Riga, Latvia’s Skaņu Mežs festival for adventurous music will host its 22nd edition on 4-5 October at concert hall Hanzas Perons (16a Hanzas street). Having previously announced the participation of Autechre, Armand Hammer and Fred Frith, the festival has added five more acts to its line-up. Tickets can be purchased at www.bilesuserviss.lv. Festival ticket price is 50 EUR.
The Body & Dis Fig (October 5)
“One of heavy music’s most interesting bands”
— “Rolling Stone” on The Body
“Extreme-metal titans”
—“Pitchfork” on The Body
“Dis Fig’s presence here is transformative.”
—“Resident Advisor” on Dis Fig’s previous projects
The Body & Dis Fig are a natural pair. Each has pioneered instantly recognizable worlds of sound all their own that defy any traditional categorizations or boundaries. The Body, Lee Buford and Chip King, continually challenge any conventional conception of metal, collaborating with myriad artists and from the folk-leanings of their work with BIG|BRAVE to their groundbreaking work with the Assembly of Light Choir to the intensity of their collaborations with OAA or Thou. Dis Fig, aka Felicia Chen, pushes electronic music into dark extremes, from warped DJ sets to avant production, from being a member of Tianzhuo Chen’s performance-art series TRANCE to being the vocalist with The Bug. The Body and Dis Fig find kinship in reimagining what it means to make “heavy music”. Their debut Orchards of a Futile Heaven, published by Thrill Jockey, is the perfect synthesis of two forces, twisting melodicism and intoxicating rhythms, layering a dense miasma of distortion with intense beats and a soaring voice clawing its way towards absolution.
Jennifer Walshe & Neil Luck (October 4)
“The Irish composer Jennifer Walshe nails down, better than any artist I know, the antic, raucous, confessional, sordid, semi-sublime texture of modern digitized life. At the age of forty-six, she has established herself not only as a composer but also as an electrifying vocalist, a sly comedian and storyteller, a fertile maker of videos and visual art.”
—Alex Ross on Jennifer Walshe for “The New Yorker”
“From pieces built on the splutters and falters of human speech to adding virtual pop stars to contemporary music, welcome to the world of the composer and Arco ensemble and squib-box founder.”
—Robert Barry on Neil Luck for “The Quietus”
“The most original compositional voice to emerge from Ireland in the past 20 years” (“The Irish Times”) and “Wild girl of Darmstadt” (“Frankfurter Rundschau”), composer and performer Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin, Ireland. Her music has been commissioned, broadcast and performed all over the world. She has been the recipient of fellowships and prizes from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York, the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, the Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstadt and Akademie Schloss Solitude among others. Recent projects include TIME TIME TIME, an opera written in collaboration with the philosopher Timothy Morton, and The Site of an Investigation, a 30-minute epic for Walshe’s voice and orchestra, commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland. The Site has been performed by Walshe and the NSO, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and also the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra. Walshe has worked extensively with AI. ULTRACHUNK, made in collaboration with Memo Akten in 2018, features an AI-generated version of Walshe. A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance, her third solo album, released on Tetbind in 2020, uses AI to rework canonical works from early Western music history. A Late Anthology was chosen as an album of the year in “The Irish Times”, “The Wire” and “The Quietus”. Walshe is currently professor of composition at the University of Oxford.
Neil Luck is a composer based in the UK. His work often explores the pathos and interaction between live human performance and multimedia, and attempts to frame the act of music making as something curious, or weird, or useful, or spectacular in and of itself. Neil’s work takes a range of forms from music-theatre, to concert works, radio, public projects and recordings. He is the founder and director of the music-theatre ensemble ARCO; an experimental music-theatre company. ARCO has been commissioned to produce work for arts institutions, galleries and music institutions around the UK and overseas. Independently, he has also worked with and written for people and ensembles in the UK and abroad, and presented work at music venues, festivals, and galleries internationally including Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Venice Biennale, ICA, Whitechapel Gallery, MATA Festival (New York), BBC Proms, Palais de Tokyo (Paris), BBC Proms, London Contemporray Music Festival, and Tokyo Experimental Festival. His music has been released on several labels including Entr’acte, Nonclassical, and Accidental Records. From 2022-2023 Neil was a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart, Germany). In 2024 he will be in residence at Mahler Lewitt studios (Spoleto, Italy), and at Kinosaki Arts Centre (Japan). He is currently professor of Experimental Music Performance at the Royal College of Music, London.
