It’s day four of Convenanza 2025 and we’re in the beautiful back garden of Hôtel de la Cité in Carcassonne, south-eastern France, to meet festival co-founder Bernie Fabre.
The hotel is set within a medieval citadel that sits perched on a hill overlooking the town below, just a short walk away from the Château Comtal.
Every September, the castle’s central courtyard attracts 1,500 pilgrims from around Europe and beyond to what has become known as ‘the Temple of Gnostic Sonics’, gathered to enjoy a carefully curated line-up of DJs and live acts and – since his untimely death in 2020 – to celebrate the life and legacy of Fabre’s friend and festival co-founder, Andrew Weatherall.
Fabre is a local promoter who met and befriended the late DJ, producer and remixer after booking him and driving him to gigs, before the duo went on to establish the festival in this unique location back in 2013.
Wearing a weary smile despite the onset of sinusitis – an occupational hazard at this stage of the celebrations – Fabre is delighted with how this year’s festival has gone so far.
“We’ve been going for 13 years now, and everything was top-notch this year,” he says. “For me, it’s one of the very best editions so far, and everybody seemed to agree with me from the feedback I got today.”
An unforgettable four-hour journey
Since the opening party at the nearby Bar á Vins on Thursday night, when Vladimir Ivkovic got the weekend started in his inimitably strange and seductive fashion, we’ve been treated to live dub excursions from Holy Tongue, whose drummer Valentina Magaletti may be the closest thing we now have to the late Jaki Liebezeit of Can, synth-punk chaos from Barcelona duo Dame Area, the Italian-language new wave of Trystero, and a hypnotic, ritualistic collision of dub, fourth world music and techno from UK producer Al Wootton (who’s also a member of Holy Tongue).
As ever, the headline set on Friday was from crowd favourite Sean Johnston, Weatherall’s former DJ partner as A Love From Outer Space, who continues to carry the torch for the singular mid-tempo, psychedelic sound the two men forged from the late 2000s until Andrew’s sudden passing.
His own Hardway Bros remix of Le Carousel’s We’re All Gonna Hurt – currently being promoted on Inflyte – was a highlight of the set, as was Fango’s towering 2025 anthem North, while tunes from Four Tet, Still Going and a clever edit of the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter kept the dancefloor moving.
But here at the hotel on Sunday afternoon, all the talk is about the previous night’s headline set by HAAi, an unforgettable four-hour journey through joyful techno, rude, UK-flavoured basslines, curveball edits and, in a bravura final hour, crowd-pleasing anthems from Kraftwerk, Vitalic, and The Skatt Brothers.
Ever since the London-based Australian DJ was announced as a headliner, her booking felt significant; a passing of the torch from the Weatherall generation – the likes of Johnston, Ivkovic and David Holmes, who also appeared this year, are all Convenanza stalwarts, while recent editions have seen Ivan Smagghe (back-to-back with Chloé) and Roman Flügel headlining – to the next.
She delivered nothing short of a masterclass, harnessing the power of the Temple of Gnostic Sonics – and an enthusiastic, experienced, but no less up-for-it crowd – in spectacular fashion.
‘It’s just word-of-mouth’
“We’re trying to see the new generation, to see where the lineage of Andrew goes,” Fabre says. “We choose [the line-up] carefully, to respect his ethos and how he wanted the festival to be.
“I had no doubts [about HAAi] because she is one of the very best DJs in the world at the moment, and it’s a big honour that she agreed to come and join us. We’re a small festival compared to the big festivals she’s asked to play for.
“And it was a blessing, because her set was just incredible.”
People travel from far and wide to visit the castle every year. Bernie estimates that around 80% of the crowd come from the UK and Ireland, 15% from Spain, and the remaining 5% from “Sweden, Germany… and France.”
But such is the pull of Convenanza and the special atmosphere it creates that at least one festival veteran travels every year from San Francisco – and this year the full allocation of tickets sold out in just one day.
