Festivāls Skaņu mežs 2026

Festivāls Skaņu mežs 2026

Pn 2026-10-09 - Sk 2026-10-11Hanzas Perons, Rīga
Experimental music festival Skaņu Mežs 2026
 
Riga’s experimental music festival Skaņu Mežs 2026 will take place on October 9–10 at Hanzas Perons (16A Hanzas Street), featuring such acts as Smerz, Krallice, aya, KMRU, Joe McPhee and many others. Two-day tickets can be purchased here; their price is 60 EUR. “Duo tickets” are also available for 50 + 50 EUR.  
 
About the festival
 
The Wire Magazine, previously having hailed Skaņu Mežs as the biggest avant-garde music festival in the Baltic states, focused the review of its 2025 edition on its informed and open-minded audience: “There is nothing this audience can’t handle,” wrote Daniel Spicer.

Last December, British radio station BBC Radio 3 aired a two-hour show, devoted to the festival. Music journalist Tom Service said: “Skaņu Mežs casts its net as generously as possible over the vast and thrilling terrains of new music-making.”

Meanwhile, Daryl Worthington of The Quietus described the festival as “a weekend of stunning performances”, “a space of radical sound and vision”, and “a world of deviant and defiant art”.

Brief overview of the program
 
Krallice: Krallice is a metal band from New York, USA. They play an experimental, highly technical style of black metal. Krallice was formed by Colin Marston and Mick Barr in 2007. They later recruited Lev Weinstein on drums and Nicholas McMaster on bass and as a second vocalist. "Where there was virtuosity, there was no glibness,” The New York Times wrote of their live performance.
 
Smerz: Smerz is the Norwegian duo of Henriette Motzfeldt and Catharina Stoltenberg, based in Oslo and Copenhagen. Using collages to capture moments of everyday life and dreams, Smerz tell stories lived and imagined – of apathy, loneliness, and internal monologue, love, and friendship.  Music criticism website Pitchfork rated their album “Big City Life” 8.6 out of 10, describing it as “so effective that you have to wonder what kind of witchcraft they’re working with”.  
 
aya: aya is a human musician from the Pennine region of the North Atlantic. Her work is primarily concerned with the transfigurative power of experience and memory on the physical body. Her most recent album, “hexed!”, earned her huge critical acclaim: it was ranked #1 in the year‑end best‑recordings lists of both The Quietus and The Wire, and it also received a 9.0 rating from Pitchfork.
 
KMRU: Joseph Kamaru, aka KMRU, is a Nairobi-born, Berlin-based sound artist whose work is grounded in the discourse of field recording, noise, and sound art. His releases have received widespread critical acclaim: the 2020 Editions Mego classic album “Peel” was named one of Pitchfork’s “100 Best Albums of the 2020s So Far,” and The Guardian (2022) noted him as ”one of the leading ambient artists working today”.
 
Joe McPhee, John Edwards, Klaus Kugel: Joe McPhee is an American multi‑instrumentalist born in 1939 in Miami and raised in Poughkeepsie, best known for his work in free jazz from the late 1960s onward. McPhee has since become a central figure in creative music, performing internationally and releasing a large, influential body of work across solo projects, small groups, and long‑running collaborations. He will be joined onstage by leading German free jazz drummer Klaus Kugel, and by long-time friend of the Skaņu Mežs festival – British upright bass player John Edwards. 
 
Gudrun Gut: Gudrun Gut has been active in the Berlin music scene and has been a part of various bands and projects since 1979 (Mania D., Einstürzende Neubauten, Malaria!, Matador, Davies/Gut, Greie Gut Fraktion, Gut und Irmler, Monika Werkstatt, solo as Gudrun Gut). In 2019 she received the ‘Listen to Berlin Award’ for the promotion and development of the Berlin music scene.  
 
Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals: Baltimore, MD-based hip-hop experimentalists Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals' music is a masterfully executed expression of ferocity and joy. Infinity Knives’ precise control over the cleverly formed layers of melody and harmony provides a relentlessly inventive backdrop for Brian Ennals' righteous poetry of vitriol, rage, philosophy, humour, and myth-making. 
 
Oren Ambarchi & Daniel O’Sullivan play Charlemagne Palestine: Oren Ambarchi and Daniel O’Sullivan present a special duo rendering of Palestine’s “KKAARREENNIINNAA.” Originally recorded in 1997 at Galerie Donguy in Paris and released on David Tibet’s Durtro label, it is a cornerstone of Palestine’s continuous music canon. Composed for harmonium and voice, it draws on the meditative unfolding of Hindustani raga, the intensity of cantorial chant, and Palestine’s singular approach to sustained, immersive sound.
 
Michael Foster, Leila Bordreuil, Chris Corsano: American free improvising musicians Michael Foster and Leila Bordreuil have been playing together for nearly 20 years. They will be joined onstage by Chris Corsano, hailed as “one of the world’s great drummers” by The Guardian. 
 
Augustė Vickunaitė: Vickunaitė is a Lithuanian sound artist based in Belgium and Lithuania, with a background in physics, using reel-to-reel tape recorders to play, record, and create sound installations, articulating diverse layers of recordings including found material, field recordings, voice, musical instruments, objects, and the whole spectrum of malfunctions of decaying technology. 
 
Ship Sket: Ship Sket is Josh Griffiths. Originally from Dorset, he’s lived in Manchester for seven years and forged his own path within the city’s welcoming and close-knit music scene, arriving on Planet Mu with his debut album “InitiatriX”. “It harks to a moment after the synthesis of Aphex Twin and before the advent of Calvin Harris, when electronic experimentalism and danceability did not feel so mutually exclusive. Its songs are challenging without being overly cerebral and idiosyncratic without feeling inscrutable,” writes Archie Forde of Pitchfork. 
 
The festival is supported by the State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia, Riga City Council, Goethe-Institut Riga, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, and Valmiermuižas Alus.
Skaņu Mežs is part of the sound art project tekhnē, supported by the European Union and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia. The festival is also part of the NERDS network, co-funded by the Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture.

Media partners include The Quietus, TVNET, Satori.lv, Radio NABA, Arterritory, magazine “Mūzikas Saule”, and la.lv.
 

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