Riga, Latvia’s Skaņu Mežs festival for adventurous music will host its 22nd edition on 4-5 October at concert hall Hanzas Perons (16a Hanzas street). The event will be headlined by iconic electronic music duo Autechre, who will play on the first evening, and abstract hip-hop group Armand Hammer, comprised of billy woods and ELUCID, who will play on the second night.

 

Tickets can be purchased at www.bilesuserviss.lv. Festival ticket price is 50 EUR, and it grants entry to the concerts of October 4-5.

 

 

Autechre are an English electronic music group consisting of Rob Brown and Sean Booth, both natives of Rochdale, Greater Manchester. Formed in 1987, the duo are one of the most prominent acts signed with Warp Records. Their music has exhibited a gradual shift in aesthetic throughout their career, from their earlier work with clear roots in techno, electro and hip hop to later albums that are often considered more experimental in nature, featuring complex patterns of rhythm and subdued melodies.

https://autechre.bandcamp.com/album/nts-session-1 

 

The Autechre live experience is a classically pitch-dark mind-warping audio affair. Meaning, their live shows have been held entirely in the dark for the last ten years or so. 

 

Autechre have been described as “iconic” (“Resident Advisor”), “wildly influential” (“Mixmag”) and “unmatched experimental pioneers” (“Fact Magazine”). 

 

In 2022, “The Guardian’s” Ammar Kalia reviewed a live show by Autechre, and concluded the text with the following words: “Autechre ultimately create an imaginative music of their own, bombarding their stationary crowd with vibrational movement. By foregoing the percussive backbeat that anchors almost all modern popular music, they leave us unmoored in rhythm, like the cacophony of the club without its dancefloor intermingling. Instead, this is a futuristic music made of sonic ruins – fragments unearthed from the darkness and left ringing in our ears as we go off into the night.”

 

 

The Washington Post have called Armand Hammer “underground rap legends”, and music criticism website The Quietus said the following of their latest full-length album: “It’s a record of flabbergasting sonic diversity and lyrical depth and complexity – an LP that is at once ardently a work of ‘traditional’ hip-hop, and an outlier that extends and deepens the blurred margins that sit beyond the music’s usually accepted borders. [..] Meticulously structured yet fuzzily abstract, cloudily claustrophobic yet aurally vast, it sounds nothing like a traditional rap LP yet definably and definitively adheres to the most crucial characteristics of the genre. It’s certainly a marvel and may well be a masterpiece.”

 

Armand Hammer, the groundbreaking NYC rap duo of ELUCID and Billy Woods, released its eighth studio album, We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, out September 29th via Fat Possum Records. The duo’s latest project arrived two and a half years after Haram, their labyrinthine collaboration with The Alchemist, and was introduced with their lead single "Trauma Mic" featuring Pink Siifu. Produced by DJ Haram, the duo's visceral new track "snowballs," Armand Hammer describes, "except instead of snow it’s a neodymium magnet cascading down a mountain of discarded pig iron."

 

Following Haram, We Buy Diabetic Test Strips is an entirely different beast, incorporating live instrumentation and featuring an array of producers including JPEGMAFIA, EL-P, Kenny Segal, DJ Haram, Black Noi$e, Preservation, August Fanon, Steel Tipped Dove, Child Actor and Sebb Bash. Holding true to the sonic identity they've successfully cultivated since their 2013 debut, familiar faces like Pink Siifu, Moor Mother, and Curly Castro make contributions, while also bringing new and like-minded peers into the fold, with features from Junglepussy, Moneynicca (of Soul Glo) and Cavalier. Virtuoso jazz musician and celebrated composer Shabaka Hutchings shows up on flute, one of several musicians who sat down with ELUCID and celebrated engineer Willie Green for a jam session in 2022 that helped pour the foundation of this album. 

 

 

Skaņu Mežs is a member of the SHAPE+ platform for innovative music and audiovisual art as well as the project tekhnē, supported by the European Union and the Latvian Ministry of Culture.
Skaņu Mežs festival is supported by the State Cultural Capital Fund, Riga City Council, the Latvian Ministry of Culture, Goethe-Institut Lettland, Trust for Mutual Understanding, and the Nordic Culture Point. Sponsors of the festival are Valmiermuiža and Very Berry.

Skaņu Mežs is a member of the international network ICAS (International Cities of Advanced Sound) and the Northern European music festival network NERDS (North European Resonance and Dissonance Society).