Stuart WoodThe launch of Medicine Festival, a music and arts festival for ‘people & planet’, was able to go ahead in a reduced capacity from 27-31 August.
The five-day festival contains a mixture of music, ancestral wisdom, art, wellbeing, future thinking, food, environmentalism, spirituality, dance and performance.
Medicine Festival welcomed 600 attendees instead of its original 5,000 capacity to the Berkshire country estate of Wasing. Organisers say it featured Covid-compliant risk assessments, social distancing, screening at the gate and a track and trace system in place. They worked closely with West Berkshire Council to enable the event to go ahead.
Audio was supplied by Audio Feed, with the festival being the company’s first work in six months following the Covid-19 pandemic.
Audio Feed’s Oz Jefferies commented: “It was great to get the crew and the equipment out working on a project again, and to work closely with our favourite contractors. It wasn’t always clear whether it would go ahead or not, but we were happy to support it when it did. We had to change the sound designs many times, but there was still a requirement for some good sized Funktion-One systems.
“We certainly had a few challenges. The downpour on build day reminded us what it’s like to work in the British countryside. Meeting with event organisers, music curators and musicians and always remembering to keep two metres apart was out of the ordinary, as was building speaker stacks using facemasks. However, the exhilarating feeling of building speaker stacks again was great.
“The energy of the musicians was incredible, and their reaction to the Funktion-One sound and XTA amplifiers was even more intense than normal.”
Photo credit: Jeremy Whelehan