ARCTANGENT

Venue FERNHILL FARM, SOMERSET

Date 15-17/08/2019

This year’s ArcTanGent Festival is bigger and better, both in terms of attendance and the size of the bands booked. It’s the seventh year of the festival, which has grown from a bunch of math rock bands in a field to the most important math rock, post-rock and experimental metal festival in the world.

THURSDAY

First up on the Arc stage is a bittersweet act – a tribute, and following with a super-cut medley of bombastic ‘turbo-prog’ Cleft riffs, the supergroup formed for the tribute are on fire. That shouldn’t be a surprise, as the band is comprised of math prog heroes Alpha Male Tea Party, Cleft’s former drummer John Simm, and Mike Vennart of Oceansize. After the medley, they play a 10-minute piece written by Mike and Alpha Male Tea Party’s Tom Peters, which culminates in more than 15 other guitarists taking the stage. Members of bands that toured with Cleft, friends, and Dan’s widow join to play the climax of the song, after which there’s not a dry eye in the house.