“This is maybe my favorite interview of all the Ankea interviews,” Sami admits early in our conversation. “All the previous ones were all about promoting the festival, really hoping that people would come.” 

During the festival itself, there was little opportunity to stop and process what had been achieved. Now, however, the pressure has subsided enough for the organiser to look back at Ankea’s first edition with something approaching perspective. “And now this is like the reflecting,” he says. “It’s just really nice to sit here and think of what we’ve accomplished with the festival, which is pretty much what we were hoping to, and then also look ahead to the next edition, which is definitely happening in 2027.”

That sense of accomplishment was already visible when the festival opened its gates. Having 21 bands on the bill, with 14 coming from outside Finland and 13 of those flying into the country, naturally brought a certain amount of uncertainty. Flight cancellations and strikes had become familiar problems for festival organisers, so simply having everyone safely in Finland was something of a victory. But the satisfaction went beyond getting the artists there.

Sami recalls being particularly proud of how the Hiedanranta site came together. The former industrial environment, already filled with murals and street art, gave Ankea an identity that could not simply have been recreated anywhere else. The team then built the festival layout around that environment, making it possible to see the two stages immediately upon entering while still allowing the various bars and other elements to reveal themselves gradually. “The area looked exactly how we hoped it would look, but even better,” he says.

There was also a more personal side to that excitement. When I arrived early on the first day, one of the first people I encountered was Sami himself, visibly delighted to finally see the thing he had been working towards actually happening. He doesn’t remember the specific moment, but the feeling is easy to understand. One of the biggest surprises, however, was not something that could be seen on the festival site at all. It was what didn’t happen. Things ran smoothly.

For someone with many years of festival experience, that was apparently unusual enough to be memorable in itself. With enough people working on the site, Sami found that his phone wasn’t constantly demanding his attention. Instead, he could actually spend time with guests and experience some of the festival himself. That created one of the memories he expects to keep for a very long time.

On Saturday, just before Sylvaine‘s performance, Sami ran into Bruce Soord in the crowd. Soord had just finished his own solo performance but wasn’t heading back to a hotel or disappearing behind the scenes. He wanted to watch Sylvaine. His beer was also running out. “So I was like, ‘Dude, you want another beer?’” Sami recalls with a laugh. The two then watched the entire performance together, spending the hour talking about music, life, beer, the festival and artistry.

“For me, that was something I would never expect,” Sami says. “It’s rare to have those moments, because usually it’s like, you know, the phone rings or you’ve got to be somewhere, you’re late for something.” Instead, he found himself standing in the crowd with one of his musical idols, simply watching another artist perform. The moment also captures something that became increasingly apparent throughout the weekend: Ankea had developed an unusually communal atmosphere among its artists. Many performers stayed around after their own sets, watching other bands and meeting one another. Some even apparently felt the need to check beforehand whether they were allowed to remain at the festival after performing. “Still, they wanted to ask. They wanted to make sure,” Sami says.

For the organisers, this was partly a consequence of deliberate curation. The lineup wasn’t assembled simply as a collection of individual names. Musical connections between artists were considered, with the team actively looking for opportunities for musicians to cross paths. “We’re nerds,” Sami says. “We’re music lovers.” That attention to detail is one of the things that helped make Ankea feel less like a conventional festival and more like a gathering built around a particular musical community. The same philosophy extended to the audience experience.

Sami says one of the more unexpected discoveries was just how much time people were willing to spend at the festival — and how much they were willing to spend once they were there. Even by his considerable experience of organising different kinds of events, alcohol sales at a progressive metal/post-rock festival exceeded expectations. That did not translate into a visibly drunken crowd. Instead, people simply appeared willing to settle in for the entire day. A surprisingly large proportion of the audience was already present when the first act, Demonic Death Judge, took the stage on Friday afternoon. “We would see at least, I think we counted, one third of the people came to see them already,” Sami recalls. The implication is important: people weren’t necessarily treating Ankea as a festival where they could arrive for one or two big names. They were there to spend the day.

And apparently they were prepared to drink a lot of coffee while doing so. The coffee queues became something of a running joke during the weekend, at one point reportedly stretching longer than the beer queue. Sami admits that next year’s festival will need more than one coffee tent. The reason is also revealing: Ankea wasn’t simply selling basic filter coffee. The operation involved baristas making different kinds of drinks, and the audience clearly embraced it.

The festival’s deliberately relaxed approach also extended to its schedule. There were no overlapping performances, and even between sets the organisers left a few minutes for people to move around rather than forcing one performance to end at precisely the moment another began. For anyone who has spent a festival running between stages in an attempt to catch half of several sets, the difference was immediately noticeable. Sami  confirms that this is not something Ankea intends to abandon as it develops. “We gave them that possibility, and people seem to like it,” he says. “So that’s the way it’s going to be in ’27 as well.”

It is perhaps one of the clearest examples of what Ankea is trying to be: not bigger for the sake of being bigger, but more considered. That philosophy is also shaping the future.

During the second day of the festival, Ankea had already begun revealing the first names for its 2027 edition, and early-bird tickets had gone on sale during the festival itself. Sami says the initial response was considerably stronger than expected, giving the organisers confidence that the festival can continue developing. There is also an ambition for Ankea to become more than a single festival weekend. The organisers have already begun presenting concerts under the Ankea name, with the goal of bringing more international artists to Finnish venues. Part of that comes from recognising a familiar problem for anyone following international touring: Finland’s geographical position can make it an easy country for tours to skip. “Getting shows here sometimes requires us to persuade the booking agents to really, really think about it,” Sami says. For Ankea, that creates an opportunity. If the organisation can establish itself as a reliable home for a particular kind of music in Finland, it can potentially bring artists to the country who might otherwise not make the journey.

And while Sami remains deliberately cautious about revealing too much about the 2027 lineup, he does offer some tantalising hints. Several artists who were pursued for the inaugural edition are still on the wish list, including artists who have never played Finland or have not returned for many years. The ambition is also international in another sense. Ankea isn’t being built solely for a Finnish audience. The organisers want it to become a destination for people travelling to Finland specifically for the festival, while simultaneously giving the event a Nordic identity that distinguishes it from comparable festivals elsewhere in Europe. Perhaps the most encouraging sign, however, came from the audience itself.

Ankea conducted a customer survey asking attendees which artists they would like to see in the future. Of the five most requested artists, Sami says, offers had already been made to three. That is a striking level of alignment between what the organisers are trying to build and what their audience actually wants. It also says something about the particular nature of Ankea‘s audience. At a more mainstream Finnish festival, the most requested names might be predictable artists who already appear regularly on festival stages. At Ankea, the audience is specifically looking for artists they don’t expect to see elsewhere. And that may ultimately be the most convincing indication that the festival has found its place.

After spending so long building the idea of Ankea, Sami can finally look back at the first edition rather than forward to it. The result seems to have surprised him in some ways: the smoothness of the operation, the willingness of artists to stay and interact, the enthusiasm of the audience, the coffee queues and even the amount of beer consumed. But the most important thing appears to be that the festival actually felt like the thing the organisers had envisioned. And now there is a second edition to build.

“Now it looks like Ankea is here to stay,” Sami says.

Links