This Spring Bank Holiday weekend – 22 to 24 May – will be lit up by the fourth consecutive edition of Acid Horse, which for a music festival – certainly a small DIY affair for discerning trippers, like this one – is the point where you know you’ve made your mark, dug in your hooves and so forth. It can be said with confidence that a big wedge of the people who attended in 2025 will be back this May to make merry in and around The Barge Inn, a pub with campsite in Pewsey, Wiltshire. It’s right beside a canal and has lots of crop circle-related paraphernalia on its walls.
Acid Horse’s setting is idyllic and you can take it from me that the programme was on the money last year too, with Matmos, Dawn Terry, Regis and Grrzzz four highlights of many more. For 2026, the organisers (the Quietus’ own John Doran and Mark Pilkington of Strange Attractor Press and multiple musical projects) have upped the ante with three days of weird, resonant music that will connect you to the ancient history that surrounds you here and point towards a brighter future, maybe at the same time. Here are ten highlights from the lineup.
Arianne Churchman & Benedict Drew
Based, in a scattered way, across London, Suffolk and Kent (the latter referenced in the name of Benedict Drew’s label, Thanet Tape Centre), come track this duo’s southwesterly movements as they craft spectral folksong to boost Wiltshire’s crop yield. Their ongoing series of releases themed around the month of May were compiled into a double LP in 2024, and are as good a place to start with their oeuvre whatever the month: seasonal songs from the English trad canon, faithfully interpreted at their core but abetted by plumes of harmonium and analogue electronics which, in this context, feel as bucolic as a lunchtime nap in a cornfield. Arianne Churchman’s vocals, with their scratched-crystal quality, verbalise this whole sense of a lost, psychedelic, possibly imaginary England. Both she and Drew also have their own visual art practises, which intersect with their music (last year’s excellent LP The Tree Of The Left Hand was recorded on a retreat in the late painter Mary Potter’s old house; In The Ghost Of The Forest We Hear Them Sing, a Churchman solo piece, was made to accompany a video installation) but in no way blemishes its organic qualities.
Bégayer
There have always been groups like Bégayer; you’ve never heard a group like Bégayer. Two true and non-contradictory statements! Once we establish the parameters of meaning. Bégayer came together in the French Alps, not too far south of Geneva, and have been releasing music – improvised, collagist, ever-moving diasporan folk – for a decade. It has mutated and developed over this period for sure, but never in the sense of finesse or aiming for a tangible end goal. Their most recent release, late-2025 cassette EP La Munglesa, is anarchic and fried, with the guest vocals of Maria Rita Piga offering Italian oaths as the four core Bégayer fellows make hairy invocations with violin, flute, begena (a sort of Ethiopian lyre) and nonspecific percussion. For guidance purposes, I’d say we could invoke Faust, Sun City Girls, Staff Benda Bilili and Kemialliset Ystävät as somewhat like minds, but there’s something ancient, or certainly predating recorded music, in Bégayer’s DNA: I really think they may be channelling sessions that took place hundreds of years ago and were never recorded in writing or spoken of again. When they perform live, they become one with the audience and have visuals on two 16mm projectors.
Dan Johnson performs The Bellflower
Dan Johnson is a drummer and also has about ten years of recorded music to his name, beginning as one half of Run Logan Run, a punky jazz duo from Bristol. His creative horizons exploded when he started working as a solo artist, though. Which is not to say that all his most interesting music is made in that mode (to wit: a long list of performances as part of EP/64, some of which have been released, plus documents of collabs with Maggie Nicols and Noah Radley), rather that it’s the truest mirror of his exceptional dedication to attaining ecstasy through percussion. The Bellflower is, to date, where all the strands of Johnson’s practise – durational events, repetition, trance, deep listening, the notion of freeness and inflexibility being two sides of the same coin – coalesce most audibly. He started performing it live in 2021 and a set at the 2022 edition of the Supernormal festival was later released as a cassette on the Panurus label. A Zen state can be achieved through exposure to its unrelenting kickdrum and roiling washes of cymbals – but be aware that no two performances of this piece are the same.
Duvel Mortgage
This project debuted in autumn 2025 and at the time of writing there is no available audio or video evidence of it. Knowledge of the people involved in Duvel Mortgage will tell you that treating a past recording as a preview of a future one is likely a fool’s errand, though. Adam and Jonathan Bohman have made music, anti-music, sound art and aktions since the 1970s (in their childhood home), the 1980s (as part of various London improv collectives) and the 2000s (as The Bohman Brothers). Sophie Sleigh-Johnson has an art rock past – she was in an early line-up of These New Puritans – but jettisoned the rock to pursue the art and in recent years has reemerged, after a fashion, in the ‘no-audience underground’ nook of weird British music. Her 2022 tape Nuncio Ref! is an addictive patchwork baffler/babbler whose fixations – Rising Damp, rising damp, Holsten Pils – have since been furthered in her debut book, ostensibly “an esoteric guide to British sitcoms”. Sophie and the Bohmans share some spirit, then, but not so much that you or I can predict what’ll happen here. Maybe worth noting that those autumn gigs took the form of an “East Anglian tour” whose geographical and conceptual epicentre was Brome, a village in Suffolk.
