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First times can be risky business — expectation vs reality, and so on — but my first ever Transforma festival was one of reality exceeding the expectation. Immediately, the festival’s sights and sounds impressed on me: standing at the top of a steep set of stairs, looking down on a green grove of trees nestled almost beneath the town of Tábor, music wafted up on the thermals quite faintly, in spite of the linear proximity. 

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There are 4 stages on the site: Stodola [barn], Sklep [cellar], Garáž [garage] and Zahrada [garden]. This year, each of them is curated in collaboration with a selected music collective who brought particular programming and feel to their assigned space for a single night along with invited light designers – for the lack of a better term. Light and dark designers, vibe operators, the grey eminence of the night. At best, they make theatre scenographies which diffuse the boundaries between the stage and the auditorium, sucking everyone in.

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This year is the fourth time I’m coming back to Tábor. Transforma has become a place to discover new music, meet like-minded people, and be a part of a community. When I’m descending the winding stairs into the valley and I finally see the roofs of the festival area Cesta, it feels a bit like coming back home. I’m wandering around, greeting familiar faces. It’s nice to be back.

Later on, when we’re standing in the queue for the next drink, heavy trap beats coming from Sklep lure us inside. I’d never seen the duo of musicians (later I find out it was probably Hlad) surrounded by the crowd of visitors, but the strange combination of harsh male rap and the innocent-sounding rapping and singing voice of the female performer captivates me. Those surprises and small discoveries are one of my favourite experiences at Transforma.

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Friday sped by in a blur of smuggled vodka and exploration, familiarising with the turf through hazily-recalled mental screenshots, my Friday’s story ends at the Ambient festival’s Zahrada for Nina Pixel’s live AV of her album Ancestral Archaeology. Woodsmoke tangled with other smokes, their bout tousled by the faint wind, and light struck out between the gaps in the garden beds and small wooded groves, or leapt up from the fires, and Nina’s music made the whole of it sing with heady vibrations.

Saturday began early, in the garden: an entire day curated by my collective, Noise Kitchen, along with Brno’s AVA kolektiv. The day’s proceedings opened with a deep sounding; a mystical yet material live improvisation entirely built from captured field recordings and self-made electro-acoustic instruments. We start as we mean to go on. 

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There is a specific allure that raw phenomena preserve in a digital world bound to reduce every imperfection to a bad memory. Transforma is one of the festivals that steadily grows more experienced and professional but never loses its original coarse character. It stands as a controlled chaos experiment in which both the festival team and the audience takes part: an environment where people lose a bit of the oppressive tightness that has come to invade every one of our movements, including nightlife and its dos and don’ts.

A recent baby boom in my IG stories got me questioning the progressive but unredeemable process of ageing and the exclusion of some from the party circuit for levelling up their lives with a kid or a wedding ring. Transforma was a soothing experience in which different generations of both DJs and partygoers coexisted and kept it real and far away from hierarchies. Giving a nod to simpler times, where complicity and companionship were the most sought-after attributes of an event, Transforma keeps it familiar and inviting.

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“The idea was to make it feel like home…” Michal Veltruský explains the irregular grid of light fixtures hanging from the ceiling of Sklep, Ankali’s temporary home on Saturday night. “…which also means a whole lot of smoke,” he adds over the loud hiss of the smoke machine he just turned on. Ah, here’s that trademark feel. Warm, stinky and cosy.

Zahrada, placed further away from three other stages, sucked me in immediately, and became my go-to refuge over the weekend. Equipped with an array of speakers surrounding the area, it offered many hideouts for the listeners and wanderers among actual garden beds. In the middle, a loosely defined and variable performance space made of scaffolding, platforms and a tangle of stretched canvases housed both unassuming and striking live shows and DJ sets. Marek Šilpoch and Lukáš Kalivoda invigorated the setting with refracting and reflecting light beams, and heaps of low smoke, which kept smoothly creeping across the area in waves, before covering everything into clouds.

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It’s past 10 p.m. [Saturday] and I’m rushing to see a show by DJ Venktovka in the Garage. The not-so-big space seems to be hopelessly crowded and behind the thick wall of human bodies, I can’t see much except for the dreamily decorated and purple-lit ceiling. As the concert starts and people begin to move in the rhythm of heavenly hyperpop-ish rap, I make my way to the front of the crowd. DJ Venktova lights up a joint and shares it with his fans, the lyrics about being high and happy seem to resonate with the crowd. I dance with the mass of mostly unknown people around me and yet feel a peaceful connection with them.

