Riga, Latvia’s Skaņu Mežs festival for experimental music will happen on October 3-4 at Hanzas Perons (16A Hanzas Street). On the first evening, Irish-Chilean music producer, singer, songwriter, and DJ Sega Bodega will give an audiovisual performance. Tickets can currently be purchased at www.ticketservice.lv for 55 EUR.
Salvador Navarrete has always created space for things to exist in curious friction. The release of his 2020 debut album Salvador and its successor, Romeo, introduced a reinvention of dance music driven by a kind of dream logic which addled the mind but made sense to the body. Even when he stretches synths to their gleaming extremes, striving toward a vision of a future we haven’t caught up with, his voice is still tender and undefined like the outline of a memory.
Navarrete’s ambitions aren’t easily contained. His irreplicable sound has been woven into the production of pop disruptors including Eartheater, Caroline Polachek, Zebra Katz and Shygirl, on her Mercury Prize-nominated record Nymph. Alongside co-founding the underground music collective NUXXE and contributing production to Björk and Rosalía’s collaborative single Oral, he has also formed the project Kiss Facility with Emirati-Egyptian artist Mayah Alkhateri – yet another avenue of his expression. In his career, he has known lifetimes; the challenge he rises to for his third album is to contain a lifetime in a single night and day.
Dennis, his latest full length album, arrived following an experience of mania. During a turbulent time in his personal life, the toll it took manifested itself in spikes of euphoria, sleepless nights, and surrender to impulse. The difference between ‘reality’ and this mind-altered state felt paper-thin. “The intention with this album was to create a feeling of being as disoriented as I was for the past couple of years,” he shares. The experience made Navarrete interrogate what we believe to be ‘reality’: “With AI and technology moving as fast as it is, I can imagine the possibility of making ‘worlds’ with ‘people’ inside who don’t know they’re not real. Who’s to say that I’m not already one of them?”
Dennis explores the experience of a day in which you can’t be sure you woke up at all. Each song blends into the next as you sink deeper into REM sleep. Even in slumber, your brain is animated by the synaptic sparks between nerve cells that mimic wakefulness. Breathing becomes fast and irregular. Your heart rate and blood pressure increase. Your eyes move rapidly behind closed lids. You dream. Dennis is a translation of how this feels.
Sega Bodega’s records have always lent themselves to introspective listening as easily as they fill dancefloors, but with Dennis, the intention is to go harder: this is a club record to lose yourself in. Adulter8 begins with the tinker of an 8-bit alarm clock before spiriting you away into a dazzling, drop-heavy floor filler; voices emerge into the light before receding back into the dark from which they came. And Elk Skin, which calls on vocalist Cecile Believe, is a dislocating blend of euphoric highs, Mediterranean guitar rhythms, and subterranean chanting. The editing of Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018), disorientating and abruptly shifting, influenced the sonic whiplash of this album.
Skaņu Mežs festival for adventurous music and art, has been running in Riga, Latvia, for more than 20 years. It’s been referred to by The Wire Magazine as “the biggest avant-garde and experimental music festival in the Baltics”.
As of this moment, the other artists announced for the 2025 edition are experimental pop music group These New Puritans, a duo of jazz multi-instrumentalist Shabaka Hutchings and drummer Hamid Drake, and iconic avant-garde vocalist Joan La Barbara.
Tickets can be purchased here.
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