Skaņu Mežs festival for adventurous music will host its 22nd edition on 4-5 October at concert hall Hanzas Perons (16a Hanzas street). 

 

Skaņu Mežs has been hailed as “the biggest experimental music festival in the Baltics”, and its stage will draw together adventurous musicians from many fields of music, including noise, contemporary music, electro-acoustics and free improvisation as well as hip-hop, metal and punk.

 

The first evening of the festival will feature the following performances:

 

Autechre (UK)

 

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.

 

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”). 

 

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

 

Fred Frith (United Kingdom, USA)

 

Fred Frith is a pioneer of the extended electric guitar. He learned to compose in Henry Cow, developed his song-writing skills in Art Bears, explored his multi-instrumentalism in Skeleton Crew, rocked the house with Massacre and is still doing all of those things, having been in one band or another continuously since 1964.

 

Meanwhile his work has been performed by ensembles, string quartets, chamber orchestras, and a whole range of groups and artists in the ever-expanding field of semi-popular music. Fred composes extensively for film and dance, and taught improvisation for years at Mills College in Oakland, California and the Musik Akademie in Basel, Switzerland. 

 

His passion for improvising, evident from the beginning, has increasingly led him to work with artists who don’t necessarily define themselves as improvisers. 2024 marks the 50th anniversary of Fred’s pioneering first  record, Guitar Solos, but this is his first ever visit to Latvia.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23SGT_XAt58

 

Charmaine Lee (Australia, USA)

 

Charmaine Lee (b. 1991) is an Australian vocalist based in New York. Using the voice, feedback, and live processing, Lee’s practice is primarily concerned with risk-taking, playfulness, and improvisation. She has been recognized as “extraordinary” by New Yorker and has been featured in New York Times, Washington Post, and Wire Magazine. As a composer, Lee has been commissioned by leading institutions including the International Contemporary Ensemble, Wet Ink Ensemble, and HBO Max. Lee is an Emergent Ventures winner (2024) and was an Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room (2019) and a Van Lier Fellow at Roulette (2021). 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swQpqZxp8bs

 

Vomir (France)

 

Romain Perrot (born 1973), better known by his stage name Vomir (French for “vomiting” or “regurgitate”), is a French noise music artist based in Paris.Since beginning his career in 1996, Vomir has appeared in over 300 releases, including singles, albums and collaborations with other noise artists. The majority of his albums were produced by his own independent label, Decimation Sociale. Vomir positions his approach to music as an “anti-” approach, with a radical and nihilist stance. He spearheads the harsh noise wall movement, an extreme subgenre of noise music which he describes as “no ideas, no change, no development, no entertainment, no remorse”.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y45d3HAHOaQ

 

Jennifer Walshe and Neil Luck (Ireland)

 

“The most original compositional voice to emerge from Ireland in the past 20 years” (“The Irish Times”) and “Wild girl of Darmstadt” (“Frankfurter Rundschau”), composer and performer Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin, Ireland. Her music has been commissioned, broadcast and performed all over the world. She has been the recipient of fellowships and prizes from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York, the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, the Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstadt and Akademie Schloss Solitude among others.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMlhFLFK1fQ 

 

Neil Luck is a composer based in the UK. His work often explores the pathos and interaction between live human performance and multimedia, and attempts to frame the act of music making as something curious, or weird, or useful, or spectacular in and of itself. Neil’s work takes a range of forms from music-theatre, to concert works, radio, public projects and recordings. He is the founder and director of the music-theatre ensemble ARCO; an experimental music-theatre company.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS7eRlv1E_I

 

2K88 (Poland)

 

2K88 — fka 1988, aka Przemysław Jankowiak — is a music producer, graphic designer, and audio director raised in the Poland of the 1990s and on the pioneering rap records of that time. The rawness, chunkiness, and paranoia he took from this period have always been an integral part of his music. They were there when he made his first homemade beats and stayed with him when, in the following years, he distanced himself from hip-hop, going deeper into the world of sampling experiments and the post-genre avant-garde. Later, he and Robert Piernikowski created the universe of the duo Syny – an irreal spectral/ontological phenomenon built out of memories, dreams, and bass, rap, dub, and smoke.

 

2K88 is an artist of the SHAPE+ platform for innovative music and interdisciplinary art, co-funded by the European Union and Pro Helvetia.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDZZJv7OGK0

 

Nick Klein (USA, Germany)

 

Nick Klein is an artist working in sound and art and sometimes sound art with a lean towards the social potential in those modalities as they interact. Klein has recorded a large amount of music and also has shown work in visual art contexts. Klein is uninterested in the prohibitive ideological tropes and circumstances that both contexts offer, and focuses the intent of his work on trying to see what productive energy comes from the friction between the two. Klein likes loud volume, cooking, offline community building, records, bars, synthesizers, and comedy. Klein is currently located in Berlin.

 

“The visceral sound of a Nick Klein record isn’t something that can be easily sourced or replicated,” writes “Miami New Times”. “This is due in part to Klein’s approach to texture, volume, and recording: In his hands, the medium becomes shaped by the material in an inescapable way.”

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faDNgIAZ8Vo 

 

Tintin Patrone (Philippines)

 

Tintin Patrone is a German-Filipino sound and performance artist who is captivated by the exploration of interconnections among music, art, sound, and experimental forms of expression. Her creative works revolve around the visual aspects of music and the ways in which personal and societal connections are established with it. By involving herself with robots and artificial intelligence in her artistic practice, Tintin Patrone challenges established notions of human subjectivity and physical presence. Using a trombone as her main instrument and modulation devices, she meticulously crafts soundscapes with sustained tones, inviting listeners into contemplative atmospheres.

 

https://soundcloud.com/stoffexyz/tintin-patrone-when-you-and-your-goat-find-bread-album-preview 

 

Skaņu Mežs is supported by State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia, Riga municipality, Danish Cultural Institute, Culture Ireland and Trust for Mutual Understanding. 

 

Skaņu Mežs is part of the SHAPE+ platform for innovative music and interdisciplinary art and sound art project “tekhnē”, both supported by the European Union and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia. SHAPE+ is also supported by Pro Helvetia.

 

2K88 is a SHAPE+ artist, while the new works by Nick Klein and Tintin Patrone are created as part of “tekhnē”.

Skaņu Mežs is also part of  festival networks NERDS (North European Resonance and Dissonance Society) and ICAS.

 

The festival collaborates with such local businesses as Mans Robots, Valmiermuiža, Laima, Staburadze, Augļu Serviss, Very Berry and Balta.

 

Media partners: The Quietus, TVNET, Satori, Rīgas Laiks, Ir, Radio NABA and Mūzikas Saule.

More info: www.skanumezs.lv