A festival
is a promise you keep.Four editions. Three venues. One rule: book for the room that’s in the room, not the one you wish was.
Started by accident, in a warehouse, in the rain.
In October 2022, four people rented a disused print factory for one weekend. The plan was to put on eight artists over two nights. The plan did not survive contact with the weather.
By the end of that weekend there were fourteen artists, about four hundred people, and a mailing list of strangers who wrote in asking when the next one was. Edition 01 of New Festival happened six months later, in the same building, with the same rain.
We’ve since moved venues three times, survived two grant cycles, and stopped pretending we know what we’re doing. Edition 04 — the one we’re building towards now — is the biggest yet, and we’re still astonished that anyone comes.
Five principles. Negotiable.
We revise these every year. So far, none have changed.
No headliners.
Every set matters. The Sunday sunrise drone closer is not a warmup for anything. If it helps: we’ve had the best weekends of our lives in the smallest rooms.
Boring is fine. Safe is not.
We book artists who might fail. Some sets will be confusing. Some will be wrong for the room. None of them will be boring, but some will be uncomfortable — that is, often, the point.
The crowd is the instrument.
Lights out. No phones at the front. No talking through the set. We do not police this — we just ask. If you want a festival where you can film everything, we love you, please go to a different one.
Money is a tool, not a goal.
We pay every artist. We pay every volunteer. We subsidise tickets when we can. The festival does not need to grow and we will not sell it. If we ever break this principle, we’ll tell you why, in writing.
Everything ends.
There will be a last New Festival. When it happens, we’ll say so. No comeback tours, no reboots. This is our promise back to you: we’ll stop before it gets worse.
Twelve people, two cats, one shared spreadsheet.
A small team of programmers, producers, editors and volunteers. We rotate roles between editions.
“Not a festival. A school for listening.”
“Programming as editorial decision — most festivals wouldn’t dare.”
“The only festival I’ve left with a reading list.”
Volunteer. Write.
Bring food.We open the volunteer list in March. Editorial submissions year-round. Solidarity kitchen every edition.