Snapped: BangOn!NYC's Elements Festival, NYC

This weekend, 8500 people gathered in an abandoned industrial park in Red Hook for BangOn!NYC's third installment of Elements Festival.

The all-day, outdoor event has quickly become one of Brooklyn's favorite summer affairs. With much of the city's music community looking forward to the multi-stage adventure all year round, there's no question the underground promoter is well on its way to the festival big leagues.

Elements hosted five ornate, artistically developed stages celebrating the natural world. Fire, Water, Earth, Air and a secret fifth element fused together for a spiritually and musically charging experience.

As BangOn's most ambitious and largest event to date, Elements Festival 2016 showed off the production team's growing and more precise sense of design and scale. The particular community, known for their highly elaborate and colorful showmanship, managed to maintain their core DIY style while presenting stages bigger and more intricate than before. BangOn cleverly utilized the environment as a key component for each performance platform and enlisted dancers and hidden gems around the festival grounds.

Mixmag's Water Stage and The Air Stage overlooked the Hudson River and Upper Bay, welcoming a light breeze in the sweltering heat with performances by Claptone, Le Youth, Klingande, Blond:ish, Nicolas Matar and more. The Fire Stage, designed by local visual artist Incendia, brought a dystopian landscape to life with destroyed automobiles, industrial backdrops and open flames. The festival's main event, The Earth Stage, was a psychedelic melange of sophisticated LED screens and elaborate floral details, welcoming the ever-funky Gramatik and Mija as the night's headliners.

BangOn's secret fifth element was the outrageous Desert Hearts crew, housed in an abandoned stone warehouse fashioned to transports fans to the inside of a kaleidoscope with hanging crystals, morphing windows and wall-shaking bass with a monstrous six-hour back-to-back set from the DH artists.

Despite the overwhelming temperatures, attendees continued to dance and admire in awe as they were offered entrance to the new, unknown, fantasy world created by BangOn.

See pictures from the event above.

[Photos: Chris Lazzaro / Freedom Film LLC, Tony Colasurdo / Tony Colasurdo Photography, Patrick Irwin / Tech Pat Inc, Tod Seelie, Daniel Leinweber / Razberry Photography]

Sydney is Mixmag's US Digital Content Editor. Follow her on Twitter here