Then the show ends and I’m heading out to meet my friends. I already know that something’s off and the chill atmosphere of the show is irreversibly gone. When I’m at festivals, I sometimes get overwhelmed by the number of people, loud music, and other sensory stimuli. I start to feel anxious. For a while I’m trying to calm down, taking deep breaths in the nearby forest. I don’t want to leave yet, but the thought of coming back into packed and heated rooms doesn’t seem very pleasant either.

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Between AVA and Noise Kitchen there’s heaps of talent (if I can say so myself), and it was on glorious display throughout the day’s sets. Thistle, NK’s Matej Kotouček with Simo Hakalisto, were spellbinding, blending dizzying electronic loops with smooth ambient glides and Simo’s captivating technique with a softened hammer and contact-mic’d lyre. Simo later played in similar formation within his other duo, Gnäw, which perhaps stole the whole show of Saturday — a symbiotic entity of soul-snatching drones from Classical Arabic instruments and deep, bewitching forms of Eastern-influenced modern ambient. A whole garden in rapt amazement for the full duration.

Perhaps it’s unfair to say that Gnäw stole the show, since every set left the full crowd glassy-eyed, mystified. It settled an internal debate I’ve had for a while, that Czech people really are hungering for listening music to be presented as the main act, not a sideshow. As the steam and sweat pouring from the Ankali stage rose from behind a tree in the early hours, AVA’s Ssnurssla delivered a masterclass in harmonising his massive tape collection with digitally-played tracks, lifting out of the hypnagogic clouds of the day, and up into bleary transcendence, where we remained until well after we rested our heavy bodies.

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Transforma is also one of the few initiatives that resists the gentrification waves that are slowly invading every city in Europe and, consequently, their nightlife. It stays local, as the delegation of the programming of each of the stages denoted this year. Priming that element of connection and mutual sharing, each of the stages were curated by a different collective involved in some way in the national scene – with broad limits.

Those limits were challenged and twisted and curled throughout the 3 days of the festival. The limitations of what ambient can be were pushed in the garden on Saturday night, remarkably successfully so by Freddie Hudson, who played an ever-changing, ambient to light DnB set of hypnotic hues. The traditional standards programming a night has been approached in a transgressive way by Ankali, with an all-nighter b2b with old and new residents of the club, discovering new formulas and re-visiting previous ones. As a finale, Austin Powers, who knows no limits, set the soundtrack straight for a few of the last hours of the festival, with a wide range of Italo, folk and hidden gems here and there.

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To make it feel like home. That’s something Transforma achieved in different ways. If you’re a night time regular in Prague you meet familiar faces here. At the same time, if you prefer shaking others off you easily can. The whole festival feels just right in terms of sizes and amounts. It’s like you’re in a distant world, but it takes 10 minutes to go have a beer in a pub in the town centre.

On another level, the attention to detail is remarkable. Cultivating a cultural event beyond the ordinary, the crew have put so much effort and care into this year’s edition. It is my first time here so I can’t compare, but everyone else seems to agree. ”We try to improve each year to be able to finally say ‘This is it, this is the edition zero. The bar should be this high from now on.’” says Ondřej, one of the organisers, while we watch the Garage stage being taken apart. ”Last year we said it, but nah, it’s definitely this one. I am moved.”

Transforma owes a great deal of its appeal, if not more, to the watermill turned underground hub called Cesta, founded in 1994 by a pair of musicians Chris Rankin and Hilary Binder. The pair have been working against all odds to provide “[…] a safe space with more individual freedom, where people can talk without traditional barriers,” as Hilary explains in a 1999’s short documentary about their endeavour, directed by Filip Remunda.

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The scene in the Garden has changed dramatically. Sunlight has flooded the whole area, river, and carpets, where the last standing barefoot dancers continue with the afterparty. The mood feels surprisingly lively and playful, considering it’s Sunday afternoon and the festival is more or less over. The air is filled with old American summer hits as well as with Czech and Slovak classics such as Miro Žbirka’s atmospheric track Do člna. I feel strange nostalgia, knowing how exhausted I am and yet I want to enjoy this hungover moment of happiness for a little longer. One more beer, I think, and then I’ll head for the train, out of this little utopia.

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There’s one moment that I found to be a proof of the endearing and caring space that is Transforma. Upon my arrival, I caught up with one of the volunteers working at the festival. He giggled after a quick listen to his walkie talkie and then whispered something back to finally explain to me that, after a couple of days of questionable sleep, a lot of work but also a lot of fun, the volunteers started using their communication devices for things far from duty. “Someone was saying ‘I love you guys’ through the walkie,” he explained with a glazed smile.

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