Skaņu Mežs 2025: second evening
Skaņu Mežs 2025 will happen on October 3-4 at Hanzas Perons (16A Hanzas Street). The evening of
October 4 is headlined by 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. Two-day tickets cost 55 EUR, and single-day tickets cost 35 EUR. Both are available at
www.bilesuserviss.lv.
Twice now - in 2022 and in 2024 - “The Wire Magazine” has described Skaņu Mežs as the main experimental music festival in the Baltics.
The stylistically unpredictable English experimental rock band These New Puritans will present an audiovisual show based on their new recording “Crooked Wing”, hailed by “The Quietus” as “Another masterpiece from this most singular of groups”.
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.”
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 at disrupting and destabilising. Producer KAVARI, hailed by Aphex Twin as the creator of “some of the most brilliant, most interesting kicking electronic music,” will play a live show on the same evening.
The US noise music scene will be represented by duo HARPY, comprising musical/performance artists Gyna Bootleg and Pippi Zornoza, who have been pushing at the boundaries of the extreme music underground for a quarter of a century.
Upright bass player Laine Luīze Freidenberga will give the world premiere of Ernests Vilsons’ work “all else erased”.
"Atmospherically dark chamber music [...] the melody is lyrical, rich in emotion, and danceable,” writes Latvian music critic Aiga Leitholde of the heavy music band Pamirt, who will be among the festival’s closing acts.
Discourse program
Alongside the main program, the festival will host a series of 8 free lectures and masterclasses, open to all interested participants.
These educational events will be led by festival artists, including Joan La Barbara, Muqata’a, Hamid Drake, and publicist Freddie Hudson, who will guide emerging musicians in writing about their creative work, and many others. The sessions are scheduled for September 30, October 2, and October 3. More info about all 8 activities can be found on the festival website.
Additional exhibitions
More info on Margrieta Griestiņa’s picture exhibition and Richie Culver’s video work “I Trust Pain” is coming soon.
The festival is supported by 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. The festival is also part of the NERDS network, co-funded by the Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture.