Skaņu Mežs 2023 opening event

Riga, Latvia’s Skaņu mežs festival for adventurous music will host its 21 edition on October 6-8 at concert hall Hanzas Perons (16a Hanzas street), with an opening event on September 30 at art center NOASS (AB jetty 2).

This event will feature SHAPE+ artist Maya Shenfeld in collaboration with film artist Pedro Maia.

For their second collaboration, Jerusalem born, Berlin-based composer Maya Shenfeld and Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Maia are producing an audio-visual live show for Shenfeld’s second and upcoming record titled Under the Sun. Echoing Ecclesiastes’s maxim “There is nothing new under the sun,” the project’s title alters the original quote to create a tension between the sense of futility and eternal return it implies, and the sense of rupture introduced by climate change and other looming crisis. Through a cycle of electroacoustic pieces for analogue synths, woodwinds, voice, and field recordings, as well as imagery shot at the

world’s deepest marble quarries in the south of Portugal under the scorching sun of the hottest summer on record, Shenfeld and Maia explore change and repetition, deep time and the ephemeral moment, equilibrium and imminent threat. Maia’s live cinema technique of analogue film processing is brought into dialogue with Shenfeld’s layered textural compositions to create an immersive radiant audio visual experience.