Risen
Day Festival
Hackney Wick, Queen's Yard, London E9 5EN
£30.00
Risen is a multi-venue London based festival based around the concept of the ‘Divine Feminine’. It is a new event, based around celebrating female, trans and non-binary talent through a multitude of different genres and platforms. Set around the plethora of venues that Hackney Wick offers, Risen promises to provide an open, passionate stage with something for everyone to enjoy.
We arrived at Risen around 3pm to collect our wristbands, the process was relatively smooth as there was no queue, and everything was easily signposted. When we got to the venue the crowds were already starting to form in the sunny spots, leaving us a chilly bench on the canal as the only option for some initial beers. The first venue was Crate Brewery: a taproom that also served pizzas. The music here throughout the day tended towards a more commercial, well-known feel. Think disco, house, garage classis. This meant that later in the evening it was by far the most packed venue as the dancefloor was also pretty small, making it almost impossible to get to the bar. I’m pretty sure this venue was also open to people who didn’t have a ticket, which felt a little unfair as you could have just come here on a whim and enjoyed the same Saturday night.
The other venue we tried and spent most of the day in was The Yard: a hybrid of both inside and outside dancefloors which focused mainly on electro and techno. The vibe here was a lot more chilled, but not in a sit-down low-key way – just more in a give each other space, cheap drinks and happy people way. The music was decent but at times very forgettable – they played a few well-known bangers, but aside from those everything sounded pretty samey. It was still a fun way to spend the day and with the sun popping out every now and then it was great to get to dance outside and get prepped for summer.
There was a third venue, colour factory, that I never got to. This was because during the day, the space was enclosed in darkness and didn’t feel very attractive when the sun was out. By the time the sun went down, the venue had closed its doors – claiming that it was going to reopen again at 11pm. This was for the purpose of the afterparty – I assume they needed to do some cleaning and have a sit down before another round of party people turned up for the evening shift. Still, I found it a little annoying that there was a cut-off point this early in the event and didn’t see why they couldn’t roll on through the night.
Whilst Risen was a nice way to spend the day and was pretty much good vibes all round, it did miss the mark on a couple of points. Firstly, it coined itself as a collective festival: a mish mash of different venues that you could move freely throughout. Freely, that is, if you don’t have a drink in hand. Each venue only allowed drinks bought from that specific place – meaning if you had got a pint at crate brewery, then headed over to The Yard for a change of scene, you had to finish your drink outside before you were let in. This made it very much not free-flowing festival vibes where you can go wherever you want whenever you want and didn’t make much sense in my head at all. Especially when the drinks here were not at all on the cheap side.
The second downfall was the opening and closing of various venues – as mentioned before, the colour factory closed around 9pm to make way for the evenings events which I think started at 11. Our day tickets took us through to 1am, when The Yard and Crate Brewery closed up shop for the evening but didn’t let us into colour factory beyond this time. I thought that it was pretty shoddy that our ticket didn’t get us full access to the whole day and night’s events (bearing in mind lots of people would have had enough by this point and gone home anyway) – two of our party stayed on and had to pay and extra £25 each on the door. To a festival they had already been at all day? Bonkers if you ask me.
Whilst there were probably a few other venues we could have seeked out, these weren’t very well signposted or communicated upfront. Overall, Risen felt less like a festival and more like a selection of bars hosting separate events. I’d be interested to see what these venues look like during a normal day, as I can’t imagine it’s very different at all to what the festival was, aside from the saving of an entry price. The whole thing was a nice environment that felt inclusive, safe and accessible – however, the music did not stand out, there wasn’t a lot of freedom, and it felt a little disjointed and disorganised in places.
OVERALL RATING: ***
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