Ypsigrock and the power of once

Okay, not a literal dream, this isn’t Fellini’s 8½, but in the interests of painting a picture, think of the late ‘90s, two grunge kids, and a burning thirst for music that felt like it was all that really mattered. Born in Castelbuono, among the rocky peaks and olive tree-lined valleys of the Madonie national park, Vincenzo Barreca and Gianfranco Raimondo grew tired of always having to travel to see their favourite bands. What if, instead of bringing the mountain to the music, they could bring the music to the mountain and make it feel at home? When they founded Ypsigrock in 1997, that’s exactly what they set out to do.

Named after the Byzantine village of Ypsigro, where Castelbuono now stands, the festival nearly went the way of the empire after just its first edition. Not everyone, it seemed, shared the founders’ appetite for change, and it took about a decade for the locals to fully catch on. While tech bros drool alone over moving fast and breaking things, Barreca and Raimondo took the opposite approach: move slowly, solve problems as they come, and invest in a community that invests in you right back. 

“Our festival is a family,” says Barreca, while the long-haired Raimondo, in true Gen X fashion, likens it to retro PC games like Quake and Monkey Island, where almost everything you find has something hidden to reveal. With quirks like the Welcome to Twin Peaks sign at one entrance to the town and the moustache design of the campsite Cuzzocrea stage (a tribute to a regular who passed away), Ypsi is at heart a wholesome exercise in IYKYK. But – and this is equally important – it’s also a place where much of the enjoyment lies in finding out.

Ypsigrock, you see, has a golden, curious rule: that once an artist has played here they don’t get invited back. The founders call it Ypsi Once and it applies to every stage, from camping to castle-side and from headline act to hopeful in the Avanti il Prossimo showcase (a battle of the bands-type side quest, with an accelerator prize). In a world that rewards infinite replay, there’s something kind of noble about once, an anti-algorithmic be all and end all that snips off the wristband, says thank you for your service, and sends you on your way. 

“We do love the rule, but at the same time we hate it,” the founders say, laughing. “It’s getting harder to make a completely new line-up each year, but it’s important for us too because there’s always something new to discover.” 

For music fan Claudio Gambini, who lives in Palermo and has been to every Ypsi since 2008, the rule has come to mean a healthy sense of trust and letting the curation lead the way. “Even if the artist is doing something different, that’s not my style, I still want to listen and maybe hear what Vincenzo and Gianfranco hear,” he says. “They have great eyes and ears.”

The contract between artist and their audience is altered too, in a democratising way. In knowing that artists only get one shot at a defining Ypsi moment, both sides have incentive to be present and to let that moment come through, which means less watching through phone screens in the crowd and more locking in both on and off the stage. “We’re really happy about that,” says Raimondo. “People are still using their bodies to enjoy it and not just their phone hands.”

“I actually didn’t know about the once rule until after we played, and I’m kind of glad,” says jasmine.4.t, who played an early set at Ypsi’s second stage, at the cloister of St. Francis. “We asked one of the founders if we could come back next year and he was like, ‘Er, no, that’s our whole thing. But maybe you can play again if you come up with a new band,’ and I think I’ve got some bangers.” She reels a couple off – I Love You You’re My Human Girlfriend, 🤘Shoplifting🤘 – and mentions some others “not safe for work,” so watch this space, side hustle loading.

Jokes aside, wanting to return before you’ve even left, I’m told, is kind of a thing when it comes to your first time at Ypsi. Or your fourth time, for that matter. Or, in the case of Gambini, your 18th. “It’s so easy to go to any big corporate festival in the United States or in Europe,” he says. “But when you find something as special as this, it’s really hard to let it go. For me, it’s like a four-day Christmas dinner with all my friends that I only really know from here. We’ll text now and then, but we only see each other here, and music is the key.”

“It really does feel entirely about the music,” Jasmine agrees. “We played a bunch of new songs that we’d been saving up for a special occasion, and it just felt like the right time to do it. It was such a magical experience, and everyone was just so visibly in love with music.”

Approaching its 30th year, Ypsigrock has long outgrown its main stage in the shadow of Castelbuono’s 700-year-old castle, once the home of the lavish Ventimiglia court, becoming a truly town-wide, all-inclusive event. Any signs of the old frictions are gone, it seems, and on the short walk from the cloister to the castle, along the via Sant’Anna and through the medieval arch, every face can feel like a possible new friend – and I swear that’s really no exaggeration.

