UH FEST 2024

Presenting free music and connecting local and international scenes since 2000 (and doing it in a week-long format yearly since 2014) in Budapest, UH Fest is back one more time in the Autumn before taking a break in 2025.

This year's edition is set to take place across seven venues in Budapest between the 7th and 13th of October.

Festival passes are already available, and they are a good deal as always, allowing passholders to participate in all ten events of UH Fest for the price of six individual events. Get the passes for UH Fest 2024 here.

Roughly half of the programme and line-up has been announced by now, on different platforms, so this is a summary of all that information – with some new bits as well.

October will bring several special collaborative projects at UH Fest: Maja S.K. Ratkje and Stian Westerhus present Die Elektrische Oper on voice and electronics, an adventure sonically and dynamically quite opposite to the acoustic chamber work they did together previously; Alexander Iezzi, Billy Bultheel and Ivan Cheng will perform “33”, which explores the fusion of machine gun techno, experimental pop, bone-chilling industrial, and baroque voices; challengers of the boundaries of metal and noise, the duo of Chip King and Lee Buford aka The Body teamed up with Felicia Chen aka Dis Fig, and released a record together earlier this year, Orchards of a Futile Heaven: they will present it at UH Fest.

Percussionist and sound artist Riccardo La Foresta and James Ginzburg (half of Emptyset) bring “Six and Forty-Six”, a conceptual piece on Drummophone (an array of bass drums sounded by compressed air, which produce complex acoustic drones) and a custom string instrument designed by Ginzburg (a bass monochord and zither hybrid), released also this year on Subtext. And some more electroacoustics, this time with oscillators and bagpipes, rhythmic noises and hurdy-gurdy swirl: this is Lise Barkas and Yann Leguay, aka Acétylène.

We'll have the duo of Danish trombonist Maria Bertel (Selvhenter, Ymers Pizza, GEK), and French guitarist Nina Garcia (Mariachi, Mamiedaragon) with their two instruments distorted and extremely played; Garcia also brings her other collaborational project Autoreverse, which sees her teamed up with Arnaud Rivière (co-founder and co-closer this year of Sonic Protest festival) on prepared electronics.

UH Fest's collaboration, as co-founder, with SHAPE+ platform* also continues and marks its tenth year in 2024. SHAPE+ is a European platform for innovative music and interdisciplinary art co-funded by the European Union and Pro Helvetia. As part of this joint venture, we carry on our residency programme too, which brings together European and local artists for trio collaborations. For the opening act of UH Fest 2024, Berlin-based performance artist and musician Kinga Ötvös will team up with Krisztina Sipos and pain.simpl, both of them from the Hungarian-speaking community of Romania, similarly to Ötvös, but based in Budapest, and connected to performance art, theatre and sound. In the frame of the Shape+ programme, we invite JacqNoise, the founder of Berlin Noise Festival, on modular electronics; Nic Krog, with his distinct and volatile mixture of bass-heavy club music and sound art intertwined with spoken word; Slovakian sound artist Lénok mutating digital sonic design with vocal fragments; Sòn du Maquís aka Maquis Son Sistèm merging sound system culture with psychedelia and hardware hypnosis. Some more SHAPE+ artists and another residency collaboration will follow, we will keep you updated.

Naturally, the biggest community represented within the mostly international programme of UH Fest is the local one. A community among these is the "irregular event series" of Noise'n'Roses, grown around Lucia Udvardyova and Rozi Mákó – two of them will present a special line-up for the occasion of a special Noise'n'Roses Ensemble live performance at UH Fest. Total improvisation from Budapest’s free music scene: this is Less Is More 4, originally the trio of Oliver Mayne (vibraphone), Zsolt Sárvári Kovács (drums) and Ernő Hock (double bass), now a quartet with the arrival of Bálint Bolcsó on electronics. UH Fest will host the first club concert of another special free music quartet: this is Csicskakoporsó, with Anna Makay aka MA'AM (voice, electronics), Marci Bíró (drums), Lajos Nádházi aka AIWA (electronics) and Ádám Czitrom (guitar). Marci Bíró – part of this years’ SHAPE+ roster too – brings one more of his bands: Protoplasma is a four-piece prog-noise-grind-no-wave madness including some of the key members of the Kripta community: Bálint Biczók, Ferzi Juhász, Raymond Kiss.

And some further acts: electronics, Hungarian spoken word and visuals from Szabina Péter and Kristóf Bodnár, this is DJ Goodbye from Debrecen; Cy4ntist (aka Fanni Csernovszky) freshly out from high school will bring her unpredictable electronics and live performance to UH Fest, there might be a special guest as well, but who knows; a dj set from Max Sinclar, a key figure of the darkened and acidic club music scene of Budapest, the founder and curator of Dalmata Daniel Records, member of the BRVTAL collective. Jan Loup, a dj set from the Toulouse underground with hybrid and percussive bass music, industrial step and mutating sonic collages. DJ Brittle, a "chopped and screwed turntablism" set from the founder of Bliss Archive and Avon Terror Corps-affiliated Jackson Veil Panther from Bristol.

UH Fest will also present the live debut of Psudoku, the futuristic space prog grindcore quartet from the Stavanger underground, so far the studio project of Steinar Kittilsen (Parlamentarisk Sodomi, Brutal Blues). Using voice, feedback, and live processing, New York-based Cantonese Australian artist Charmaine Lee will perform at the opening event of the festival, as well as Venezuelan experimental musician Carlos Giffoni, now based in Los Angeles, founder of No Fun Production, with a new record out on Ideological Organ this spring – he will return to UH Fest after almost 15 years.

The line-up is not complete, this is roughly 60 percent of the programme; we'll follow up with more announcements in the upcoming weeks. Festival passes are already available as well as most of the pre-sales for individual events (the missing ones are coming by the end of August too), more info this way.

We will update you more frequently as the festival approaches. See you latest in October at UH Fest. Until then, enjoy the last days of summer.

*Funded by the European Union. All statements and opinions of UH Fest are those of the organisers and do not necessarily reflect the official standpoint of the European Union or the European Agency for Education and Culture (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the EACEA can be held responsible for them.

Photo credits: voldseth (Die Elektrische Oper), The Body & Dis Fig, James Ginzburg (La Foresta & Ginzburg), Peter Podolsky (Lénok), Szabó János (Csicskakoporsó), Protoplasma, Cameron Lee Phan (Charmaine Lee)