The jewel of the Funkhaus is Saal 1, a concert hall and recording studio that’s been built in concentric cherry wood circles with the performance space in the middle. A 54-piece organ climbs the walls of one half of the room. Shortly after its conception it was knocked down and rebuilt to take 0.6 seconds off the reverb. Andre de Ridder’s Stargaze orchestra opens with Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier, reimagining Beethoven and Fugazi. Saunier’s tattered rainbow straw hat and tasselled flares mark him as an eccentric, but there’s something mesmerising about watching a professional percussionist drop marbles on a Birchwood snare drum and scrape a credit card around a cymbal for 20 minutes. With curiosity as the bedrock, an intimate hallway session sees Irish hip-hop convince a 50-year-old man to “do the helicopter” with his T-shirt; a Finnish man then learns Italian in front of a live audience for seemingly no purpose. In Saal 6, Beth Meyer collaborates with Jason Treuting by breathing sharply in and out.

Where experimental interludes were received with eagerness and intrigue, the highlights across the two-days were special and raw moments. No musician is awarded the complacency of knowing how 95% of their material will be received – this isn’t a weekend of Justin Vernon playing ‘For Emma’ – you’d be lucky to hear a B-side. Bon Iver’s trumpeter, CJ Camerieri, airs a raucous set of electronic-brass demos with Ryan Olson, Ben Lanz and Kyle Resnick to a standing ovation. They say it’s for an album that’s coming soon with Sufjan Stevens. Resnick later plays an immense drone set in Monom, a spatial sound studio that blankets you entirely in noise. Above them in Alex Somers’s ‘Siblings Installation’, Gordi and Buck Meek initiate an ambient folk set with 36 amps.

When the studio sessions have finished, Big Red Machine play a thunderous European debut. It’s the one project that’s taken the PEOPLE platform to elevate a traditional album roll-out. Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner don’t let that interrupt the festival’s ethos though, bringing out Lisa Hannigan, The Staves, Kate Stables and more for a full band reformation. It’s as close to a headline set as the weekend sees. Earlier, you could catch the collaborators joking about, practicing the lyrics to ‘Gratitude’ – “well we better not fuck this up.”

On Sunday, Efterklang and Liima’s lawless brass-tinged dance collaboration sees Sinkane nearly breaking a drum kit or two. Angel Deradoorian and Beirut’s Zach Condon play an intense 20-minute drone set comprising only one note in a wall of sound. JT Bates repurposes some cans of Michelberger coconut water as guiros, ratcheting in different keys. A standout is the heart-wrenching tribute set to Lhasa de Sela led by Mina Tindle, Emma Broughton and friends, closing with Feist’s devastating interpretation of Lhasa’s ‘Fool’s Gold’, a song she wishes she’d written herself.