Sunfall Festival 2017 review: Local noise restrictions means a stellar line-up goes to waste

Located fifteen minutes from Brixton High Street allows the tens of thousands to pour in, but for a worse experience

The sound restrictions on London festivals put in place by local residents and councils are well-documented and would ordinarily have been a well-established premise for those going to a festival in Brockwell Park, which is a space tightly surrounded by residential streets lining its under one kilometre width and length in Lambeth. However, the disappointment many punters had at the relatively timid sound systems at Sunfall festival last weekend was in no small part due to the extensive assurances the festival made on social media of the unrivalled sound systems put in place for this year’s festival.

While describing the “award-winning Martin MLA and cardioid sub array systems” in use in all Sunfall tents, the majority of the announcement was in fact used to explain the measures that avoid “unwanted offsite noise propagation” onto the lives of local residents. Such a set-up was ultimately not sufficient to fill the tents with music themselves, nor withstand the artists' performances, with Ben UFO blowing a speaker in the North Stage during his evening performance.

Many fans often accuse Sunfall organisers the Columbo Group – who run XOYO, Phonox and the Jazz Café, amongst other London venues – of ruthless profiteering at the expense of fan experience. Many aspects of their events do seem to point to a genuine concern and care for electronic music, and an awareness of the group’s powerful place within London’s scene. As with Sunfall festival, their clubs’ booking policy is second to none, and many of their venues are well thought-through with the experience of clubbing in mind. “If there’s a complaint, if you had a bad night, that’s really, really important...and if anybody [attending one of our venues] had a problem, we really try and fix it,” said Columbo Group chief Andy Peyton in an interview with Resident Advisor last year.

However, given the unchangeable noise restrictions, there is a strong argument to move Sunfall away from the centre of London to where a proper sound product can be experienced, akin to Junction 2 festival in Boston Manor Park. A cynic might suggest that such a festival would not be primed to make as much money as Sunfall does, which is fifteen minutes’ walk from Brixton High Street and the residential network of gentrifiers that have made that part of South London their home in recent years.

Predictably, the majority of Sunfall attendees seemed primarily there to be present at a significant event in their particular social scene, with the music at best a welcome by-product, if not simply background entertainment. It seemed that whether this year's performers Helena Hauff and Shanti Celeste were on stage, or say, Dusky and Eats Everything, it would not have made a big difference to most. A big festival-type congregation for London post-graduates to take pills, create an instagram story and be home in half an hour, featuring music above a certain floor of cultural capital, will always be popular. There’s nothing inherently wrong in this – perma-tanned investment managers have to hang out somewhere – but it undoubtedly means that there’s little chance of Sunfall’s consumer base deserting the festival en masse because of underwhelming sound.

The festival site is small – understandable to limit noise leakage - and therefore easy to get around quickly, but also at a critical mass for its infrastructure. Last year’s debut festival saw queues at toilets and bars of up to an hour – more facilities more or less alleviated such a problem this year, although the queues to enter the festival from mid-afternoon onwards saw people with between two to four hours of waiting (for an event that ended at 11pm) if holding the most common type of day-only ticket, with tributary queues cutting in and barrier-jumping commonplace.

Most of the four tents were jam-packed by the evening, as were queues for the bars and toilets, with rumours that the capacity had in fact doubled from the 10,000 attendees last year. You had to be on the front row to experience anything resembling immersion in the artist’s sound, which was nigh-on impossible once the festival was full. The main stage’s sound was most fulsome, though it contained the most eclectic programming, from Moses Boyd: Solo X to Roy Ayers to Motor City Drum Ensemble, and so settling in there is less likely for those who do not want set breaks.

Sunfall did not answer a question about the new capacity in a pre-festival interview – it looked a lot more like 20,000 than 10,000 - all of which does not bode too favourably to questions of the prioritisation of fan experience versus maximising turnover. Any festival can probably survive as worthy of fans’ time if they have either mixed sound quality, or crowd with mixed interest in the music – but it is a steep ask to survive both simultaneously.

Sunfall tickets gave the option of an after-party at night once the day festival ends, to go to one of nine clubs, where the indifference of the crowd to the music was much harder to escape as a fan than at the festival. As is typical for many London clubs, a strange atmosphere pervaded the crowds at the Electric Brixton for Larry Heard and Palms Trax, as well as at Phonox for Move D; few people seemed to be dancing or having that much fun.

Of course, you’re not “obliged” to be any type of way or do any one activity in clubs – they are supposed to be spaces of liberation - but the performativity of people’s attendance, almost as if they had never gone to hear electronic music before, is nearly impossible to ignore. Few people were smiling, few people stayed in one place for any length of time listening, and few people were audibly or visibly reacting to the music.

It is hard to find fans of electronic music who describe favourite, momentous memories exclusively in terms of the artist’s performance with no relevance to how the atmosphere contributed to some kind of happy or joyous collective moment. You can fit the most spectacular lights in a club and book the best international talent all you like – if the crowd’s inner desire not to really be there listening to the music is palpable, neither losing yourself, nor finding yourself at such a performance is likely to be possible.