Rally Festival 2025: Floating Points, Porridge Radio, Speaker’s Corner Quartet and more
Rally Festival’s third iteration continues its mission to showcase the UK’s grassroots sector. With each year featuring a specific theme, 2025’s is “a common purpose”. Now broadening their scope across multiple art forms, Rally sees collaboration between various independent promoters, arts organisations and a limited number of corporate partners.
In fact, there’s a visible effort to keep such sponsorship to a minimum. This comes at a fitting time, one where larger day festivals are experiencing boycotts protesting their corporate financiers. In this climate, Rally offers a more appealing vision, advocating not just for artistic discovery but also social responsibility.
Early on, Brighton rockers Porridge Radio deliver one of their final ever sets on the Channel stage. As such, the performance is tinged with melancholy, adding extra gravity to their already poignant songwriting. Meanwhile, spilling out of the Mill House tent are fans of Japanese producer Takuya Nakamura. His blend of jungle with live trumpet proves a crowd favourite – every blast of the instrument electrifies the space. Behind him lies a simple layout mimicking a relaxed vinyl listening cafe, a theme that matches Mill House’s adventurous programming.
More broadly, Rally’s stagecraft trades visual glamour for a minimalist approach. The Channel and Agnes stages both feature exposed scaffolding and corrugated plastic, the latter offering tiered platforms for the audience to better view the performers. This open design admittedly detracts from Poison Girl Friend’s set, when noise from other stages muddles their intricate sound design.
The issue doesn’t persist, however. For fans of heavier techno, the Visionaire stage sits in the corner of the site, supplying constant intensity while keeping the peace elsewhere. Courtesy’s bass-heavy performance never troubles the delicate dynamics presented at Channel. Here, London-based jazz collective Speaker’s Corner Quartet reimagines Arthur Russel’s avant-garde discography against the backdrop of a bleeding sunset. True to the festival’s overall style, the late US-based composer is acclaimed for his boundary-pushing style that challenged genre classifications.
Rally carries Russel’s ethos across disciplines. An afternoon spoken-word programme on the Skehans stage gives a platform to upcoming local artists. Visual pieces crop up across the site, from miniature worlds encased in glass houses, to a vague human-like figure sculpted in epoxy clay. Through bringing various artistic media together, the value of “common purpose” starts to become apparent. Community organisations hosted by Rally range from fighting local gentrification on Old Kent Road to directly supporting Palestinian families in Gaza. Ground-up local action is given a platform here, a refreshing alternative to Rally’s questionably funded counterparts.
Floating Points closes the night with a collaboration between two mediums, both an aural and visual spectacle. Akiko Nakayama contributes her “alive paintings” to the performance, using coloured liquids that swirl in response to the music’s pulsing rhythms. The set typifies the value of connecting different styles in order to build a more complete artistic vision. Both throughout the day and into its final moments, Rally acts as a meeting ground between grassroots communities, a role that remains vital.
Ben Browning
Photos: Courtesy of Rally Festival
For further information and future events, visit Floating Points’s website here.
Watch the video for Afflecks Palace here:
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