Noisily Festival

A clearing in the woods, a sound system taking low frequencies very seriously and several thousand people who had collectively decided that sleep could wait: for more than a decade, that combination described Noisily Festival remarkably well. Founded in Leicestershire in 2012, the gathering developed into one of Britain's most distinctive underground electronic festivals by combining techno, psytrance and bass music with visual art, performance, wellbeing and an unusually close relationship with its natural surroundings. Its most recent completed edition took place in July 2024 at Barkestone Wood, where four days of music and camping created a temporary 18+ community spread between open farmland and a forest containing its principal stages.

The first Noisily was considerably smaller. In May 2012, a secret Leicestershire location welcomed only a few hundred people, two main stages and a collection of miniature venues hidden among the trees. Spektre, Mark Broom, Matador, SpectraSoul, Audio Bullys, Ed Solo and Far Too Loud were among the performers. Co-founders Robbie Parry, Will Hazlerigg, Charles Audley and Lachie Gordon were not attempting to reproduce a giant commercial dance event. The founding idea was closer to building the party they themselves wanted to attend. That small beginning allowed music, landscape and community to become intertwined before the festival had accumulated the infrastructure and expectations that came with growth.

Coney Woods on the Noseley Hall estate became Noisily's long-term home. There, the event expanded from hundreds to several thousand visitors while preserving the ritual of walking into the forest to find the dancefloors. The Noisily Stage developed as the principal techno environment, Liquid became the psychedelic heart of the festival through psytrance, and Treehouse explored bass music in its different forms, from glitch hop and breaks to drum & bass. Production was designed around woodland clearings, paths and trees rather than treating the landscape as anonymous ground. The forest influenced how audiences moved and how individual stages felt, helping each area develop its own enclosed atmosphere.

Music remained the centre, but the festival progressively widened its definition of what an electronic weekend could contain. Mind Body Soul became a substantial programme of yoga, meditation, breathwork, holistic therapies, talks and workshops addressing creativity, wellbeing and personal reflection. Visual art, installations and performance occupied other areas. The organisers repeatedly used four verbs — Dance, Create, Learn, Connect — to describe an approach that balanced full-power dancefloors with quieter experiences. A visitor could spend part of the afternoon at a workshop or meditation session before disappearing into techno or psytrance late into the night. Noisily's version of personal balance simply happened to include very large sound systems.

Growth also made the relationship with the woodland a practical responsibility. Sustainability initiatives addressed single-use plastics, waste, transport, power consumption and care for the site. That environmental connection became particularly important when ash dieback seriously affected trees at Coney Woods. Major areas needed to be felled to protect the woodland, forcing the festival to leave the place that had defined it for roughly a decade. In 2023 Noisily relocated within Leicestershire to Barkestone Wood near the Vale of Belvoir. The move was treated not as a new festival but as an opportunity to design another natural site from the ground up while carrying the existing culture with it.

The 2023 event marked the tenth completed edition and introduced the Barkestone setting on a larger scale. The following year refined that new layout. In 2024, Noisily Stage featured Dubfire, Pan-Pot, Ida Engberg, Bart Skils, Township Rebellion, Dave Seaman and other artists working across techno and progressive territory. Liquid retained the psychedelic focus through Avalon, Tristan, Liquid Soul, Eat Static, Freedom Fighters, John 00 Fleming and Antix. Treehouse leaned heavily into drum & bass, with Camo & Krooked, Break, DJ Marky, Calyx, Flava D, Fred V and P Money x Whiney among the artists. Moving between the three areas meant changing speed, rhythm and subculture without leaving the wider electronic identity of Noisily.

Barkestone preserved the four-day camping structure as well. Attendees arrived on Thursday and remained on site until Monday, with Mind Body Soul and opening activities gradually giving way to the full music programme. The event was strictly for adults and was designed so that living on the site mattered almost as much as any individual DJ set. There was no urban centre integrated into the festival route. Once inside, the experience revolved around campsites, woodland paths, art, workshops and dancefloors. That continuity helped maintain the “family” language Noisily often used for its community, even after attendance had grown enormously from the few hundred people at its first edition.

The next chapter did not happen as planned. A twelfth edition was advertised for July 2025, artists were announced and tickets went on sale, but the event was ultimately cancelled. Major ticket agents removed it from sale and refunded customers, while much of the festival website remained frozen on the abandoned 2025 information. No verifiable Noisily edition followed in 2026. The operating company remains active and retains a premises licence for the Barkestone site, so there is not enough evidence to describe the festival as permanently finished, but its annual rhythm clearly stopped. The last completed picture of Noisily therefore remains 2024: techno in one forest clearing, psytrance deeper among the trees, drum & bass shaking Treehouse and a woodland temporarily transformed into something between nightclub, gallery, retreat and campsite.