Memòri Festival 2026 through five key performances

At its sold-out debut, the intimate festival paired dub, techno and psychedelic sounds with a strong sense of community and place.

Set on a limestone plateau overlooking Occitania’s Lot Valley, Memòri‘s first edition channelled the energy of France’s thriving independent electronic scene into a rural setting. Founded by Antoine Hernandez, formerly involved in programming Saint-Étienne’s Positive Education and pe:rsona, alongside Lyon-based Quentin Courel of Underscope and Comic Sans Records, Memòri brought together two strands of France’s independent electronic scene for a four-day gathering.

From 2–5 July, the Domaine de Gayfié near Saint-Jean-de-Laur became home to 2,000 people, surrounded by forests, streams and vineyards. The weekend arrived in intense heat, but the scale felt just right: sold out without seeming overcrowded, and small enough that the same faces kept reappearing from one stage to the next.

At Unda, people moved between the pool and Tweak’s huge sound system rolled through the afternoon. Lux, the main stage, hosted live performances and wider-ranging electronic sets beneath an impressive lighting rig. Mentis was tucked away from the busier paths, offering ambient music, cushions and somewhere to slow down in the small hours of the morning, while after-dark Aura turned a barn into a nightclub. There was even a secret stage, with its daily set times posted at the bar rather than listed on the main programme.

Music remained at the centre of Memòri, but there were plenty of other activities too. Yoga sessions, workshops and even a free library gave the daytime programme a slower rhythm and added to the sense that the festival was being built collectively rather than simply presented to an audience.

Not everything ran smoothly, however. Queues formed around the indoor stages at peak times, while the combination of packed rooms and the weekend’s heat made Aura uncomfortable on occasion. But these felt more like manageable first-year problems than issues that defined the festival. 

Here are five of our standout performances from its inaugural edition.

Jonquera & Officium

At 9pm on Thursday, while Memòri was still slowly filling up, Jonquera & Officium played one of the weekend’s most intimate sets. Rather than taking to the Lux stage itself, the duo set up beside it at ground level, with the crowd forming a loose circle around them. The sun was dropping, the site was washed in orange light and, with fewer people around on the opening night, it felt more like an impromptu gathering than a conventional festival performance.

Following the recent release of their collaborative record on Teenage Menopause Records, the pair moved through psychedelic rock, downtempo and experimental electronics. Jonquera switched between live drums and Ableton-triggered samples, sometimes holding the groove steady and elsewhere knocking it slightly off balance, while Officium’s guitar pulled the music into hazier territory. Before Trickypony took over the Lux stage, it offered a calm and strange start to the night.

Nono Gigsta

Nono Gigsta’s poolside set at Unda felt made for Tweak, the huge handcrafted sound system built by Victor Willaert, a.k.a. Mains Courantes. As people gathered in the shade or sat along the edge of the pool, the Belgian-born DJ began slowly, moving through dub and leftfield bass while letting the weight of the system do much of the work. As daylight faded, she gradually raised the tempo, shifting into breakbeat and jungle as the festival moved towards night.

A live effects controller had been placed among the dancers, allowing people in the crowd to send delay and reverb back through the mix. It blurred the boundary between DJ and audience, with parts of the music seeming to ricochet unpredictably around the space.

Sandrien

Sandrien’s late-night set brought a harder edge to the Lux stage. Much of Memòri’s line-up leaned towards leftfield bass, dub and downtempo psychedelia, but the Amsterdam DJ offered techno that still left space for the unexpected.

Smoke drifted across the stage and caught in the Lux visuals as she worked through deep, weighty tracks without letting the set become one-dimensional; her pacing was patient but never flat. Towards the end, she suddenly swerved into Björk. It was a curveball, but one that opened the set up at exactly the right moment and drew one of its biggest reactions.

CCL

By midnight on Saturday, CCL was the name people kept mentioning. The crowd began drifting towards Lux well before their two-hour set, and by the time they started, the stage felt more charged than almost anywhere else that weekend.

CCL moved easily between genres and tempos, without turning every transition into a big moment. Even at its most unpredictable, the set never felt forced. Rather than simply pushing things faster and heavier, they gave the more intricate passages room to breathe and trusted the crowd to follow. And for the two-hour-long set, they did.

Kia

Kia played the final hour on Lux, from midnight on Sunday into Monday morning. The Melbourne-based DJ moved through deep techno, trance and broken rhythms, keeping the dancefloor moving as the weekend drew to a close.

A version of DJ Rolando’s Knights of the Jaguar got one of the biggest reactions of the night, with hands in the air and people hugging across the dancefloor. Kia then brought things down with The Durutti Column’s Future Perfect, a softer final track that seemed to gather up the warmth and closeness of the weekend, bringing the festival to a gentle close.