Skaņu Mežs 2025

After its most successful edition in 2024, Riga, Latvia’s Skaņu Mežs festival has announced the dates for the next edition: Skaņu Mežs 2025 will happen on October 3-4 at Hanzas Perons (16A Hanzas Street), and tickets can be purchased for 55 EUR at www.bilesuserviss.lv. This festival edition is headlined by hyperpop singer and producer Sega Bodega, experimental rock band These New Puritans, iconic avant garde soprano Joan La Barbara and the duo of modern jazz stars Shabaka Hutchings and Hamid Drake.

Recap of 2024

Skaņu Mežs 2024 was the festival’s most well-attended edition so far. More importantly, it was fairly evenly attended across both central concert evenings, demonstrating the audience’s interest in taking in the event’s eclectic program as a whole.

Writing for The Wire, Peter Margasak described the festival as “arguably the most important experimental music festival in the Baltics”, echoing Geeta Dayal’s similar compliment from her review of Skaņu Mežs 2022 in the same magazine.

Daryl Worthington reviewed Skaņu Mežs for The Quietus and wrote thus: "Boldly curated [..] An extended journey through radical sound [..] Key to the event’s success is that the curators are not afraid to abruptly jump genre boundaries."

Victor Moreno reviewed Skaņu Mežs for the Spanish fashion and culture magazine Metal, and described it as “not only a destination for curious listeners but also a key fixture in the international experimental music scene.”

Finally, Linas Ramanauskas of Lithuania’s Ore.lt wrote that "Skaņu Mežs may still be one of the best festivals in the region, consistently fulfilling its mission to present relevant modern music."

First wave of artists

Each festival evening will have anchors that link its diverse program to traditional song structures and pop music in general - on October 3, the Chilean-Irish hyperpop singer and producer Sega Bodega will showcase his viscose and surreal songwriting, while, on October 4, the stylistically unpredictable English experimental rock band These New Puritans will present a show based on their new recording “Crooked Wing”. Both shows will be audiovisual.

Skaņu Mežs will continue its exploration of forward thinking hip-hop via the performance of eccentric rapper Fatboi Sharif. Of his music, Rolling Stone wrote the following: “There are plenty of rappers who fans claim “no one else is rapping like,” but this dignification is actually true of Sharif.”

Esteemed free jazz and free improvised music drummer Hamid Drake will return to Skaņu Mežs with multi-instrumentalist Shabaka Hutchings, hailed by Pitchfork as “one of the most celebrated jazz musicians of the past decade”.

Vocalist, composer and innovator in the field of contemporary music, Joan La Barbara may be the most venerable guest of this festival edition: having inspired a large body of work, including outright masterpieces by Morton Feldman and Robert Ashley, she has been hailed by the San Francisco Examiner as “one of the great vocal virtuosas of our time”.

Purveyor of heavy industrial dance music, Kilbourne will close the first evening of the festival with an extended set, hot on the heels of her critically acclaimed new album “If Not To Give A Fantasy”. The Wire Magazine’s Misha Farrant writes thus: “Relentlessly punishing dance music often feels so satisfying because it emulates a form of cathartic sonic self-harm or kink, pounding against the body and overwhelming it. [..] Kiloburne’s new album nods to the ability of hard dance, gabber and industrial techno to sonify such fantasies.”

A veteran of the Palestinian underground music scene, Muqata’a will close the second evening with an immersive and confrontational set, layering textures, rattling bass, and momentary torrents of broken beats, aimed to disrupt and destabilize.

You can read more about the artists of Skaņu Mežs 2025 by visiting the festival website.

Further acts, commissioned works, installations and workshops will be announced in the coming months.

The first confirmed supporters are the State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia, Riga municipality, Goethe-Institut Riga, Kulturkontakt Nord, the Trust for Mutual Understanding and “Valmiermuiža”.

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.

More info: www.skanumezs.lv

Tickets:https://ej.uz/SM2025

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1804325026989403

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U-3Hh7Zky8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTDMxDp2BOA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8N7hheAu4X8&t=12s

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1X9Q6kGwew

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4brv4_AvVQ