When I attended in its first year, Anthropos Festival showed enormous promise, despite mud and rain. In 2022, it has lived up to those high expectations and more.
Understand, Anthropos is something of a hippie heaven. It features psychedelic music split across three stages, as well as a wide variety of art, therapies, lectures, and performances. It also has one of the sweetest, most welcoming crowds of any UK festival, with people across the site feeling like they’re friends already by Friday.
The first thing you notice is the festival’s sheer beauty. The amount of effort the team put into decorating the new woodland site was outstanding, and the end result worked wonderfully to enhance the incredible natural beauty of the woodland. While art is less concentrated than at the first Anthropos, the entire site featured something beautiful hiding just behind the next corner.
Stage design more than kept up with the rest of the festivals incredible aesthetic, with each of the three stages having a very different feel. The large open-air Oak Stage was set in between two large walls of trees, giving it a sheltered, hidden feel. Fantastically lit, the stage offered artistic timber constructions that work well as seats, as well as featuring a frame for aerial acrobatics and hanging art.
The other two stages, Yew and Ash were smaller but no less beautiful. Both set up in large tents, Yew featured a fascinating variety of bands and solo artists while Ash focused on being a perfect environment for a boogie. Beyond the stages, the festival’s devoted team set to work creating the Metaforest: a wonderful exhibition where the festival’s fantastic land art was concentrated.
Speaking of art, the Anthropos gallery, set in a geodesic dome, made a return featuring dozens of amazing psychedelic paintings. These ranged from more traditional psychedelia to the sexy and dark, with a detailed isometric painting of a ship that was also a bathhouse catching my eye in particular. Many of the exhibitors spent substantial amounts of time in the dome giving guests a chance to meet the artists behind the pictures and buy any prints or original works that took their fancy.
Almost all the music at Anthropos can be categorized as some type of psychedelia, although the focus on psy-dub seems reduced relative to the 2019 edition. While it is still the most prominent genre at the festival, it has been joined by a substantial amount of Psy-Trance, a healthy serving of psychedelic rock, and even a little alternative hip hop.
The Oak Stage in particular offered an amazing selection of some of the best psychedelic music in the UK with the legendary space rockers Ozric Tentacles tearing it up on the synths and guitar on Saturday afternoon. Featuring the widely underrated guitar and DJ combination, their soaring desert rock riffs fused fantastically with their booming psy synth, providing a fantastic soundtrack to dance, spin or lie back and trip out to.
They were followed by the producer extraordinaire and dub titan, Gaudi. Relaxed and clearly in his element, he wrapped the Anthropos crowd around his finger, getting up to his usual on-stage mucking about much to the delight of everyone watching. Gaudi offers a slightly different, more urban, reggae-inspired sound to the majority of the music at Anthropos, but went down fantastically regardless.
Image credit: Amir Weiss, Transformational Eye
On Sunday, Kaya Project took to the Oak Stage and delivered one of the best psy-dub sets I’ve ever seen, bringing members of the audience to tears with their intense and powerful sound. Combining elements of modern psy and ambient music with traditional elements from all over the world, the soundscape put forth by Kaya Project can be an almost overwhelming experience, and is absolutely not one to miss.
Highlights from the Yew Stage include both the Saturday and Sunday headliners, HENGE and Mobius Loop respectively. Stars of the UK alternative festival scene, HENGE delivered an intense, heavy set of the gloriously theatric space rock fusion they call cosmic dross, bringing the crowd into the only mosh pit I saw at the festival.
Mobius Loop did not disappoint either, with their combination of haunting, ethereal vocals, violin harmonies, socially conscious lyrics, and a sense of fun leading to an experience that is very heterogeneous throughout and unlike any other band I know. One song differs greatly from the next, with some taking more of an influence from European folk, some sounding like traditional Gypsy and Balkan music, while yet others have more of a cabaret, or even hip hop feel.
Also fantastic were the face-melting guitar licks of postpunk act The Age of Strange, the mellow, funky psychedelia of The Good Beast, the funny and touching folk set of Kitty Stewart, the singalong mayhem of the Counterfiet Celts, and the impressive stoner rock band that is Big Byrd. Beyond these “more traditional” psychedelic acts, the Yew stage also featured the powerful English Spanish fusion rap duo Sombras, whose performance had a real sense of honesty to it, and included some amazing Freestyle improvisation.
A final highlight from yew were the bizarre yet engrossing hyperpop antics of Try Me, who seem to have their finger perfectly on the zeitgeist. They put on a hilarious, strange show which involved having the audience lie on their back like a baby and roll around. I expect they will be going far, fast.
On top of the fantastic music, Anthropos is also a centre for flow arts, with multiple troupes of fire performers bringing some of the best shows in the country to the event. A particular highlight I caught were the performers from Pantheatrix, whose individual technical skill was absolutely jaw-dropping.
Image credit: Amir Weiss, Transformational Eye
Despite my love for it, I can’t say Anthropos was flawless. The festival suffers from a long walk from the carpark to the campsite, very limited food options, and few water points. However, by the time you are actually partying, these seem like incredibly minor niggles. Also, while Anthropos clearly had an issue with the toilets, with half of them being locked throughout the festival, this didn’t actually have a negative impact at all, as the half that was open turned out to be more than plentiful for the event.
In addition, one should also note that Anthropos is set up with the German 24-hour approach to partying in mind, so some artists’ set times were slightly strange. The constant availability of something interesting to see or do is a big advantage to this, but seeing that a performer you are interested in is on at 8am is certainly a buzzkill for the traditional UK festival goer.
An event on the up, Anthropos has more than bounced back from the pandemic and the cancellation of its planned 2020 and 2021 events. The 2022 edition was a substantial improvement over the already fantastic 2019 event, and they have no intention to stop at this, with plans and space in place to expand over the next few years. If you like small festivals, this is one to catch before it grows.
Truly a hippie paradise, Anthropos has some of the best psy, flow arts, vibes, bands and people in the country. If you have even the slightest bit of flower child in your soul, please attend next year, either with a ticket or as a volunteer. It will likely change your life dramatically for the better.
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