London’s Crystal Palace Park is set to host the “largest outdoor spatial audio festival” the UK has ever seen next summer.

Presented by Polygon Live, in partnership with Full Fat 360 and OpenLab, Polygon Live LDN will take place from 2-4 May 2025. The event will also be the first to use Polygon Productions’ dual-dome design.

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Every dome boasts a 12.1.4 immersive system, with 12 L-Acoustics speaker arrays surrounding the audience, one giant festival-grade sub-wall for “earth-shaking bass”, and four overhead line arrays “raining crystal-clear sound” from above.

The total count amounts to a little less than 100 speakers in over 25 unique positions – or “five times the speakers a stage of similar size would use” according to Polygon.

Among the acts confirmed to appear are Jon Hopkins, Photay, Gold Panda, Arooj Aftab, Nitin Sawhney, Tinariwen and electronic musician slash AV producer Halina Rice, who released her third album in October. Polygon is also working with a team of specialist lighting engineers to create a custom-designed lattice of lights that will move in sync with the artists’ music.

“We’re doubling up on everything so that we can offer outdoor spatial audio to a larger audience,” says David Lopez de Arenosa, Polygon’s technical director. “The process has been a physics-bending exercise, but we have created a solution that neither compromises the quality of the sound, nor the intimate spaces that Polygon is known for.”

Last month, the Association of Independent Festivals (AIF) revealed a troubling trend in the UK festival scene: 72 festivals have been cancelled or postponed in 2024 – twice the amount compared to the previous year.

This alarming statistic is part of a broader decline, with a total of 204 events disappearing from the British festival calendar since 2019, exacerbated by challenges such as rising costs and logistical hurdles faced by independent organisers.

Tickets to Polygon Live LDN are available at Polygon Productions.

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