FORM Arcosanti 2026 was a wild, chaotic, beautiful ride

The production team of FORM 2026 planned one of the most ambitious and — at $1,000 a ticket — expensive music festivals in the country from Oct. 9 to 11.

It was a massive lift, even for a 2,500-person festival. There was an open bar all weekend (though my bartender friends complained that no one was tipping them), a stage was built down the valley and far away from everything else just for Dominic Fike to perform on (he seemed totally uncomfortable about this and cut his set short), a number of drink brands and Spotify sponsored the event (and their logos and products were placed near stages for commercial visibility) and an entirely new camping area was created for attendees to be closer to the stages (which by Sunday morning became a muddy lake). 

It probably wasn’t all that hubris that brought the wrath of the festival gods upon the experimental, futuristic complex of Arcosanti, but it sure did feel like it.

Attendees got to enjoy two days of performances by stellar musical artists and DJs like Lorde, Tycho, Disclosure, Zach Fox, Kamasi Washington and Fcukers. 

But none had as powerful a performance as Tropical Storm Rachel, the remnants of which tore through the festival after midnight on Saturday, soaking the experimental urban laboratory and devastating the campsite in a wicked maelstrom. 

The atmosphere was apocalyptic. 

With the excess of the festival mirroring that of our own civilization and unsustainable way of life as a species, the storm was a perfect analogy for the end times. 

Tents were destroyed en masse and high winds strewed camping equipment across the muddy fields that had been newly leveled and created by the FORM crew for a better experience for guests. Folks struggled through ankle-deep mud to make their way out of the festival. Vehicles were stuck for hours in the slushy mire. Some of the glamping tents — which cost attendees $2,000 to rent — were obliterated after staff evacuated the guests inside them.

And keep in mind that this was not a camper’s festival — this was an invasion of “sparkle ponies” from Los Angeles and New York who barely knew how to pitch a tent and were ill-prepared for things to go sideways. 

By morning light, news was spreading that the third day of the festival was canceled. 

“After assessing conditions with our production, safety, and emergency partners, we’ve made the difficult decision to close FORM 2026,” the FORM team said in a written statement. “This isn’t how any of us wanted the weekend to end. Right now, our only focus is getting everyone home safely.”

It’s hard to imagine there will be another FORM — an assessment many people shared with me.

Founder Zach Tetreault said in an interview that the festival has been “hemorrhaging money year after year” and called the $1,000 ticket price a step toward making it sustainable. 

I heard from several people involved with production that the real costs of the event were already way over budget. At least, for the festival, there will probably be a decent insurance payout.

And while there were certainly plenty of phenomenal musical acts in the two short days, so many elements of the festival felt sickeningly surfeited and, in some ways, poorly run.

And I want to add: I went to FORM in 2024. It was one of my favorite music festivals I’ve ever been to — but I had much more complicated feelings about this one. 

My personal experience began with a bad taste in my mouth. 

At the security checkpoint at the festival’s gates, a large team of security guards had me exit my vehicle and step away while I searched it.

I was unaware that glass was not allowed in the festival, and understandably, security took a few glass bottles from a cooler. 

But when I arrived at the campsite, I looked in my personal bag and noticed that the security team had swiped a bottle of perfume that I made in a workshop on a trip to Istanbul. It was priceless to me and cannot be replaced.

Not only that, they also took a plastic container of cannabis I brought — though security guards later admitted to me that cannabis was allowed at the festival. 

The alarming part is that no security agents told me they were taking these things out of my bag. They just did it. I know that they did because after harassing the security folks long enough, one named Andrew was brought to me and said he remembered taking the bottle. He did not, however, remember taking the container of weed, which was placed directly next to the perfume.

I asked Andrew and another security agent what their protocol was for taking things out of people’s vehicles, and they said they had none. 

A festivalgoer told me it’s unlikely that they actually threw the perfume in the trash — they just wanted to steal my swag. And another told me there was a rumor that security was trying to shake down attendees at the gates because the impression was the pricey festival was for trust fund kids.

But enough about my grudge against the festival. There were some amazing musical performances, too.

Adrianne Lenker — the lead singer of Big Thief — played a beautifully moving acoustic set in the amphitheater. Fcukers and Geese both threw down under Arcosanti’s iconic vaults with their own separate brands of indie rock.

And the gem of Friday was Lorde, who delivered on her star power. I enjoyed the visual theater of her dark performance, with bright lights framing Arocsanti’s famous bells and the songwriter’s shadow. Whether or not attendees knew her music, the set left a powerful impression — which speaks to the endurance of her poetic lyricism, which was written by a younger woman and still rings mightily today.