E The Artist
Daranijoh Sanni has been going about his business as E The Artist since 2022 and has developed into a pretty singular voice amidst an Irish experimental music scene which, at the same time, offers a useful outlet for this singularity. We can point to his membership of the Bitten Twice Collective, through which his debut EP EeE emerged just over two years ago, or last year’s Fáschoill compilation LP, released by the Faoi Thalamh label and which opens with his ‘Lint’: 71 seconds of hideously low-end bass drops and evil doomy voices. Supported by an amusing video in which people dressed as knights cut about suburbia on pushbikes, the track now forms part of E’s debut album Six, to be released in March by County Leitrim’s splendid Nyahh Records. It’s a surreal, genre-eclipsing heavy hitter that has parallels with noise, techno and cloud rap but doesn’t really sound like anything but itself, and finishes with the intense, 20 minute-long ‘Drogo’. Sanni has said, “My dad is Nigerian, my mum is English and French; I’ve pretty much spent all of my life between Coolock and Lagos,” and Six is the sound of someone ensuring they’re irreducible to any one place, nation or identity.
The Ex
Of all the individual bios attached to the Acid Horse lineup this year – and there are plenty which make for a thumping good read – The Ex’s is perhaps the one it feels the most insulting to try and boil down to 200 words. It would though be equally disrespectful to pass over their brilliant, inexhaustive prowess as a live unit, honed over more than 45 years since their beginnings in the embryonic Dutch anarcho punk scene but blessed with the gift of infinite rebirth so you can be seeing them for the tenth time and it feels like the first time. Terrie Hessels, the band’s guitarist and founder member, is 72 this year and continues to demonstrate, as profoundly as just about any currently living human, that you can get up every day, be unbridled in your creativity, do right to others and not compromise your principles in any way. He also makes incredible sounds with his instrument, equally evocative of an Ethiopian jazz joint and a busy shipyard: Hessels, along with Arnold de Boer and Andy Moor, is one of three guitarists in The Ex, with Katherina Bornefeld the quartet’s tactile drumming powerhouse. Latest album If Your Mirror Breaks (2025) is typically inspirational rock-rooted rhythm-forward noise, chants and poetry.
Lord Spikeheart
Martin Kanja, the Kenyan producer and vocalist who is Lord Spikeheart, gives the impression of being a serious music sponge – just constantly listening to stuff from everywhere and everyone, internalising it and eventually spitting it back out as one micro-component of a million in his productions. It’s your classic case of having so many influences that the listener can’t pin any one of them down, and hears something deeply original and distinctive – which can absolutely be said of The Adept, Lord Spikeheart’s debut solo album following a 2023 LP with Elvin Brandhi. (A three-song followup EP, Reign, came out late last year.) Lurking in the approximate regions of industrial metal, maximalist club music and noise rap, it’s equally a logical progression from, and break with, Duma – a Nairobi duo who included Kanja and burned brightly for just a couple of years. The Adept is also feature-heavy on both the production and vocal side of things (Backxwash, DJ Scotch Rolex and Rully Shabara of Senyawa to name only three) – in contrast to the Spikeheart live show, where it’s just him on an otherwise empty stage, growling along to backing tracks. If that doesn’t sound that exciting to you, rest assured Kanja has a magnetic stage presence, and really gets the room involved.
Mohammad Syfkhan
Another artist from the Nyahh Records roster popping over from Ireland (as well as E The Artist, don’t miss County Clare fiddle player Ultan O’Brien’s set), Syrian techno-folk titan Mohammad Syfkhan is making his second Acid Horse appearance after bringing the house down in 2024. Audio evidence of that very demolition can be found on a live album released as part of the Quietus’ monthly subscriber series. It’s not part of my remit to tell you to sign up to it, but apart from anything else it was the perfect way to hear Syfkhan in his element, in front of a rapt, rug-cutting audience. It’s also mostly a different set of material than his debut studio album I Am Kurdish, which was a few months old at the time of that 2024 performance and garnered mainstream media attention. (There is something uncomfortable about the way Syfkhan’s life story, which involved him settling in Ireland as a refugee after Isis killed one of his children, attracted some press attention but at the same time it’s a story which deserves to be told and he makes music which deserves to be listened to.) His live sets are just him in his avuncular suit-and-tie garb, playing the bouzouki to a brisk drum machine backing and singing in his beautiful voice; I really can’t recommend it enough.
Rian Treanor & Mun Sing
Bristol’s Harry Wright, aka Mun Sing, and Sheffield’s Rian Treanor are producers of electronic music who have played a significant role in the proliferation of electronic music which doesn’t sound like the electronic music of ten years ago (or more). They’ve both released albums on the always-crucial Planet Mu label and most often play live sets, but on this occasion will be DJing together. I believe this will be their second such time doing so and the reason I’ve selected it for attention is because I saw the previous one, at the Supernormal festival in August of last year. In fact, I can add a bit of backstory, which is that someone on the bill cancelled at short notice and in the process of brainstorming a replacement it was realised that Harry and Rian were both on site, albeit as punters. They had however brought USB sticks with them, and a couple of quick chats later were good to take the plunge. The result was 90 minutes of astonishing futurist mutant rave music which made hundreds of people go fucking mental in mid-afternoon. Acid Horse have scheduled them for after midnight but I expect the response to be similar.
Sarah Angliss
London-based Angliss is on chatty terms with musical high culture, decorated by the establishment no less (in the form of an Ivor Novello award), but remains stoutly embedded in our beloved underground, and so it is that she is here. She styles herself as “composer / performer / sound designer”, and also sometimes “automatist”, in which all three of those aforementioned titles are incorporated. Some standout examples of Angliss’ self-built automatist works include the Ealing Feeder, a “28-note robotic, polyphonic carillon” whose name is also the title of her debut solo album; and a portable pipe organ that played disco favourites through old Welsh chapel organ pipes. Her live sets have been fairly sporadic in the last few years, and her last artist album, Air Loom – built around the sounds of the Ealing Feeder, a medieval harpsichord and the snow-pure vocals of Sarah Gabriel – came out in 2019. So I am limited in my ability to let you know what to expect from Angliss at Acid Horse, or how predetermined or thematic it will be, but I will be there no matter what.
