FORM Arcosanti is a music heaven in the desert

I awoke in my RV in the Sonoran desert to the thrum of calls and messages. It was Sunday and I was at FORM Arcosanti — a quasi-utopian, 2,000-person music festival that featured an absurdly elite lineup of artists like Lorde, Geese, Blood Orange, Adrianne Lenker, and ear.

For two days, I'd sat stageside for intimate performances from my favorite artists among a small community of music lovers and creatives. Under the harsh desert sun and into the temperate night, we saw musicians who are used to playing for massive audiences translate their artistry in a quaint, spiritually attuned environment. On Sunday, Turnstile, Quiet Light, After, Tinashe, and more were set to perform but the fun was over. Overnight, a tropical storm wrecked the camp site where the majority of festivalgoers were staying. While I was sound asleep in my provided abode, attendees were battling the wind and trudging out of the basaltic mesa mud. After waking up and getting my bearings, I was shuttled into a car by festival representatives just as a rainbow jutted out from the stark horizon. Paradise, it turns out, is fickle and muddy as hell.

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FORM Arcosanti is Zach Tetreault’s passion project. He created it in 2014 to combine a musical festival experience with themes of mindfulness, architecture, and sustainability. This year, there were sound baths and yoga in addition to the musical performances, and past years included panels from Planned Parenthood and Solange’s Saint Heron.

Tetreault has no outside investors and plans the festival’s finances to break even every year. “I've yet to be successful,” Tetreault says on the festival’s second day while sitting at a small table. This year's festival was made possible by a partnership with Spotify, who ran the Fresh Finds Stage, which featured artists who have graced the platform’s eponymous playlist: MGNA Crrrta, Sophia Stel, Gena, Searows, Mack Keane, and Dominic Fike, whose set took place in a canyon a short walk away from the festival site.

Tetreault first came upon Arcosanti, an experimental town in the Arizona desert that was built to be a utopian “urban laboratory” in 1970 by the Italian-American architect Paolo Soleri, in 2014. He was on a cross-country road trip with his bandmate, Paul Giese, who knew about the town from architecture school. The sprawling complex, which houses residences, an amphitheater, studios, and a cafe, was built to live harmoniously and sustainably within its high-desert environment. It has since become a destination for artisans, architects, and the sustainably minded.

FORM Arcosanti’s inaugural year in 2014 was essentially an album release event for Tetreault’s band Hundred Waters. Three hundred people came for free and saw the band perform their album, The Moon Rang Like a Bell, alongside sets from recognizable names of the 2014 indie era. Over the years it accrued buzz for its increasingly how did they book that? roster of artists. Charli xcx, Mitski, Florence + The Machine, Beck, and Solange have all played.

Artists play for significantly reduced fees, and their agents and managers, who can be notoriously demanding, seem to soften when confronted with FORM Arcosanti, Tetreault has noticed. “When the top agents and managers see this thing, maybe it reminds them of something from when they were kids,” he adds. The site had taken on an even more profound significance for Tetreault and his collaborators; Giese passed away two years ago and they spread his ashes during the festival’s 2024 iteration.

Lorde’s headlining set this year was particularly striking to witness. In a crowd of 2,000 people, Lorde came on stage alongside just two musicians (one of whom was Virgin’s primary producer Jim E. Stack) and the famous Cosanti bronze bells, which are made on the site. She had rehearsed a stripped back performance specifically for FORM Arcosanti.

After a year of touring with the Ultrasound World Tour, she called this penultimate performance a “ceremony” to close this massive era. Her vocals were loud in the mix and she sounded raw and real. Lorde’s sincerity and intensity has always been a hallmark of her artistry, but still, seeing an artist you’re used to witnessing on multistory IMAX screens in an intimate amphitheater was chilling — especially when she played songs that soundtracked my youth. Her bare-bones techno version of “Green Light” stopped me in my tracks.

Such spine-tingling moments were ubiquitous across the festival. New York City artists I had seen a handful of times — like Blood Orange and Geese — sounded brand new at the small-capacity event. I had never heard, for example, ear’s production sound as bass-heavy and propulsive as during their shortened Saturday afternoon set. Geese felt as if they were taken over by a wild, desert energy; they thrummed their timeless rock as throngs of men in their 30s thrashed about like harried hyenas. Annahstasia cooed her deep-toned ballads as rain snuck through the amphitheatre's imperfect tarp. On Spotify’s Fresh Find stage, Sophia Stel’s cinematic electronic pop was intense as a thunderstorm and MGNA Crrrta served full popstar personality as member Farheen Khan wielded a bubble gun like a magic wand. On Saturday night before the rain, The FADER’s July cover star underscores performed a riotous DJ set that evoked the eclecticism and chaos of her own FADER Mix.

Tetreault describes the festival as “cathartic” for himself and the many industry pros who are there — many of whom are used to attending the hyper-sponsored and gargantuanly scaled likes of Coachella or Lollapalooza. That said, it's costly to do things like this, for organizers and ticket buyers alike: 3-day passes were nearly $1,000.

But beyond economics, there’s the sheer reality of organizing a small festival on an increasingly volatile planet. Tropical storms, like the one that shuttered the festival on Sunday, have become an increasing concern. In just the past month, extreme and unpredictable weather has shut down festivals in New York City (All Things Go NYC and Global Citizen Festival), Indio, California (HeadTrip), and Ocean City, Maryland (Oceans Calling).

“[Weather is] becoming a variable that we have less and less control over and it’s honestly really scary on many levels,” Tetreault wrote me via text two days after the festival. Although they never planned to cancel the festival entirely, Tetreault added that they were forced to after weather conditions didn’t approve.

The festival ultimately had to bring multiple tow trucks to rescue cars stuck in the mud. Tetreault personally shepherded attendees who were stranded in the glamping camps. In the comment section of one viral Reel about the event, however, the vast majority of people still expressed that the whole ordeal was “worth it.”

Perhaps they, like me, were so struck by the intimacy and intensity of the live music that the mud was a bearable price. I was lucky for many reasons: being protected from the elements in an RV; attending the festival for work so the cost of escape was not off my own personal dime. But the deeper feeling I was left with was gratitude for getting to see that music. Mud wipes away, but memory lingers.