The mood on Saturday afternoon was vibrant. Tycho played two great DJ sets. The first one was in the morning under the Arcosanti cafe, where everyone was sitting peacefully as he played unreleased music — though I remember some asshole was standing on a rock and dancing wildly, disrupting the tranquil energy. And later, Tycho played a fantastic set at the pool, where mostly everyone was also sitting peacefully with their feet in the water.

LA folk musician Annahstasia — with her soul-stirring, heavy voice and heavenly acoustic chords gracing the afternoon — was also a favorite among attendees. So was John Carroll Kirby, whose 45-minute jazz set was packed with fervor and lighthearted sophistication.

By the evening, a wave of darkness began settling over Arcosanti. Heavy clouds started to blot out the sky, and I ventured down the mountain to the “sunset stage,” which was built for only one performer: Dominic Fike.

After a 30-minute walk to the stage, I arrived just in time to hear Fike play a few songs, in between which he grumbled, “sounds like shit” and went on a rant about how he wrote one song in his younger days “before I was 30 years old, back before I had a son and a 401k, when I was doing anything to make a buck.”

I turned to my friend and said, “LA shit, man.”

I do remember feeling joy when he played “Misses,” which made for approximately a minute and 14 seconds of bliss. But he was obviously running out of material — and seemed to feel genuinely bad about the fact that attendees traveled all the way into the valley, far from the main Arcosanti complex, to watch him play. 

It was probably the most disappointing set of the weekend, and strangely, there were a ton of what I can only assume were LA press members and photographers taking up the first three rows of the crowd. One nice woman with a camera told me my “vibe was atrocious.”

The whole scene was weird.

Fike left the stage about 30 minutes before his set was scheduled to finish, and it was back up the mountain for another long trek. My friend Sophia and I were completely winded at the top, laughing our asses off and calling Arcosanti “America’s real city upon a hill.” New England and John Winthrop ain’t shit.

Back up at the wet, dark Arcosanti complex cloaked in eerie and unsettling shadows, there was revolution in the air. The cold night air was delicious. While Sophia and I smoked a cigarette on the roof above the amphitheater — us both struggling to light it in the shiver-inducing wind — she told me that a woman named Racquel was going to speak. Racquel signed up to work as a volunteer for the festival but was arrested on the Tohono O’odham Nation at the southern border while protesting the destruction of the sacred land there (populated by migrating jaguars, ocelots and a number of rare species) by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. She wasn’t able to volunteer since she was detained, but the festival gave her and members of her organization a platform to speak about their experience and urge people to become involved.

It was a beautiful moment, and I have to give the festival credit for letting Racquel speak and raise awareness to the probably liberal, bourgeois crowd. 

After that, L.A. jazz saxophonist Kamasi Washington took the stage with his eight-piece band of sensational musicians for one of the most stunning sets of the entire weekend. The band blasted through time and space, blowing holes in minds as they spun, whirled, dazzled and oscillated wordlessly through peace and fury. The performance was a total triumph. 

My friend and I sat in the front row with our Italian friends Mariachiara and Edo Zuffetti, muddy water soaking the ground in front of the stage. We danced in disbelief to the sounds of the band, being taken along on a cosmic spiritual journey, feeling inspired, passing around hand-rolled cigarettes and smiling and laughing into joyful oblivion.

Much of Washington’s music — especially the song “Together” — is philosophically based on human unity, community and connection. 

While the band swirled through the music and sang a refrain of “stay together,” I wrote in my notes: “Love is the answer.”

Later that night, Disclosure played one of the best DJ sets I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing. He dropped funky banger after banger without missing a single moment, the entire crowd grooving in an ecstatic flow. Ben UFO was also fantastic, and we danced into the late night, even as the rain came down harder and the dance floor became increasingly sloshy.

The storm hit and ravaged the land after midnight. I was inside one of the bell tents with Edo and Mariachiara as the wind howled, bringing the tent dangerously close to collapse as we worked together to keep it upright.

By Sunday morning, the FORM team had canceled the final day of the festival and was evacuating the area, telling people that the festival was over and to get home safely. Cars everywhere were stuck in the thick mud, sliding around clumsily. 

This was the festival finale from hell.

I felt bad for the operations team that would ultimately have to clean the campsite, as people simply left muddy, destroyed tents and other items strewn all over the area. I felt bad for the attendees who made the effort and journey out for the event to be cut short (especially those for whom attending was a major financial commitment) and for having to deal with the chaos. And I felt bad for the production team that dreamed this event up only to see it struck down.

We all lost something to FORM 2026.

But it wasn’t bad. There were great moments and performances.

It was just … tragic.

Ultimately, the festival’s website and Instagram — branded as “experienceform.com” — sum it up most appropriately.

For all of us who were there, we definitely witnessed FORM in all its spectacular highs and lows. It was certainly an experience.