Comunité Festival review: A panacea for the January blues

Not much beats escaping the UK for the Mayan riviera in the dead of winter, except maybe doing so in the exalted company of Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Auntie Flo and James Holden

It's only a very special festival that, after 15 uninterrupted hours on my feet, could put as committed a fan of dry underwear as me in a good enough mood to consider an unprepared-for al-fresco swim, let alone make me go through with it. A combination of setting, crowd, lineup, timing and weather, however, elevated the third edition of Comunité Festival, which took place near Tulum, in eastern Mexico's Yucatán region on the first weekend in January, into just that goldilocks zone of specialness – diving headlong into one of the festival site's natural cenote pools wound up feeling like the only reasonable way to end a near-perfect day, rather than the regretful result of a few too many mezcals.

This was my first time at Comunité, and it had the distinct feeling a festival coming into its own, ironing out minor issues with previous editions, and setting course for a long, successful future. Organisationally there seemed to be very few hitches – no mean feat when ferrying artists, journalists and 2,500 ticket-holders into and then back out of an isolated patch of jungle over the lion's share of 24 hours. And the festival's latest location – its third in three years – was a delight to explore, with its three stages (Solar, Lunar, and Jungle, in order of size) linked by relatively lengthy jungle pathways and no fewer than three majestic cenotes (large sinkholes formed centuries ago that are one of the region's most celebrated aesthetic features) dotted around to take a time out at when needed.

Comunité kicked off at 10pm on Friday night – we arrived soon after the gates opened and headed for the "main" Solar stage, where the revered American producer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, above – in Tulum at the invitation of Sally Montes's Aki Aora artist residency – was commanding her modular synth and singing through a head-worn microphone, sending beautiful, incantation-like curlicues of sound out into the warm night air. Glasgow's Brian D'Souza, aka Auntie Flo, below, followed her with a DJ set of Latin and African-influenced electronics that started with Jorge Reyes and Antonio Zepeda's beautiful "Wawaki" and ended with "Dance of the Conch", an excellent new production of D'Souza's own forthcoming on one of Optimo's labels.

Down at the Jungle stage at the same time, meanwhile, the Venezuela-born, Berlin-based DJ/producer Uchi was turning in a set of startlingly dark, esoteric noise; as I arrived she was dropping Christoph de Babalon's "Dead (Too)", a track I last heard coming out of my own stereo speakers sometime in 1998. It was one of many moments that pointed up the amazing breadth of Comunité's programming, not to mention the minor miracle that such an event can survive and thrive a stone's throw from the worst spring-breaker excesses of Cancún and Playa del Carmen.

The Jungle Stage seemed a curious addition at first – much smaller than Solar or Lunar, it was stuck down a relatively obscure path away from the festival's main drag and had no horizontal dance floor, but rather a dusty, rutted 45-degree incline that led all the way down to the lip of the stage. We soon found that watching from above was the more enjoyable, calf-muscle-friendly option there, and in Uchi, Bucharest's Aleksa Alaska, and the German-Chilean Cómeme label boss Matias Aguayo (whose wonderful set peaked, as all sets that feature it tend to, with MMM's "Nous Sommes"), it ended up hosting some of the festival's most enjoyable moments.

All three stages were open constantly from late Friday night until Saturday afternoon; curiously the larger Lunar and Solar's respective best moments seemed to come at times at odds with their names. As the night wore on we repeatedly returned to the Solar stage and were rewarded with two standout live sets: the joyous, physical and sometimes downright sexual Cuban group Dayme Arocena, above, followed by James Holden and the Animal Spirits, below, who played the gorgeously swirling, astral electronic jazz of their eponymous debut LP.

As the dawn began to break, Carl Craig, below, easily the most straightforwardly famous name on the bill, played a two-hour DJ set that concluded with a faintly ridiculous but undeniably enjoyable minimix-cum-meltdown that made stops at the Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams" and Octave One's "Black Water" amid a barrage of hits that could be conservatively described as "singalong".

From there on in the Lunar stage was the place to be. The German producer Lawrence heralded the arrival of the sun with an almost inevitable but nonetheless rapturous airing of Larry Heard's "The Sun Can't Compare", while Mexico's own Murcof – who I last saw play in his native Tijuana a full 16 years ago – played an entrancing ambient set as we sat and basked on a little wooden mezzanine opposite the stage. The looping techno of Bucharest's Rhadoo held our attention for a half hour or so afterwards, but by that stage chatting and enjoying the sunshine had become a more pressing priority than dancing, and we opted to drift around the site doing that rather than stick with one particular performance.

All of which brought us up to the happy, sun-dappled haze of early afternoon on Saturday and the joy of a deeply unexpected dive into the perfectly clear, cool water of one of the cenotes – by far the loveliest end to a festival I've ever known, although the usual trudge back to one's quarters in the company of a mounting sense of dread admittedly doesn't offer much competition. The indisputable excellence of the main event ensured my time at Comunité 2018 was one of the best festival experiences of my life. The food (special shouts to the very different but both very incredible Taquería Honorio and Arca restaurants), weather, people and fascinating Mayan history of the Yucatán region, plus the occasional indulgent glance at a London weather forecast, made it one of the best weeks, full stop.

Photographs: Alejandro Puente / Aleks Sol / Maria Leyva