Prague’s Lunchmeat festival returns for its 16th edition, showcasing cutting-edge new media and experimental music from international and local artists. Running end of September across two venues, the weeklong event blends immersive audiovisual performances, daring sound experiments, and thought-provoking installations.
Lunchmeat is Prague’s premier festival for presenting new media artists experimenting in digital technology, combining both multimedia artists and musical artists from abroad and domestically for a weeklong program. Lunchmeat always opens in the last week of September, and so this year it begins on Monday the 22nd till Sunday the 28th at two venues. Lunchmeat is now in its 16th edition with a solid reputation for its programming of experimental artists and music, in solo and collaborative performances, and for inviting extraordinary international artists of the first rate as headliners.
The young French musical artist, Malibu, creates majestic sounding compositions or rather sonic atmospheres blended with songs, inspired by her dreams and nature – water (the ocean), earth, and the wind. Her sound is often slow-moving, soothing, refreshing, and peaceful – best meeting the festival’s motto “Dark Times Need More Light” over any other artist in this year’s edition. However, Malibu’s music is not at all New Age. She also has a dark, upbeat, humorous, and harder side, so full of life. Malibu performs on the closing night in the main venue, Studio Hrdinu, in the Trade Fair Palace.
On the purely visual side, the Canadian multimedia artist Baron Lanteigne works with animation and 3D mediums for creating thought-provoking images (sculptures) and installations focused on the connection between the real and the virtual worlds. He explores how we interact with technology (for instance, phones as our primary communication medium) for surrealistic effect. How we struggle to keep up with the changes in technology is another theme of his, so his work is empathetic to everyone. He will have an audiovisual performance titled “hard data/soft bodies” on the opening night at CAMP.
Here are a few other highlights or standouts, some noted especially for their performative theatrics.
The American artist, composer, and choreographer Colin Self presents Gasp!, a futuristic cabaret, and a tribute to Queer ancestry. It’s an audiovisual performance combining opera, performance art, drag, and puppetry with a cast of actors, dancers, and projections; for this performance, Self will also perform as a trio with musicians Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst, who supported Radiohead’s 2016 tour.
Ego Death is a duo with experimental Paris-based sound artist Aho Sasan (alias of Niamké Désiré) and cellist/composer Resina (alias of Karolina Rec, based in Warsaw). They will be performing their dark, cinematic compositions, Egress parts I to VIII, from their new album on Subtext Recordings (2025).
A world premiere and most appropriate for the times is estoc’s How Can You Possibly Bear to Think About Anything Else (released in June 2025). This is the artist’s personally enraged and fiercely political reaction to understand a world seemingly “hellbent on violence as its chief export.” It has ten thought-provoking tracks addressing the question: Are we doomed to bow to the stupid and cruel?
Sound experimenter Goh Nakada (aka Gorgonn) and Berlin-based visual artist Utku Onal’s joint audiovisual performance was created for their Six Paths album (2024 on the Shanghai-based label SVBKVLT), and it is inspired by the six paths of the afterlife in Japanese Buddhism. It is a new form of horror cinema (using new media tools) and with a hard-pounding sound (or sonic) assault to match.
A Japanese horror show, VMO (aka the Violent Magic Orchestra), is a Sci-Fi darkside counterpoint to the legendary Yellow Magic Orchestra (pioneers of electro-pop with Ryuichi Sakamoto). VMO’s new album Death Rave melds hardcore techno-dance (gabber) with black metal as performance art.
For the late-night to early morning visitors, the festival becomes a nightclub for the multimedia art scene. Among the DJs, Lee Gamble will perform as a heavyweight of experimental contemporary UK dance music. It is not his first appearance for this festival, no doubt invited back due to past successes.
For the younger generation, DJ Danny L Harle is a British music producer and composer, formerly of the PC label. He has most notably produced Caroline Polacek, and his newest is with Pink Pantheress.
Noteworthy local acts (Prague-based or Czech and Slovak artists) this year include kodiki performing from their new release Your Excellence – kodiki is a new and emerging artist from the Slovakian electronic scene. Mudaki is a sound artist/musician and producer from Minsk, Belarus, but based in Ústí nad Labem. She will perform her new release with collaborators from Ústí’s collective, phonon.
Prague-based artist Ursula Sereghy performs a new release Cordial (on the Czech label Gin&Platonic) with the world premiere of a commissioned live performance Growing in the Dark with Czech visual artists realitycongress & nismo. Sereghy’s newest seems minimalistic compared to the others with open spaces for drifting thoughts, while the vocal tracks are a gentle futuristic pop.
The festival this year is in two venues: CAMP (Center of Architecture and Metropolitan Planning) and mainly in the cavernous Divadlo Hrdinu, underground Prague National Gallery’s Trade Fair Palace.
For full information about this year’s list of artists and collaborations, see: Lunchmeat Festival 2025.
Lunchmeat Festival
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