they're a bit awkward, they don't know what to do with their hands,” he laughs. “If they're alone, they want to see what's up on the socials, and you can’t. But once they push past that, on the next day of the festival, you can really sense that people are chilling, sitting down and looking somewhere in the distance, it's meditative.”

Coinciding with the idyllic nature of the environment comes the responsibility to care for the lush grounds. It was Mo:Dem that laid the groundwork for the environmental aspects of the festival. “It just made sense. We have to respect this, otherwise it won't be here,” Marin says. “So we definitely communicated this with our visitors from day one, and they completely resonated with it.”

He says that cigarette butts are history thanks to some unexpanded PET bottles (“It's kind of this little cube with a bottle cap on it”), and they also have a cleaning crew keeping a keen eye on things, but for the most part, their job is easy. “I’m definitely seeing a shift in people's mentality that they understand the privilege of the festival being held in this sort of location,” he says.

There are also their unique compost toilets throughout the festival area, so no chemicals are used, barring a couple in the backstage area. For Lalić, these elements are as important as the lineup, just as they were for him when he was learning the ropes at Mo:Dem.

All of these factors are what make Bear Stone more than just a uniquely positioned festival. It’s a coming together of like-minded people who have a love for both local and foreign bands, in a location they bestow equal amounts of respect on. To de-ironise the common meme, it’s quite literally a bunch of people living in the moment, no phones in sight. It all ties together to give Bear Stone its abstract draw. “The energy, the feel of it all, it’s definitely intangible, because if I knew what it was, I would definitely work on it more,” he laughs. “It’s an atmosphere like I'm in some parallel universe that I've entered when I walk into the festival…it's the sum of its parts, I guess.”

As for growth, that’s limited by the design of Mother Nature’. With no plans to relocate given the intense partnership between the festival’s essence and its location, the festival’s capacity is, for all intents and purposes, limited by the grounds. “It's kind of poetic because the location itself that draws the people limits us, won't allow us to pass a certain point,” Lalić says. It’s not a problem to solve, but instead, much like the festival itself, it’s a reality to embrace.