SFEMF announces the dates and artist lineup for its 25th Annual Festival, celebrating 25 years of groundbreaking electronic music. Presented in co-production with The Lab and with support from the Italian Cultural Institute and InterMusic SF, the festival features three nights of live electronic performances by an exceptional roster of internationally acclaimed and emerging artists.
Spanning a remarkable breadth of contemporary practice, this year's program explores electronic sound as science-fiction fantasy, sonic ecosystems, technologically realized fugues, acousmatic dramaturgy, patient listening, sonic theater, and deeply liberating ritual.
The festival opens on Thursday, September 24, with Blevin Blectum (Bevin Kelley), whose vibrant audiovisual performance creates a technicolor sonic fever dream. IDHAZ & Emily Bouton follow with a hybrid of scored and improvised music for harp, violin, voice, and visuals, inviting openness, flight, and spontaneous self-expression. The evening concludes with Rrose's Helicopter Mass, an immersive work exploring the intersection of hypnotic techno, experimental composition, and psychoacoustic phenomena with meticulous precision.
Friday's program begins with Albert Yeh, who presents four voice fugues performed using MIDI and modular synthesizers, demonstrating timeless musical processes realized through contemporary technology. Stefano Pilia follows with solo performances excerpted from his recent works, Spiralis Aurea and Lacinia, adapted for electric guitar and electronics, creating an acousmatic dramaturgy suspended between logos and chaos. The Gleaners—Laetitia Sonami and Matt Robidoux—continue the evening, combining Sonami's pioneering electronic instruments with Robidoux's distinctive "corn synth" practice to create immersive performances that blur the boundaries between composition, installation, and sonic theater. Friday concludes with Paul DeMarinis, whose experiments with sound objects, harmonicas, and electronics transform performance into a ritualistic theatrical experience.
The festival concludes on Saturday with Thomas Carnacki (Gregory Scharpen, Cheryl Leonard, and Gregory Hagan), who conjure dreamlike sonic environments from found sounds and unconventional materials, including rocks, glass vessels, and even live scorpions. Seth Cluett follows with quiet, patiently unfolding music that explores the liminal space between the senses through an acute attention to perception. Closing the festival is Moor Mother (Camae Ayewa), whose powerful performances fuse free jazz, noise, hip-hop, and Afrofuturism to examine memory, displacement, Black histories, and alternative futures through sound, text, and performance.