Festivāls Skaņu mežs 2026

Skaņu Mežs 2026 Announces Second Wave of Artists

Riga’s experimental music festival Skaņu Mežs 2026 will take place on October 9–10 at Hanzas Perons (16A Hanzas Street). In addition to the previously announced artists, four more acts now expand the program: Norwegian anti-pop duo Smerz, Lithuanian sound artist Augustė Vickunaitė, British experimental electronics producer Ship Sket, and the festival’s “guest of honour” – veteran free jazz saxophonist Joe McPhee with bassist John Edwards and drummer Klaus Kugel. Two-day tickets can be purchased here; their price is 60 EUR. “Duo tickets” are also available for 50 + 50 EUR with promo code: DUOTICKET.

All SM 2026 artists, announced previously: Krallice; aya; Gudrun Gut; Charlemagne Palestine, Oren Ambarchi & Daniel O’Sullivan; Michael Foster, Leila Bordreuil & Chris Corsano; Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals. For info on the first artist wave, please, visit the festival website. 

Smerz (NO)

Smerz is the Norwegian duo of Henriette Motzfeldt and Catharina Stoltenberg, based in Oslo and Copenhagen. The duo released their sophomore album, “Big City Life”, on May 23, 2025 through Danish label Escho.

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. Smerz operates at the intersection of genres, drawing inspiration from compositional techniques in classical music, the experimentation of computer music, and the immediacy of pop music, in the palettes of girly existentialism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzEzE3cpuvg&list=RDLzEzE3cpuvg&start_radio=1 

Notable past performances include Tate Modern, MOCA Geffen, Berghain, Volksbühne, MIRA Festival with Weirdcore, KODE with the Norwegian National Company of Contemporary Dance, and Club To Club. From their choir performance at the MUNCH Museum to fashion runway soundtracks, throughout their work, Smerz have been known for their ability to navigate and create new sonic worlds.

Music criticism website Pitchfork rated “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”. The album was also included in “Best Recordings of 2025” lists by The Wire Magazine and The Quietus. 

Ship Sket (UK)

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”. He has released EPs on Sidechains, Heel-Zone, SZNS7N, Modern Trips, Unguarded, and Illegal Data, and collaborated with Alza54 and Seychelles, as well as self-releasing his own drill, grime, pop, and rap edits on his own label Hdmurder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIAACKZdiBg&list=RDjIAACKZdiBg&start_radio=1 

“The tunes don’t meander or drag – important for an artist who approaches experimentalism with the crowd-conscious sensibility of more mainstream electronic subgenres,” writes Archie Forde of Pitchfork. “InitiatriX is not Overmono or Sammy Virji danceable, but more like “Drukqs” danceable. 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.”

At the end of 2025, DJ Mag included Ship Sket in the article “Six emerging artists you need to hear”. 

Joe McPhee, John Edwards, Klaus Kugel (US/UK/DE)

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. He began on trumpet at age eight and played in school and U.S. Army bands before expanding to saxophones, flugelhorn, and valve trombone, eventually teaching himself saxophone in his early thirties after encountering the music of Coltrane, Ayler, and Coleman. His first recorded appearance was on Clifford Thornton’s “Freedom and Unity” in 1967, marking the start of a career defined by emotional intensity, conceptual depth, and a continual search for new sonic possibilities. 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. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuGPtZ-e6rs 

John Edwards (born 1964 in London) is a central figure in European free improvisation, known for a fiercely physical double‑bass style and a vast range of extended techniques. Active since the late 1980s, he has become a core presence in the UK and European scenes, performing with Phil Minton, Maggie Nichols, Evan Parker, Roscoe Mitchell, Louis Moholo-Moholo, Mark Sanders, Caroline Kraabel, John Butcher, Pat Thomas, and many others, and playing an extraordinary 150–200 concerts a year, making him one of the most active improvising bassists of his generation.

He is a long-standing friend of the Skaņu Mežs festival, and has performed here with Wadada Leo Smith, Charles Gayle, Peter Brötzmann, Mark Sanders, Roger Turner, and Steve Noble, as well as solo.

“I think John Edwards is absolutely remarkable: there’s never been anything like him before, anywhere in jazz.” – Richard Williams, “The Blue Moment”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyrOSnuKwLE&list=RDxyrOSnuKwLE&start_radio=1 

“Drummer Klaus Kugel is one of Central Europe’s busiest and most articulate modern jazz drummers… he treads the boundary between inside and outside playing in a particularly incisive way; always listening and never getting caught up in his own considerable chops.” – Dave Wayne, “AllAboutJazz”, USA

Klaus Kugel studied at the School of Jazz in Munich. Since 1989, he has attracted attention worldwide through projects with Steve Swell, Sabir Mateen, Peter Evans, William Parker, Bobby Few, Roy Campbell, Jemeel Moondoc, Marco Eneidi, Mars Williams, Charles Gayle, Conny Bauer, Ken Vandermark, Knox Chandler, Mark Tokar, Christopher Dell, Herb Robertson, and many others. Over the past 30 years, he has given numerous concerts and appeared at festivals throughout Europe, the Baltic States, Canada, the USA, Syria, Japan, Mexico, Russia, China, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Israel.

Augustė Vickunaitė (LT/BE)

Augustė 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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hHbO63sboQ&list=RD4hHbO63sboQ&start_radio=1 

She has performed solo since 2016 and has played in various cities in Europe. 

Vickunaitė performs at Skaņu Mežs as part of the sound art project tekhnē, co-funded by the EU and the Latvian Ministry of Culture.

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.

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