Perhaps the first thing you notice on entering the Highams Hill Farm site, Leefest’s home for one weekend each year, is just how small the event is. Critics of the vast and unfathomable scale of such festivals as Glastonbury, where a trip to Shangri La can find you on an uncertain and perilous days-long quest, will be greatly relieved. If you stand in just the right vantage point in the arena you can take everything Leefest has to offer without even moving; three large stages (two of them in tents), a dotting of fringe arenas, a handful of stalls and a modest campsite. Ultimately the festival’s meagre size is both its making and its own undoing, depending on how you look at it (more on this later).

Though the music and activities were split over the two days, Friday and Saturday, there seemed to be an emphasis on the Saturday, with many people only arriving on the second day. Those who had arrived in time for Friday’s music were able to watch performances from the likes of Summer Camp, Slow Club and Jakwob on the main stage. Summer Camp’s set was looking to be a sadly under-attended and almost awkward display until the injection of some freshly cider-intoxicated youths did a great deal to lift the energy of audience and performers alike. I should point out that ‘youth’ is an obsolete signifier at Leefest, because at least 75% of the attendees could safely be put into the category of ‘first-time-away-from-home-without-my-parents’.

The festival is the brainchild of one Lee Denny who, back in 2006 whilst his parents were away on holiday, decided to have a party in his back garden in South London, bringing seven local bands together to perform. Each year since, Leefest has grown exponentially. What was once an audience of 150 or so has now become more like a couple of thousand, and the back garden has been traded for Highams Hill Farm in Surrey. Understandably, along the festival’s unique journey Denny and the others involved in organising it have caught the attention of the press. In 2009, much to their surprise, Leefest won an award for Best Grassroots Festival at the UK Festival Awards. That same year the festival received coverage from BBC and London Tonight, amongst others, and the following year the Guardian included it in their list of the UK’s 10 best small festivals.

What is praised time and again is Leefest’s unpretentiousness and inclusiveness. Right from the off the event has been a non-profit enterprise, with any extra turnover going to charity. The impetus behind it all has always be passion. In Denny’s words, ‘it’s a labour of love and is driven by us wanting to create the perfect event’. Visitors to the Leefest website can read a whole section titled ‘Ethos’ where the core principals of the festival are laid out, including providing opportunities and celebrating community. There you will also be treated to charming little details like the ‘Progress’ infographic which shows the festival’s improving toilet situation over the years (1 downstairs toilet no longer cuts it).

The ever-enigmatic producer, South London Ordnance is due to release a debut record next month on 2^nd Drop Records. Not a great deal seems to be known about this south London-based (surprise surprise) electronic artist beyond a fleeting collection of tracks on his SoundCloud page and a handful of impressive mixes here and there (earlier this year you may have heard him doing a guest mix on XFM for Mary Anne Hobbs’s show). Getting the thumbs-up from producers such as Mosca and Dark Sky, this forthcoming debut is definitely one to keep an eye on.

The title track, ‘Sanctuary’ plods along with an incessant rhythm, eventually giving way to a grime-inspired sub bass bubbling up between percussive clashes and scraps of vocal samples. On the other side of the record, ‘Roofy’ provides a slow-burning, toe-tapping minimal groove which feels like a satisfying counterpoint.

Overall the sound sits neatly in the ‘bass music’ sub-genre; that loosely defined class of electronic music that has arisen in the wake of dubstep’s mainstream attention. Here the music is not simply house or techno or any other overt iteration.  Instead it is a sound which borrows intuitively from multiple electronic sub-genres at once. And, in the case of South London Ordnance, particularly on this debut release, the result is a brand of club-ready dance music which isn’t just a pretty face. Most refreshing of all perhaps is that tracks like this can reward the listener on repeat plays.

Nathan Thompson can be found at http://nathanwrites.wordpress.com. Thompson also runs the Slam Poetry Workshops which you can find more about here.

On 1st March, I went to the Wapping Project with Summer. Before we found it, we found a riverside beach. It was mid-afternoon. From there we could look up the river towards the city and the sun as it crept west. The litter, floating in an endless queue, was carried by the tide towards central. A boat of sorts hauled some kind of boat-trailer with a crate on it, again, west, and I thought: perhaps I could do that, drive crates down the Thames on boats, all I need to do is learn the correct terms. We walk down the riverside and Summer tells me about her thoughts on the Beatles and their persistent appeal to music fans around the world. For her, a myth of Englishness becomes imbued in the mediated image of the Beatles, cast off through global communications technologies, becoming evermore diluted by representation and reproduction. To get beyond this veil of fabricated meaning, visitors to England take trips to Abbey Road and Strawberry Fields. Perhaps here, in the singularity of these spaces, the aura can once again be felt, the truth somehow closer.Which brings us to the Wapping Project, which is a café/restaurant/art gallery in a redundant hydraulic power station which has held on to a portion of the machinery.

Beneath the throbbing streets of London lie 32 ‘ghost stations’ – echoing, cavernous spaces once filled with the roaring of approaching trains which now lie abandoned. Tiled ticket halls sit empty and unused, like archaeological finds sedimented over with time. Weaving corridors which neighbour busy, strikingly silent tube stations, steadily slide into the past.

The 17^th February last year saw 17 of these ‘ghost stations’ brought back to life by a group of ‘urban explorers’. The London Consolidation Crew emerged through Russell Street Station and wove through the labyrinthine tunnels of the sleeping stations. Prowling over ghostly platforms they scampered like giant rats across the tracks and eventually ended up face down on them at the hands of London police.

South-Londoner Barby Asante’s show aims to celebrate south London black music history whilst simultaneously preserving our thoughts and experiences of the area. The exhibition features objects and memorabilia such as old tape players, vinyls, radios, magazines and concert tickets, some of which Asante has put together and some which have been donated by the public for the duration of the exhibition. After navigating busy Peckham High Street, stepping into Peckham Space is an edifying experience and the exhibition just smacks of south London. With smart design from collective Åbäke there is something for everyone here, but what specifically caught my eye was a map of South London music venues adorned with people’s memories of the places. Memories of thinking ‘I’m cool’ at my first gig at the Amersham Arms came flooding back. If I’d wanted I could have texted them to a live printer and they would have been printed out and added to the map… but I don’t think I want that memory geographically locatable on the map; I still haven’t quite gotten over that night…

One of the founding objects of the South London Black Music Archive is a limited edition vinyl which was especially produced by Asante where young people from Leaders of Tomorrow (LOT) mentoring programme were asked to suggest ‘inheritance tracks’; essentially songs which inspire them. I caught up with Asante and managed to ask her about the exhibition and what her ‘inheritance track’ would be.