Raven Chacon (October 5)
Pulitzer prize winning composer and experimental musician Raven Chacon was set to perform at Skaņu Mežs last year, yet he could not attend due to personal reasons. In the meantime, he has been awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, the “Genius Grant”, and will perform at Skaņu Mežs 2024 as one of the most highly regarded – and awarded – American experimental musicians of our time.
Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. His work ranges from chamber music to experimental noise to large scale installations, produced solo and with the Indigenous art collective Postcommodity. At California Institute of the Arts Chacon studied with James Tenney, Morton Subotnick, Michael Pisaro and Wadada Leo Smith developing a compositional language steeped in both the modernist avant-garde and indigenous cosmologies and subjectivities. He has written for ensembles, musicians and non-musicians, and for social and educational situations, and toured the world as a noise artist. As an educator, Chacon has served as composer-in-residence for the Native American Composer Apprentice Project, where he taught string-quartet composition to hundreds of American Indian high-school students on reservations in the American Southwest.
“Raven Chacon is a composer and artist creating musical experiences that explore relationships among sound, space, and people. In an experimental practice that cuts across the boundaries of visual art, performance, and music, Chacon breaks open musical traditions and activates spaces of performance where the histories of the lands the United States has encroached upon can be contemplated, questioned, and reimagined.”
—The MacArthur Foundation on Chacon’s work
Charmaine Lee (October 4)
“Extraordinary”
—“The New Yorker” on Charmaine Lee
Charmaine Lee (b. 1991) is an Australian vocalist based in New York. Using the voice, feedback, and live processing, Lee’s practice is primarily concerned with risk-taking, playfulness, and improvisation. She has been recognized as “extraordinary” by New Yorker and has been featured in New York Times, Washington Post, and Wire Magazine. As a composer, Lee has been commissioned by leading institutions including the International Contemporary Ensemble, Wet Ink Ensemble, and HBO Max. Lee is an Emergent Ventures winner (2024) and was an Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room (2019) and a Van Lier Fellow at Roulette (2021). Her long-standing collaborators include Conrad Tao (Forbes 30U30) and Ikue Mori (MacArthur Fellow). Lee frequently guest lectures at undergraduate and graduate-level composition programs around the country. In 2023, she founded a record label & distribution platform, Kou Records, dedicated to pioneering artists in music & sound.
In conjunction with her music, Lee has worked on the operations, strategy, and development of some of the largest talent programs in the world, including Rise (Schmidt Futures) and the Asian Cultural Council. She currently serves on the Board of ISSUE Project Room and is on the National Annual Giving Committee at Princeton University.
Vomir (October 4)
Romain Perrot (born 1973), better known by his stage name Vomir (French for “vomiting” or “regurgitate”), is a French noise music artist based in Paris.Since beginning his career in 1996, Vomir has appeared in over 300 releases, including singles, albums and collaborations with other noise artists. The majority of his albums were produced by his own independent label, Decimation Sociale. Vomir positions his approach to music as an “anti-” approach, with a radical and nihilist stance. He spearheads the harsh noise wall movement, an extreme subgenre of noise music which he describes as “no ideas, no change, no development, no entertainment, no remorse”.
The performances of Charmaine Lee, Raven Chacon and The Body with Dis Fig are supported by Trust for Mutual Understanding.
The performance of Jennifer Walshe and Neil Luck is supported by Culture Ireland.
It has previously been announced that iconic experimental music project Autechre, avant-garde guitarist Fred Frith and abstract hip-hop duo Armand Hammer will also perform at the festival.
Skaņu Mežs is a member of the SHAPE+ platform for innovative music and audiovisual art as well as the project tekhnē, supported by the European Union and the Latvian Ministry of Culture.
Skaņu Mežs festival is supported by the State Cultural Capital Fund, Riga City Council, the Latvian Ministry of Culture, Goethe-Institut Lettland and Trust for Mutual Understanding. Sponsors of the festival are Valmiermuiža.
Skaņu Mežs is a member of the international network ICAS (International Cities of Advanced Sound) and the Northern European music festival network NERDS (North European Resonance and Dissonance Society).
