Riga, Latvia’s Skaņu Mežs festival for adventurous music has participated in the White Night culture forum since its first iteration in Latvia.
This year’s free-entry White Night concert by Skaņu Mežs will take place at the Ave Sol concert hall (Citadeles Street 7, former St. Peter and Pavel Church) on September 6, starting at 20:00. The event is co-funded by the Riga City Council.
As always, the program will present adventurous music from the perspectives of various genres, including computer music and electro-acoustics, free improvisation, and sound art. Two performances will be audiovisual.
There will be eight performances overall:
20:00 EIII (Latvia)
20:50 Arttu Partinen (Finland)
21:30 Axel Dörner & Roger Turner (Germany/United Kingdom)
22:20 AWWWARA (Georgia)
23:10 Black to Comm – a/v show (Germany)
00:00 Jasmine Guffond (Australia/Germany)
00:50 Zein Majali – a/v show (Palestine/Jordan)
01:35 Eleonora Kampe (Estonia/Latvia)
“EIII” is an experimental electronic music project that blends sounds from everyday objects and environments with elements of contemporary electronic music, creating a deeply immersive and richly textured sonic experience.
“The Abstract Observer” music website writes thus: “Try this if you want to surf on fractured rhythms and distorted urgency. Layers of erratic synths and jarring percussive bursts mimic a nervous system on edge, creating an atmosphere both chaotic and hypnotic. Subtle modulations and ghostly textures surface just long enough to vanish, heightening the sense of unease.”
“UNDULATIONS”, EIII’s debut album, came out in 2024, with “REFRACTIONS” following in 2025 on Opal Tapes.
<a href=”https://opaltapes.bandcamp.com/album/refractions”>Refractions by EIII</a>
Arttu Partinen has performed solo under the moniker Amon Düde for around 15 years, recently also often under his own name. Partinen is one of the founding members of the beer trance / forest folk group Avarus that has done several extensive tours in Europe and the US. In addition to solo gigs, Partinen has done duos with, among others, Sami Pekkola (Taco Bells, Jooklo Finnish Quintet) and Pekka Airaksinen. He is also part of Hockey Night with Pekkola, Jaakko Tolvi (Taco Bells, Kiila, Pymathon, Jarse…) and Jonna Karanka (Kuupuu, Olimpia Splendid), combining tape collages, sound effects, toys, and free jazz. One of his earlier bands, Hetero Skeleton, which had a release on Load Records among others, is now on an indefinite hiatus. Since 2020, he has been operating the ARTSY label, with releases by, among others, Kraus, Natalia Beylis, Marcia Bassett, and Reynols. He has also been a key part of the Mental Alaska collective, organizing domestic and international experimental music concerts in Finland.
As sound sources, Partinen uses collapsing tape players, found tapes, his own recordings from several projects, nature sounds, human voice etc. Nowadays he also has a library of sounds by friends, which enables him to become the leader of a virtual band. The physicality of his performances makes him a kind of a full-body theremin, as every vibration has an effect on the music. The same goes also the other way, as the sounds in turn guide the body movements. Operating with tapes, coincidence always has a huge role, making each concert an endlessly dividing entity. The decaying equipment and aging human body also play a key role in this all.
Axel Dörner was born in Cologne, Germany. From 1983 to 1986, he studied trumpet with Jon Eardley in Cologne. From 1988 to 1989, he studied piano at the conservatory in Arnhem, Netherlands. From 1989 to 1994, he continued his studies of piano and trumpet (with Malte Burba) at the Academy of Music in Cologne.
He was a member of numerous bands and music groups. Since 2000, he has undertaken extensive concert tours on all five continents on a regular basis, which led to a worldwide cross-genre musical network with the most important musicians of our time. His discography currently includes more than 150 CDs / LPs. Since 2000 he has been working on an electronic extension of his music on the trumpet (together with Sukandar Kartadinata).
He has collaborated with well-known orchestras and ensembles and undertaken residencies at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (Japan) with Otomo Yoshihide and at EMS Stockholm (Sweden), among others.
Axel Dörner is one of the most unique interpreters of free improvisation. In the late 1990s, he developed a completely new language for the trumpet. Most of his ensembles are characterized by a non-hierarchical collaboration of the musicians involved.
