As music festivals continue to multiply across the summer calendar, the Big Chill has somehow retained its unique mix of left-field sounds, mellow hedonism and arty trimmings. Marking its 15th birthday this year, its eighth in Eastnor Castle’s idyllic deer park, the weekend’s festival treated about 30,000 people to glorious sunshine and an eclectic cultural menu. It opened earlier than usual on Thursday, with a film shoot for a low-budget zombie movie and a talk by Michael Lang, co-founder of the seminal Woodstock festival.

Since relocating to the rolling Herefordshire hills, the Big Chill has evolved into a kind of giant outdoor art gallery. This year’s range of sculptures included the charity collaboration Blank Canvas, an array of tents customised by Rachel Whiteread, Vivienne Westwood, Gavin Turk and others. There was also a helter-skelter lighthouse in the middle of Eastnor’s mini-lake, which proved far too tempting a destination for wild swimmers on Saturday afternoon, much to the annoyance of festival security staff.

Merging conceptual art with music, one of the weekend’s highlights was a rare live performance by the avant-garde video director Chris Cunningham, who cleverly synchronised abrasive electronic beats to rhythmic visual loops taken from his own nightmarish short films of dancing freaks and blood-smeared naked people punching each other repeatedly.

Intercut with footage from Star Wars and Adolf Hitler’s speeches, Cunningham’s sustained assault on the senses combined the visceral beauty of Francis Bacon with the undergraduate shock tactics of Jake and Dinos Chapman. It was certainly the most memorably extreme, and least chilled out, act.

Born out of club culture, the Big Chill is arguably the closest approximation available today of an acid house rave from 20 years ago. Indeed, some of the late-night DJ sets drew larger crowds than many of the main live acts. But the musical menu was more expansive than a rave, taking in world music, folk and jazz. Among the stand-out performers were the veteran jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and Chicago’s Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, both of whom have family connections to the legendary Sun Ra.

Star names are less important at the Big Chill than at more conventional rock festivals. That said, the choice of headliners was still impressive: the multicoloured disco-pop floorshow of Basement Jaxx on Friday, the gleaming techno modernism of Orbital on Saturday and the playfully cerebral art-funk of David Byrne on Sunday, the latter playing the last show in his acclaimed year-long tour. A suitably suave finale to the summer’s most sumptuously appointed left-field garden party.

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