Two years ago this weekend, the vibe at the festival was stifling. The National Weather Service reported a record high of 108 degrees on Oct. 4, the first day of FORM Arcosanti 2024.
“It was really, really hard,” says the festival’s founder Zach Tetreault. “It was like, tremendously difficult.”
While performances by artists like PinkPantheress, Thundercat, James Blake, Skrillex and Four Tet all happened smoothly and attendees generally had a good time, behind the scenes, it was a struggle to stay ahead of the heatwave.
With FORM happening in a remote stretch of the Sonoran Desert roughly 70 miles north of Phoenix, all potable water must be brought into the site, and “we just burned through 10 times more water than we ever have,” says Tetreault. “There were 10 times more medical visits because of people passing out.”
On the show’s second day, it was 113 degrees.
2024 was the first time FORM had happened since 2019; prior to that, it happened annually since its start in 2014. Setting up at an architecturally far-out experimental town in the Arizona desert, FORM became known as a destination for artsy, in-the-know music devotees who traveled across the desert to see artists like Charli xcx, Florence + the Machine (whose creative direction is done by Tetreault’s wife Molly Hawkins, who is also the creative director for Harry Styles), Anderson .Paak, Solange, Father John Misty, Chance the Rapper, Bonobo, Skrillex and other bookings that punched above the weight of FORM’S slim 2,000 capacity.
As it was for many independent festivals, bringing the festival back after the pandemic was challenging enough. Now, as FORM returns this weekend after taking last year off, the approach is do or die.
“The stakes are so high,” says Tetreault. “This is at a turning point where it has to be really, really good this year,” says Tetreault. “It’s always good, but for it to continue, it has to be on another level.”
For the festival’s core team – Tetreault runs FORM with longtime partners Mike Feinberg, Kim Swift and Alex Hoffman – the pressure is particularly high, given FORM’s nearly $1,000 ticket price and the expectations that come with paying such a premium.
“We struggled with the economics on this thing really hard,and had to make a difficult choice to more or less double the ticket price,” says Tetreault. While this price increase “excluded a lot of people who have been with us from the beginning, with how expensive s–t is now, it’s also literally the only way this could continue to exist.”
There’s reason to believe FORM 2026 might indeed reach the necessary level. Beyond improvements to the food and beverage program and water refill stations, the first time addition of car camping, and a lower capacity as requested by previous attendees (“a hilarious thing for a 2,000-capacity event,” says Tetreault), this year’s lineup is arguably its strongest ever. Baltimore rockers Turnstile, jam rock darlings Geese, indie pop artist and Euphoria star Dominic Fike and dance favorites Disclosure all headline a bill that also includes a DJ set by Tinashe, progressive electronic producer Underscores, jazz titan Kamasi Washington, Blood Orange, Ben UFO, Twin Shadow and Fcukers.
On Oct. 9, the night before she headlines Austin City Limits, Lorde will perform a show at FORM that she and her team designed especially for the festival, while Fike’s performance is set to happen in a nearby canyon, and serve as the release party for his new album How to Quit Smoking.
These mainstage level artists aren’t coming for the paycheck. “My entire talent budget is the standard rate of one of the acts,” Tetreault says. Instead, he says it’s about the desire to do something different than a standard plug-and-play festival set.
That’s in fact how FORM started. In the early 2010s, Tetreault was touring with his band Hundred Waters and feeling some malaise after playing roughly 300 shows behind their eponymous 2012 debut. “We played all the festivals and opened for every band on Earth and were ultimately just like, ‘What is the point in this s–t? What’s exciting? What would be fun and weird?’”
The answer came when a friend drove Tetreault to Arcosanti, an experimental town proposed by Italian architect and urban planner Paolo Soleri, whose designs for the town’s vaulted structures were created to show how humans could better coexist with nature. Hundred Waters threw an album release party on the site, rounded up friends including How to Dress Well, Alvin Risk and Eskmo to come play it, and that was FORM 2014. (This fest also marked the launch of FORM Productions, with Tetreault and his partners subsequently working on events like Life Is Beautiful and traveling electronic show Cercle.)
The spirit of “finding the point in this s—t” has been a philosophical framework that’s proven sexy to artists and their teams. “I’ll do private shows where I have massive budgets, and it’s difficult to get people on the phone to talk about it,” says Tetreault. “But with this, I’ll be like, ‘Hey, I’m doing FORM,’ and get swarms of inbound messages from people wanting to talk about it.” This year, Lorde’s team reached out to tell Tetreault she was interested in playing.
FORM Arcosanti
Julian Bajsel
Acts who might typically tour with multiple semi-trucks have to pare it down to come play the off-the-grid, experimental fest. While every artist brings a full show from an audio perspective, visual productions are all modified to fit FORM’S unique stage shapes and sizes. Organizers also insist on having no video or LED walls here, feeling that the site is too beautiful and intimate to have a big screen in people’s faces.
“I’m on the phone with teams being like, ‘Actually, there’s no way we can bring a single semi out there,” says Tetreault. To get gear in, FORM staffers typically meet the artist’s semis at the nearest major road juncture and load equipment into box trucks.
“It’s kind of like putting on a large-scale festival at a house party,” says Tetreault.
Like most house parties, FORM has never broken even, although the team has kept it going by taking small investments from friends, from companies that want to be involved, and even from a partnership with Ticketmaster, in which the company gave FORM a large sum of money that allowed the team to do the festival for a few years. (They are still in the process of recouping.)
“Honestly, I’m finding a lot of goodness in people and in the industry through this, which these days is sometimes hard to find in our business,” says Tetreault. “It’s been reassuring.”
This year, support has also come via Spotify, which is hosting FORM’s Fresh Finds stage for emerging artists. The space will host performances from artists including Mack Keane, Sophia Stel, After, MGNA Crrrta. Food and drinks are included with the ticket price, with beverage sponsors like Mountain Valley water donating all the drinks.
In total, the premise is a strong one. FORM 2026 has sold all of its 2,000 tickets, and the forecast is predicting sun and temperatures in the mid-80s on Friday — and then potential rain and thunderstorms for the rest of the weekend. Organizers are helping attendees prepare by advising them to bring extra layers, shoes that can handle mud, tarps and extra tent stakes.
“Hopefully,” says Tetreault, “we make it so all these people who took the leap and spent $1,000 to come be part of this incredible thing feel like it was absolutely worth it — and then they tell their friends and they want to come back next time. That’s why for me it’s a turning point, where every single person has to have that feeling.”