Roger Turner has been working as an improvising drummer-percussionist since the early 1970s, collaborating in numerous international established and ad hoc configurations. He remains one of those players who have collectively redefined the language of contemporary percussion. Solo work, intense acoustic duo collaborations, work with electro-acoustic ensembles and open-form song, extensive work with dance and visual artists, plus specific jazz-based ensembles have brought collaborations with many of the most interesting European and international musicians and performers, from Annette Peacock to Phil Minton, Charles Gayle to Lol Coxhill, Derek Bailey to Seiichi Yamamoto, Alan Silva to Keith Rowe, Cecil Taylor to Yuji Takahashi, Josef Nadj to Min Tanaka, Toshinori Kondo to Roy Campbell, etc.
AWWWARA is a Georgian musical duo and record label consisting of Giorgi Koberidze and Levan Luka Nakashidze. It draws inspiration for contemporary music from Georgian instruments and folklore. The primary objective of the project is to explore novel techniques and expand the possibilities of local instruments. Therefore, the duo occasionally collaborates with additional instrumentalists of different kinds in an ensemble format. It is worth noting that out of deep reverence for Georgian musical folklore, AWWWARA strictly limits its interaction with it to the utilization of traditional instruments. The project abstains from incorporating melodies or samples from this rich musical heritage.
Over the course of 20 years, German artist Black To Comm aka Marc Richter has pushed the limits of and merged the aesthetics of art, conceptual installations, and music, coming in a wave of innovation alongside his peers Pita, Fennesz, Felicia Atkinson, and later Sarah Davachi, to name a few. His list of collaborations and commissions is long and impressive. Through it all, Richter, as Black to Comm, has challenged assumptions, explored identity, and confronted the concept of authorship itself. Black to Comm’s work investigating the bounds of originality, reinvention, and recontextualizing sounds of the past, in tandem with the growth and complications of AI, becomes ever more apropos and potent.
Australian artist and composer Jasmine Guffond moved to Berlin in 2023 and has since played a crucial role within the local and international scene.
As an electronic musician, she explores the intersection between sound, technology, and political infrastructures through live performances, recordings, and installations. Over the past decade, her sound art has engaged with surveillance cultures, using the sonification of data to reveal hidden digital processes such as facial recognition algorithms and internet tracking. These research-based artistic projects have created sonic platforms of experience to promote listening as a means of socio-political inquiry and to explore the contribution that embodied sound and listening can make to knowledge production.
Jasmine Guffond’s album “Alien Intelligence”, released in 2024, explores machine autonomy using Max/MSP programming and a modular Serge synthesizer – a process that challenges the supposed centrality of human subjectivity in socio-technical assemblages. Her 2025 album “Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity” is a poetic reversal of the traditional role of Muzak, which is designed to promote seamless productivity in the workplace. It sonically thematizes notions of efficiency and maximum productivity inherent in capitalist culture, as well as their negative effects, from the exploitation of labor to the consequences of overproduction for the environment. The album aims to create a space for reflection on the personal, global, and ecological benefits of slowing down.
Zein Majali is a Jordanian-Palestinian artist currently based in London, where she completed her MA in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art in 2022. Formerly an engineer and data analyst, she turned to the arts out of an urgency to archive and examine the accelerated cultural shifts in the Arab world. While her work touches on a post-colonial and globalized Middle East, her primary area of interest is the internet and its effects on both geopolitics and community.
Eleonora Kampe is a voice artist and an avant-garde singer living in Riga, Latvia. She started her journey as a vocalist in 2010. She uses her voice as a diverse musical instrument in various formats – voice in sound art, voice in installation, voice in free improvisation, voice in noise music, voice as the singer in an avantgarde blues duo. Her recent album “Breath. Play.” (released on Cruel Nature Records in February 2025) was featured in The Wire Magazine, Anxious Music Magazine, EX! Magazine and Audio Crackle Sound Art Blog and included in many radio shows presenting experimental sound works, including BBC Radio 3 show Late Junction. In May 2025 she released a site specific album “Balss un rezonanse” (released on Sapes Skaņas Records) – a voice art collection recorded at 6 different acoustically unique locations in Riga and focuses on the sound dialogue born between spatial resonance and human voice. Eleonora’s work can be experienced both as a solo artist and in collaborative projects that include Ringhold (avant blues duo with Kalle Tikas), Road To Saturn (abstract sound duo with Richard Thompson) and Tencu/eleOnora (abstract sound duo with Tencu).
Komentarai