As electronic, hip hop and rock blasts from competing speakers in all directions, about 100 or so festival-goers gather under dozens of red umbrellas in a semi-circle to hear a lecture on blockchain.
This idiosyncratic scene is what makes Wonderfruit, the four-day extravaganza last week outside Pattaya, so different from other music festivals. Apart from the traditional offerings of music, booze and hippy-chic aesthetics, the festival offers seminars on technology, sustainability and mindfulness to captivate young people from around the world.
These types of talks and discussions happen all the time in Bangkok, but are rarely attended by an audience of casual non-experts or those unaffiliated with the specific field.
"Blockchain is such an insular community and it's hard to break out of that bubble," said Ashoka Finley, an engineer for ConsenSys, a software company that finds ways to use blockchain technology for social change.
The layout of the Wonderfruit festival, which aims to offer technology, sustainability and mindfulness.
Mr Finley gave a talk on blockchain along with fellow ConsenSys employees to a knowledgeable and engaged crowd at the "Eco Pavilion", one of the many painstakingly constructed event stages built exclusively for Wonderfruit on the sprawling fields by the Siam Country Club.
"It's important to make this stuff relatable for young people," he said. "Blockchain can be so naval gaze-y, you need more conversations in spaces that are not blockchain focused."
The stage was filled all weekend with talks from activists to tech visionaries, from topics ranging from urban farming to biotechnology to decentralised waste solutions to simply finding oneself. Lance Diaresco, the director of brand and creative solutions at Google, ran a meditation seminar, encouraging the audience to face their fears by anthropomorphising them and talking to them.
Perhaps one of the most high profile speakers at the event, Constant Tedder, co-founder of Jagex, the creator of the hugely successful online game Runescape, and chief executive of Hive, a co-working company with locations throughout Asia, with two in Bangkok. He said he was surprised by the large crowd, who came to see him talk about the environment, forgoing more selfish delights offered by the music festival.
"Festivals have an important part to play in encouraging change and creating a dialogue," he said. "Where else does this happen in physical spaces besides at festivals."
He used Wonderfruit as an opportunity to first talk about his upcoming project, Earth.org, a work-in-progress initiative to track the effects of climate change and man-made environmental destruction through satellite imagery. The project is aimed at one day becoming an open source data base tracking the loss of flora and fauna worldwide.
"We're still in pre-launch, but thought this was a friendly forum to begin to talk about it and fine tune the language surrounding the project," he said.
Apart from enrichment, these talks provided a vital space to get into the shade and out of the brutal heat, before the sun went down and the seven or so music stages filled up with dancers.
"If I'm going to dedicate my time to a music festival, I want an experience that encompasses many factors like art, culture and learning," said Melissa Carpio, 37, from the US who attended a few of the talks on Saturday. "I've never seen education emphasised to this extent at any of the other big festivals."
Despite Wonderfruit's uniqueness, it's hard not to compare the festival with Burning Man, the annual desert, hippie, art festival in the US, which has not only grown to be a popular institution, but has engendered an alternative lifestyle brand in its own right.
Burning Man in recent years has become a central hub for Silicon Valley elites -- at odds with its free-spirited, egalitarian values -- featuring spectacles like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg dropping down at the festival from his helicopter to hand out cheeseburgers to attendees.
Wonderfruit has a similar mix of hippies, heat and technology, although Wonderfruit's co-founder Pranitan Phornprapha bristled at the idea that his festival would become a gathering place for the region's tech elites.
"Silicon Valley people gravitate to Burning Man because it's close," Mr Pranitan said. "Thailand is not the tech centre of the world. We're a country of farmers and craftsmen, so we have to work with what we have."
Yet the festival is still bringing technology to the forefront. Wonderfruit has its own smartphone application with an interactive map and programme line-up. In previous years blockchain technology was used to plant trees in order to offset the environmental costs of the festival. The entire event is cashless, with attendees loading money on a wristband that can be scanned to purchase food and drinks.
Mr Pranitan, scion of one of Thailand's wealthiest families and a businessman in his own right, brings a more practical approach to putting on a sustainable ecologically empowering show.
"A lot of people think that being sustainable is about being a hippie," he said. "But you can have a business plan and a proper structure for it."
Wonderfruit takes its sustainability seriously and has an outside organisation, Thailand Greenhouse, auditing the festival. The organisation tallies and scores every negative impact caused by the festival, then gives them a score. The organisers then plant a certain amount of trees to offset their ecological footprint.
"Frankly, I'm not interested in doing a music festival," Mr Pranitan said. "What we're really about is creating environmental content that is inspiring, has purpose, is subtle, but also enjoyable."
He said his goal for the festival was to convert the 95% of people who show up to a festival and don't care, and propel them to change the environment or make the world a better place, even if they just want to party. He hopes by living in this alternate universe for a weekend, this venue and structure will convince the apathetic to care.