Ramsgate Festival of Sound’s impact resonates around the town

Historic buildings filled with sound, beachside busking, white cliffs turned into cinema screens, cabaret in the park. For seven years, Ramsgate Festival of Sound has been turning the town into an aural wonderland. More than a music festival, it takes the entire field of sound as its starting point.

“It’s a festival that shines a light on the talent of music creators but it is a cultural festival,” says Gemma Dempsey, the festival’s director. Beginning as a strand of the Ramsgate Festival it became a standalone event in 2018, mixing music, sound art, film, performance and even meditation. It also celebrates the town itself, with installations and events taking over buildings and moving between spaces. “Each year we programme new work from local artists to keep it fresh and evolving.”

The inaugural edition set the tone, with events including BAFTA-nominated composer Simon Boswell projecting his film Blink onto the white cliffs near the wartime tunnels, and musician Filipe Gomes filling the historic Cervia tugboat in Ramsgate Harbour with sound. Elsewhere, a collaboration between composer Mike McEvoy, creative director Theresa Smith and sound artist Emily Peasgood transformed the Latin inscription atop Ramsgate’s lighthouse - Perfugium Miseris (“refuge for those in need”) - into choral music. 

“It reflected what a creative and culturally diverse community we have and allowed us to programme a wonderful selection of music and events for all ages,” recalls Gemma.

A long-running strand of the festival is the Sonic Trail, which sees new work commissioned from local and established artists. This year’s theme is ‘sonic architecture’, encouraging artists to interact with buildings around Ramsgate. 

“It's always been our aim for Sonic Trail to highlight Ramsgate's heritage and the stunning buildings we have in the town, especially those that have been overlooked or fallen into disrepair in recent years,” explains Gemma. “If there is one thing we have in buckets loads of in Ramsgate its architecture!”

Among 2025’s chosen projects are a sound installation by Kat Peddie and the Free Range Orchestra at St George’s Church inspired by Ramsgate’s maritime history, and Kkailou’s sonic love letter to the Pie Factory Music youth centre. 

Beyond the five specially commissioned pieces, the Sonic Trail is bolstered by additional installations and exhibitions, including Emily Peasgood's interactive sound sculpture The Listening Desk and The Love Booth, collecting photos and sound clips from over 1000 visitors to an analogue photo booth earlier this summer.

New this year is Busk Until Dusk - an evolution of the Busk At Dusk show at the Ellington Park bandstand. Originally a concept born out of the pandemic, when all events had to be outside, for four years, musicians played along the East Cliff promenade. 

“The location is stunning,” Gemma says of that previous iteration, “but once the sun goes around the corner, it gets chilly at that time of day! It was also quite expensive to build a stage and infrastructure down there, so we thought about how to keep the concept but evolve it.”

This year, nineteen musicians, including Lo Barnes, Claire Nicholson and Will Rees, will move around eleven pubs and bars in the town, popping up at different times on the Saturday of the festival - taking the music to the audience, “so sit in your favourite local and let the music come to you or follow them around town.”

At the end of the night, at Winterstoke Gardens, there will be a headline performance from The Future Psychedelics The Future - a band of 13 musicians “corralled” by Penguin Café composer and bassist Andy Waterworth. The collection of musicians with backgrounds playing with acts such as Primal Scream and Fat White Family will perform their space-funk opera The Anti Gravity Groove Machine.

Beyond headline acts, the festival has also set out on a mission to nurture upcoming talent. “We want to be part of a legacy that involves supporting up and coming artists,” Gemma explains. “So many grassroots venues and pubs have closed, depriving young musicians of places to hone their craft and get that all-important live experience.”

This year’s ‘Ramsgate Introducing’ line up includes Take Too, Kingfisher and Lucy Taylor, all selected via an open call, alongside Moss.E, who came through a long-running partnership with Pie Factory Music. At the same time, local musician Andrew Dennis is curating Teenage Kicks, an evening at Slice showcasing young bands.

Considering the long term impact of the festival is something that Gemma comes back to often, and her desire to do something positive for the people of Ramsgate and the town as a location is clear. 

Following the recent announcement that Heritage Lab will refurbish the 1930s Art Deco shelters along the East Cliff, she says that she’d “like to think that we had something to play in bringing those back to life” by staging Busk At Dusk down there. 

Similarly with Winterstokes Gardens and the Ellington Park bandstand, she feels that Ramsgate Festival of Sound has “reminded people of they were there for a reason, that they were there for mass entertainment.”

One plan for the future to get people out and seeing what Ramsgate has to offer is to make available geolocated recordings of previous sound installations via the Echoes app. With their phone and headphones, locals and visitors alike could move between locations, listening to work created for those specific spaces. 

“I think that's an obvious win-win,” says Gemma. “I hope we can do that somehow in the future. People put in all this work each year and then it’s gone. But with this it's not gone because people can come back and actually dial it up again.”

Gemma comes across as a fan of the festival as much as anything. Asked for some of her highlights, she reels off a long list of amazing sounding events, from Bangra dancers leading the audience in a Covid-safe dance during the pandemic to Deal based violinist Anna Phoebe performing music she had composed each day while sitting looking at the sea.

Again though, it’s not just about the festival’s events, but the people they attract. “What I love and what blows us away every year is the community,” she says. “We have an extraordinary local community. Front and centre is, the reason we keep doing what we’re doing is because of our community.”

Ramsgate Festival of Sound takes place from 12-14 September. The Sonic Trail is open throughout the three days from 12-4pm. Busk Until Dusk will run from 12-6.30pm on September 13, followed by The Future Psychedelics The Future performance.

Strange Tourist will be at the festival on Sunday, hosting a Q&A with artist Karen Vost about her art project The Love Booth, which you’ll find on the Sonic Trail. 

Find the full Ramsgate Festival of Sound programme at ramsgatefestival.org