Riga, Latvia’s Skaņu Mežs festival for experimental music will happen on October 3-4 at Hanzas Perons (16A Hanzas Street). Fatboi Sharif and Kilbourne have been added to the festival lineup. Tickets can currently be purchased at www.ticketservice.lv for 55 EUR.
Fatboi Sharif
“There are plenty of rappers who fans claim “no one else is rapping like,” but this dignification is actually true of Sharif” – Rolling Stone
“No two songs are alike, but the fragmented verses and horror flick references from each one form a twisted mosaic of Lynchian strangeness, where nothing is too strange, sacred, or taboo.” – SPIN
Sharif doesn’t look at his performances with the traditional lens that a normal rapper does, but treats the live show as a spiritual experience where Sharif and the crowd become married through raging and serenity. With being inspired as a child by Nine Inch Nails, White Zombie, and Parliament Funkadelic, it’s hard to put Fatboi in a box. Grit over glamour is the name of his game. Production-wise, once he finds the right instrumental that speaks to him in his language, he’ll sit with it for a few weeks and sleep to it on repeat. He’ll dream and see certain visions, colours, and shapes that create an image on top of the production canvas. This keeps his music everlasting.
Lyrically, he’s inspired to paint pictures like Stephen King, Oliver Stone, Stanley Kubrick, Clive Barker, David Lynch, and Ernest Dickerson. A literature titan and comic villain-like figure, Fatboi is one of the most charismatic and embracing individuals you’ll have the pleasure of meeting.
Fatboi Sharif’s EP “Something About Shirley” with producer Roper Williams was named among the “50 Best Recordings of 2024” by The Wire Magazine.
Kilbourne
DJ and producer Ashe Kilbourne is a staple of American hardcore techno. Her DJ sets showcase an unrelenting drive and spontaneous selection, and she has toured widely across the Americas and Europe at venues such as Tresor, Defqon.1, and Boiler Room. After critically acclaimed releases on PRSPCT, Industrial Strength, and Evar Records, 2024 saw her launch Hammerhead, a label and party series showcasing the genre’s most psychedelic and brutal sounds.
In February 2025, Hammerhead released Kilbourne’s first full-length album, “If Not To Give A Fantasy”. Grace Byron of Pitchfork describes it as “a distillation of what makes hardcore so seductive: the opportunity to be annihilated, to enter a new hallucinatory realm” and “a welcoming portal into the feral magnetism of the alternative hardcore scene”. “Despite the constraints of the genre – gravity-force four-on-the-floor, bare drones,” writes Byron, “her take on the sound is never boring.”
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.”
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