“We don’t do publicity, we don’t do adverts, we are not in the fashionable magazines,” Fabre says. “We don’t do flyers, we don’t do posters, we don’t do anything. It’s just word-of-mouth.
“And so it took a few years, but it seems that people enjoy what we are doing. They recognise we are true to the spirit of Andrew, and we are very careful when we do the line-up to present something which is really good every year.”
‘We should continue’
Weatherall’s sudden passing five years ago left Convenanza at a crossroads. Whereas the festival was once led by Weatherall’s vision – it was his idea in the first place, though Fabre deserved enormous credit for successfully pitching it to the French government, which owns the site, and wading through the annual bureaucracy necessary to make it happen – the much-missed icon now functions as something of a north star.
Was there ever a chance that it wouldn’t come back?
“That was a big blow,” says Bernie. “Besides being a collaborator, Andrew was a friend. And then we had [the pandemic] as well, on top of losing Andrew. We were completely destroyed for two years.
“We had discussions with Sean [Johnston], with Lizzie, Andrew’s girlfriend, and they said what they thought about it, and they said, ‘Well, we should continue’. So that’s what we did.
“But it was very difficult, I must say. I’ve started relaxing this year, but to make it start again was very difficult without the presence of Andrew, because he brought a lot of energy to this thing.”
‘If you expect one genre of music, don’t come to Convenanza!’
He may no longer be with us, but Weatherall’s unique instincts are embedded in the minds and the hearts of Bernie, Lizzie, Sean, and everyone else who loved him.
“When I heard the first album by Holy Tongue, I said, ‘Wow, that’s Andrew Weatherall. There’s no doubt about it’. So it’s automatic now.
“I knew his tastes very closely and what he went for, and he always wanted to book people who are honest in the way they approach things. There’s a song of his [with Two Lone Swordsmen] called Faux, and the lyrics go, “We don’t do faux” – ‘we don’t do fake’. Which sums Andrew up perfectly.
“We get asked the same question all the time – ‘What’s the Convenanza sound?’, and we say there’s no Convenanza sound because we address all genres, but we try to pick up what’s best in each genre.
“So it’s really completely different. If you expect one genre of music, don’t come to Convenanza!”
There are lots of things that make Convenanza special – the line-ups, the crowd, the spirit of Andrew Weatherall. But the castle is a main character in itself. To walk through the gate and into the courtyard is to enter another world, one that represents everything that makes life worth living.
Rectangular in shape and featuring a couple of enormous trees, the whole scene is beautifully lit, with stunning projections on the ramparts, and hundreds of ecstatic dancers locked in to the music, and each other. For two nights each September, it becomes the centre of a transcendent musical universe – the Temple of Gnostic Sonics.
“You’ve seen it, the venue is spectacular,” says Bernie. “The sound is very clear, and it enables us to have a good quality of sound as well, because with the ramparts, the bass does not get lost. They rebound well. Which is the most incredible night club!”
‘We’re following the map’
Those ramparts also have the happy by-product of permanently capping the festival’s capacity at the current level of just 1,500. It can’t get any bigger – the downfall of so many festivals that keep expanding until they lose what made them special in the first place. Not here.
And there’s only one stage in the courtyard, so the entire festival – including the parties at nearby Bar á Vins, which take place at different times – takes place without clashes, making it an entirely communal experience. Yet another ingredient in the magical soup.
Bernie says: “We were offered another venue, the theatre in the Hôtel de la Cité, which they use in July every year with big acts, with I think 3,000 seats. We refused because that was always the wish of Andrew when we started.
“He said, ‘1,500 will be the maximum because that’s the kind of crowd I like, I don’t want more than that’.
“To perpetuate the Andrew Weatherall ethos is very important to us. As Sean has said, he left us a map, and we’re following the map. That’s exactly how it is. And we won’t betray the ethos of Andrew.”
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Credit for main image of Sean Johnston: Luis Kramer / @kramerdoingbits