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