Goldrush runs nine stages on three different clocks

Goldrush 2026: Midnight Riders put its set times out for Friday and Saturday at Rawhide Western Town in Chandler. It is 122 sets, 117 names, nine stages, both nights running 6pm to past 1am Arizona time.

Here is the part that is not on the flyer. The nine stages do not keep the same time.

All nine, all night

Start with the density. From 6pm to midnight, every night, all nine stages are running. Not eight. Not seven at the front end while the site fills up. Nine, for 360 straight minutes, both nights. Worth reading the grid before you walk in, not in the beer line.

Three clocks

Sort the nine by set length and start time and they fall into three groups that barely acknowledge each other.

Three stages run clean 60-minute sets, every one starting exactly on the hour. Four run 90-minute sets on a 6:00 / 7:30 / 9:00 / 10:30 / midnight ladder. The two big stages run off the beat entirely — six different set lengths between 40 and 105 minutes, and only 8 of their 28 sets start on the hour.

A set is buried when it starts after another stage's set begins and ends before that set does, so no version of the night gets you part of it. Counting only sets with a listed finish, 38 are buried:

Zero is the number to look at. The four stages on the 90-minute ladder bury nothing and get buried by nothing, because a 90-minute block always hangs over the edge of an hour. Whatever else you are doing, you can always walk into one of those four and catch something.

Three of those four are the silent disco — the only place on the property where changing your mind is free. Three channels, same start times, one thumb.

Nobody gets a gap

There are 104 handoffs from one set to the next inside a stage-night. Every one is exactly zero minutes. No changeover anywhere, on any stage, either night.

So every walk is paid out of the set you are walking to. And because the two big stages sit off the beat, a trip to a headliner drops you back into the hour stages mid-set. That is the real cost of this grid, and it is bigger than any one conflict.

Zero gaps also means every stage closes on a set with no listed finish — eighteen open-ended sets across the weekend. Whoever you end on, you end there.

The calls that are genuinely hard

Friday at 11:25pm, deadmau5 on Golden Gorge and Boogie T on Pioneer's Peak start at the same minute and finish at the same minute, 80 minutes later. No partial credit on that one. Both stages then hand straight to their closers at 12:45am — Alesso and ALLEYCVT, neither with an end time.

Saturday is worse in a quieter way. Delta Heavy plays 11:15pm to 12:30am. GRiZ plays 11pm to 12:45am. Delta Heavy sits entirely inside GRiZ, so if you want GRiZ you see none of it — though Delta Heavy is on the Lost Lands bill next weekend, which is a real make-good. Then Golden Gorge closes with Martin Garrix at 12:45am against Ray Volpe, already 15 minutes into a set on Pioneer's Peak.

Two DJs doing something silly

CID comes off The Hideout at midnight Friday, then plays Breakaway Philadelphia at 8:30pm Saturday Eastern. Chandler to Chester in 17 hours 30 minutes. Deathpact runs it the other way, off the Philadelphia stage Friday night and onto Pioneer's Peak 26 hours 35 minutes later. Zoey808 and ROSSY are on the Global Dance Festival bill in Denver the same two days.

Mostly, though, this is a local bill, and that reads as a compliment. Not one artist on it is in the ten most-booked names we count. Of the 117 on the poster, 85 play no other festival on our upcoming board at all.

So pick your clock before you get there. Want to see a lot of Goldrush? Live on the 90-minute stages and treat the headliners as trips. Want the headliners? The hour stages will be half-gone every time you come back.

The full grid is on the Goldrush event page — save the sets you want and let the app do the reminding. Goldrush is not in our ticket feed, so there is no ticket link on this one.

Electric State is free on the App Store, on Google Play, and at electricstate.app — set times, lineups and the boards this post is computed from.

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