ArcTanGent 2025

After what seems like the longest summer ever, with very little preparation and a lot of excitement we headed down the road on a warm, slightly breezy day to Fernhill Farm, the Mendips setting for ArcTanGent Festival (ATG). Now on its eleventh iteration, the lineup this year was packed full of acts that you would definitely struggle to talk to your colleagues about over the watercooler at work. Headliners Wardruna, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Karnivool and Tesseract tell the story of an eclectic lineup precision engineered for enjoyers of all things angular, esoteric and with a rotating prefix of “Post”, “Prog”, “Math” or “Metal” in their genre descriptions.

From the outside, this would seem to be a Serious lineup, for Serious music fans. Yet that doesn’t tell half the story of the weekend. I’ve been going to festivals for three decades now, and what I saw at ATG was one of the most joyful, celebratory crowds of people having the weekend of their lives. There was no fighting and no aggro, beyond the moshpits, which are paradoxically a place of solidarity and caring. Very few people talking through sets, and most noticeably, few instances of people filming entire sets to watch back later on tinny phone speakers. There is one notable, and understandable, exception to this, but I’ll come back to that later.

ATG is a small, fiercely independently-run festival, and it shows. From the booking (“see the whole lineup!” the promotional material proclaims, which is largely true, especially on the more pared back Wednesday bonus day) to the range of stalls and bars. Local drinks from Arbor Ales and a decent selection of food options (including the incredible Bunnymans Bunnychow) show good judgement in providing the punters with sustenance. A few stalls, including clothing promoting Metal for Good and Safe Gigs For Women organisations, as well as the always busy merch stand, demonstrate a selective approach to selling gear, as opposed to the normal endless rows of disposable festival tat. The site is clean, safe and never did I feel any anxiety over security being either overbearing or absent.

You get the strong impression the organisers care as much about the overall festival experience as they do about the lineup alone. This is an event run by festival lovers for festival lovers.

Getting to the site is simple, with decent transport links from Bristol city by bus or taxi, and driving is a gloriously easy experience. Having done years of Glastonbury car queues, followed by hour-long hikes cross country, the modest 5 minute walk from the car, through security and to our camping spot, was a breath of fresh air. Plenty of space to pitch up, and even by the end of the weekend, there was no overwhelming feeling of claustrophobia from too many people or the feeling that every step to your tent would end in tripping over another guide rope. Space is a lovely thing. The campsite had a nice buzz, and while it was rarely quiet, it was also absolutely fine to sleep if you needed to. Overheard at 4am one night was a long, winding conversation about the merit (or lack of) contained in the Peter Jackson Hobbit trilogy, briefly interrupted by another group comparing notes on where they were from and what they were on. This is a safe space for nerds, party people, and nerds who like to party.

But what was the actual lineup like? While my personal highlight was seeing one of my all time favourite bands play one of my all time favourite EPs in full to close their set (GY!BE’s ‘Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada’, if you were interested!), I wasn’t hugely familiar with the majority of the music on offer. What we saw was an incredible range of acts, ranging from jazzy krautrock (the unbelievably NOT Australian band Drongo) to Japanese screamo heroes Envy, from the crunchy proto grunge of Melvins (iconic frontman Buzz Osborne’s hair standing to full attention) to the Nordic Viking folk of Wardruna. What was on offer continually challenged my ears, and not just through pure decibel levels (wear ear protection, you’ll miss it when it’s gone).

This also wasn’t just an exercise in intellectual, beard-scratching appreciation of difficult time signatures, this was in a crowd that clearly deeply emotionally connected with the acts playing. The Danish indie band Mew, on their goodbye tour, had one girl stood next to me in floods of tears as they played out their final track, Comforting Sounds. The crowd for my personal discovery-of-the-weekend, SleepyTime Gorilla Museum, was loving every second of their set, a performance I can only describe as if Frank Zappa stayed alive long enough to join Mudvayne. This was their first time touring in decades, and I’m not entirely certain it wasn’t their first ever UK show.

Acts I didn’t catch but overheard others raving about included Ithaca’s last ever show, and Frontierer’s insanely heavy hardcore, which I could hear in my bones from a distance. In fact, looking at the lineup in retrospect, it was a weekend of discovery, and I now have a long list of acts I want to hear more of. Ahab’s nautical doom metal and The Gorge’s jazz-inflected prog metal being just a couple of examples. The festival site is so perfectly laid out that sound bleed is minimal, the rotating of stage times means if you really want to you can spend from 11am to 11pm non-stop at a stage listening to something engaging.

But what about after 11pm? A festival after hours is a deal-breaker for many. After the stages close, ATG switches exclusively to silent disco mode but the selection on offer across the channels isn’t your normal selection of Mr Brightside or S Club 7 sing-a-longs. Instead there are a number of channels playing very different selections - flipping through I went from NIN’s March Of The Pigs, to Technoheads’ awful happy hardcore classic I Want To Be A Hippie, a song I haven’t thought about since the late 90s for a good reason. Most importantly, switching over to the Green channel, I had a moment airdrumming to The Mars Voltas’ Roulette Dares (The Haunt of) along with a stranger as we left the urinal area together. That was a new box ticked for me. I’m sure some people might want more than just a silent disco at night, but then that would mean smaller crowds for the earlier bands on the lineup potentially, and likely is a licensing issue, so this is definitely an expectation to be managed if you’re a night owl.

Before the silent disco proper though, there were live sets over the headphones. We only did this one night because I am old and tired, but an amazing live set by Nordic Giants followed by newly-formed Wulpurgis, a Mike Vennart (Oceansize, Empire State Bastard) fronted Ozzy-era Black Sabbath tribute band. From the start of War Pigs to the end of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, the crowd in the packed tent were singing along to every word.

I suppose the point I’m trying to convey is that music festivals are not about just having a great lineup, or even just how battered you get for the duration - they are, at least for me, about moments, memories, connections. ArcTanGent connects people, and I have a lot of memories from the weekend to mull over. Which brings me to my final memory of the festival before we headed home, namely the set from Clown Core.

After pulling out from last year’s festival, the mysterious clown duo, purveyors of smooth-jazz-meets-death-metal were finally on stage to play a set of intensely short, silly and visually offensive drum & sax noise songs. Many in the audience looked confused and potentially scared of what they were witnessing. From clips of their portaloo music videos to various animals rutting, from mountains of meat interspersed with surgery imagery, to generative AI obscenity that must never be seen by innocent eyes, it was an intense time for everyone present. This was the set of the aforementioned recording on phones, and in this case it’s pretty understandable why. One particular highlight of them showing YouTube reactions to their own videos had the crowd in hysterics. Then the coup de grâce, where the anonymous masked clown saxophonist simultaneously bust a lovely sax solo while playing a single note synth line with...another part of his body...ahem. Would I recommend seeing Clown Core? Probably not to everyone. Did I have a great time, and now have the memory of them seared into my brain, to be remembered at 3am on a dark nightmarish winter’s night? Absolutely.

There’s much more I could write about the fest from the reliable cleanliness of the toilets, availability of showers in general camping, the endless parade of band t-shirts many of which I’ve never heard of, the pure joy of seeing a tiny child on their parent’s shoulders rocking out during an amazing set from Pelican, or the end of Wardruna’s set where the lead singer reminded everyone that the songs of our history will be forgotten if we don’t keep singing them. Safe to say that I’m already eyeing up the super early bird tickets for next year. Not sure how they could top this year, but I’m sure James Scarlett and the team will try and do just that. On this form, I wouldn’t bet against them.