Following its most successful year in terms of attendance, the experimental music festival Skaņu mežs has announced the dates for its next edition: Skaņu mežs 2025 will take place on October 3 and 4 at the Hanzas Perons cultural space (Hanzas iela 16A), and its main guests will be the hyperpop project Sega Bodega, the experimental rock band These New Puritans, the avant-garde rapper Fatboi Sharif, and contemporary jazz star Shabaka Hutchings.

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As always, the festival will examine changes in contemporary music through the prism of a wide variety of genres, including pop music, noise, hip-hop, contemporary avant-garde music, and industrial techno. Seven festival artists have been announced so far.

Each of the two festival evenings will feature an audiovisual performance that will bring the festival's diverse program closer to pop music: on the first evening, Irish-Chilean hyperpop singer and producer Sega Bodega will perform, while the second will feature the stylistically unpredictable experimental rock band These New Puritans.

Skaņu Mežs' long-standing search for truly experimental hip-hop will continue with a performance by the eccentric rapper Fatboi Sharif. Rolling Stone magazine writes the following about his music: "Many rap fans will claim that their idols sound like no one else, but in Sharif's case, it's actually true."

This year's guest of honor at the festival is vocal innovator and composer Joan La Barbara, who has inspired a host of new music, including masterpieces by Morton Feldman and Robert Ashley. The San Francisco Examiner has called her "one of the most outstanding vocal virtuosos of our time."

One of the leading drummers of free jazz and free improvisation, Hamid Drake, who will perform alongside British multi-instrumentalist Shabaka Hutchings, whom Pitchfork has called "one of the most celebrated jazz musicians of the last decade."

American hardcore techno producer, DJ, and tattoo artist Ash Kilbourne will close the first evening with a performance echoing her latest recording, If Not To Give A Fantasy. Misha Farants, rhythmic music reviewer for The Wire Magazine, sees a desire for extreme experiences in Kilbourne's music: "Relentlessly heavy dance music often provides satisfaction because it is associated with cathartic, sonic self-harm or sexual fetishes – its sound waves crash against the body and overwhelm the mind. Kilborn's new album provides the necessary sound for such fantasies."

The second evening will conclude with a performance by Muqata’a, a pioneer of Palestinian underground music, whose captivating performances focus on the themes of memory and its fragmentation and transformation through sound.