Monolink walked up to the decks at Long Feng as the Burning Man sky was still deciding what color it wanted to be, and within minutes a crowd that had been dancing through the Nevada night was lifting its arms toward a sun none of them had slept through. This was his only sunrise set of 2026, and he said so plainly from the stage, which meant everyone in that crowd knew the stakes before the first drop landed. What followed was not just an electronic set but a slow-burn ceremony, one that moved from tightly wound club tension through a full emotional arc and landed, improbably, with an entire dance floor hugging strangers.
When the rain almost cancelled everything
Before the set reached its warmest moment, Monolink took a breath between tracks and told the crowd something most of them did not know. ‘When I woke up this morning and it was raining, I was a little worried,’ he said, then looked out at the people still moving in front of him. ‘But seeing all of you guys here enjoying yourselves, this place always reminds me why I’m doing this.’ It was a small admission that reframed the whole morning: the set almost did not happen at all, and the crowd had shown up anyway, and that mattered to him.
The music itself carried that gratitude forward. The opening hour leaned into the desert’s particular brand of hypnosis, with the word ‘heat’ repeating across lyric lines like a mantra synced to the temperature of the air. Songs about losing one’s mind, about colors fading to grey, about the compulsive need to keep dancing rather than talk, moved through the set in a sequence that felt less like a playlist and more like a single long sentence.
A love ritual born at the burn
Deep into the set, with the sun fully overhead, Monolink paused the energy entirely. He told the crowd the next song came with what he called ‘a little ritual which was born at the burn.’ He asked everyone to stop dancing, wrap their arms around themselves, then turn and find a stranger. ‘If you’re here by yourselves, please find a stranger to hug,’ he said. ‘We’re all a big family here.’ The dance floor, which had been a wall of movement seconds earlier, reorganized itself into something closer to a field of slow embraces. Then the track he described as a song about love opened up underneath them.
The final stretch moved through a cover of ‘Nothing Compares 2 U,’ its familiar lyric about seven hours and fifteen days landing differently at sunrise after a night-long burn, before Monolink stepped back from the decks with a short, direct goodbye: ‘Thank you so so much everyone. I love you guys. Have a beautiful burn.’
The lyric still echoing across the playa
A single line from mid-set: ‘I dreamt I had a dream out in the desert, lying naked underneath a liquid sky.’
The set began with the word ‘heat’ pulsing through the speakers before a single human voice had said anything, and it ended the same way, the word dissolving into the morning air over Long Feng, practical and relentless and true to the place.