It’s something that the founders are proud of, having folded the festival into a broader cultural association that gives back to the community, and with the unexpected bonus of changing people’s music tastes too. From isolated, music-obsessed teens to getting the whole town buzzing about bands like Mogwai, Blonde Redhead, and Cigarettes After Sex, it’s certainly been a ride. But all rides have to wind down at some point, and their next challenge, they say, is to think about what’s coming if or rather when they step away.

With a festival capacity of 3000 people per day and little scope for more, no one’s really making a full living. Raimondo, in his other life, is a lawyer in Palermo, while Barreca works as an agronomist in Castelbuono, but the most important thing, they say, is to keep the Ypsi identity alive. 

“In the early days, every year was going to be the last edition, and we wanted to give it up,” they say. “But when we started to get all these wonderful, happy feelings from the community, it became so important to us to maintain it. And now, approaching 30 years, it’s important to give testimony to the next generation so that they can keep the model of Ypsigrock going.”

For now though, let’s get back to the present. Far and away the biggest name from Italy this year is Niccolò Contessa’s I Cani (The Dogs), finally getting his Ypsi main stage moment after 15 years, but it’s Brazilian/Italian duo Hate Moss, playing a much smaller show at the campsite, who get the pulse racing with hard-edged, multilingual post-punk meets electroclash that, although quite at odds with the daylight, still carried enough menace and beauty to impress.

Tasmin Nicole Stephens, aka TTSSFU, is well known to us at BEST FIT, but I somehow haven’t seen her before and am instantly pulled, more or less as expected, right into her murky world of reverb and distortion. Not a bad place to be by any means, but Wednesday, up next on the main stage, are on another level. The North Carolina band don’t waste any time in bringing the heat, tearing roughly into their by-now distinctive brand of Southern “creek rock” for the first half of the set before easing up a bit and bringing down the fever. Karly Hartzman continues to be one of music’s most formidable belters, enormous but never anonymous, but her softer side is just as compelling. 

Dry Cleaning’s set, by contrast, never really catches fire and feels awkwardly aloof, beyond the studied distance that comes with their usual territory. I’ve seen better shows of theirs, but those were in tents and not the starlit open air, so maybe it just didn’t scale for whatever technical reason on the night. The Sunday closing set from Black Country, New Road is also hit and miss, though more to do with the songs than the sound. As skilled as they are, watching them often feels more like an exercise than something to enjoy, with a few inspired moments tipping the scales, but only so far, never quite enough to really commit. 

For a masterclass in making the elaborate seem easy, look no further than Cate Le Bon and her merry band of seven, who deliver hazy beauty, psychedelic elegance, skewed instrumentals, and more across a baker’s dozen of songs – including almost all her latest album – made light on their feet. One last main stage mention has to go to French electro-pop-punk trio DITTER, who came to turn up the party with a highly physical and often unpredictable show, thanks largely to the force of singer Rosa Rocca-Serra, who was utterly convincing as both popstar and provocateur.

Meanwhile, over at the cloister, Annahstasia just about knocked the wind out of me, and I strongly suspect just about everyone else. Joined by cellist Abi Asisa and Genevieve Namazzi on double bass, she was totally transfixing, with a strong gravitational pull of unwavering authority. It’s perhaps a bit too easy to reach for the Nina Simone comparison, in terms of her command of the room, but it’s also not wrong as shown by the way she at one point paused to wait for silence, saying nothing, just radiating self-possession and trusting in the still. Two new songs were played, “Life and Its Interference” and “Trials and Tribulations” (an Ypsigrock world premiere), but it was her cover of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” that sealed her triumph, cut loose from the faulty tech to sing us out, unamplified, into the rest of the night.

Skipping over a deflated set from Horsegirl, let’s show a little love for The New Eves, who bring their old-world art-rock to life in perfectly jagged relief. But the cloister plays its biggest hand by far with the absolute mayhem of GANS, three guys risking it all in the true Ypsi spirit of once. If drummer Euan Woodman and bassist Tom Rhodes are the two-horse engine of GANS, sharing vocals too, it’s Tommy Lawther on sax and flute who most feels the call of the wild, throwing his body around like it’s made of nothing. It’s safe to assume that the medieval courtyard of St. Francis has never seen anything quite like GANS, and that’s because I haven’t really either, as least not for a long while. 

Naturally, the crowd go bananas as a circle pit turns to a stage rush, and we all dance as one. One band, one night, one chance and then it’s gone. Same as it ever was, right? And that’s the real power of once – not to make a moment artificial, but to make us feel the fact that it is passing; a reminder, then, rather than a rule.