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, Cities Aviv and many others. Two-day tickets can be purchased here; their price is 60 EUR. “Duo tickets” are also available for 50 + 50 EUR. Single day tickets cost 40 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 musicmaking.”

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”. In a later publication this year, The Quietus also described Skaņu Mežs as “the most internationally recognised platform for experimental music in Latvia”.

Concerts of October 9 – a brief overview

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.

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”.

KMRU appears within the program as part of a special peek into the current music scene of Berlin, created in collaboration with Goethe-Institut Riga.

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.

Sofi: Latvian sound artist and performer. With a background that spans classical piano training and electroacoustic composition through live coding and the DJ scene, she has developed a distinctive approach to experimental electronic music that prioritises an open-source philosophy and creative live coding.

Sophia Djebel Rose: At the crossroads of folk, vocal performance, noise, and avant-garde songwriting, Sophia Djebel Rose creates a singular universe where the voice becomes a space of exploration and transfiguration.

During the two days of the festival, sound art installations by Erik Alalooga and Augustė Vickunaitė will be exhibited at “Hanzas Perons”. In between concerts, ModularTribe.riga will be giving soundwork performances in the foyer by the wardrobe.

The festival is supported by the State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia, Riga City Council, Goethe-Institut Riga, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, BALTA 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.

More detailed info can be found on www.skanumezs.lv

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpBdv-P9T74