UH FEST 2026

Presenting free and adventurous music, connecting local, transnational and subcultural scenes, and creating a platform for multicultural discourse since 2000 in Budapest, UH Fest is back after a short break in 2025. This year's edition is set to take place across eight venues in Budapest between 28th September and 4th October, and will present 41 acts from more than 20 countries.

The programme of the 2026 edition is now full, read it (or scroll) until the end, you might find unexpected things anywhere!

Weekly passes and tickets for all individual events are available here.

Celebration and resistance: Mestizx is the project of Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti and Frank Rosaly, as a quintet they infuse rhythmic patterns from pre-and-post-colonial Latin America into a collision of avant jazz, art punk, electronica, and folk; key producer (and probably the most experimental one) of the hyper-fast singeli movement from Tanzania, Jay Mitta will be joined by MC Anti Vairas at UH Fest; with Hildegard Ukrainian electronic music composer Oleh Shpudeiko, known as Heinali and Ukrainian singer Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko will reimagine Hildegard von Bingen's music serving as a distant mirror to reflect, comprehend, externalise, and transcend wartime experiences; Zoe Heselton's both intimate and vibrant music is steeped in traditional, folk, blues, and flamenco influences, spoken word poetry, and experimental inspirations, at UH Fest she will perform with Inès Rousset on bass; Amirtha Kidambi’s lineage in Indian devotional musical tradition and Angel Deradoorian’s investigation of her Armenian heritage, find common language in their experimental practices nurtured in Brooklyn’s DIY music community, they will perform as a duo.

Voice Actor is the enigmatic music project of Sheffield-based artist Noa Kurzweil blending haunting, deadpan vocals with dream-pop, IDM, trip-hop, and lo-fi aesthetics with hypnagogic soundscapes; Jeugdbrand is the duo of Dennis Tyfus (piano and voice) and Jeroen Stevens (beats and percussion), they perform a sparkling drama, a theatrical tragedy, marinated in a classic Antwerp anarchic sense of humor; Galangolong is an experiment of how the instruments of a distant non-Western culture – in this case Java – can be integrated into an individual sonic world, it's also the return of Bálint Szabó aka Gosheven as a band; Viktor Lois is an outsider, yet a key figure of the 1970's, 80’s and 90’s Hungarian avant-garde: he will present a live performance on one of his iconic sonic sculptures as the opening concert of the festival.

UH Fest will present Giulio Erasmus' latest band, The Target Group, it's a mutation of the Factory-Benelux post-punk lineage with the freedom and experimentation of Brussels dub and no wave funk, or as Felix Kubin said: "It’s like riding a 6-legged horse, where sometimes the saddle starts to levitate and leave the animal"; Devon Rexi is an outsider dub trio of Nicola Reverda (Nicolini) on drums and vocals, Nushin Naini on bass and farsi vocals, and Goya van der Heyden (La Rat) on electronics, samples and effects: this time they will perform with two drums, joined by Ruggero di Luisi; feedback and cacophony, avantgarde chaos and looney tunes: Norms is an internationally recognised gem of a five-piece outsider hardcore from Hungary, also reinventors of the cowbell; coming from the gloomy shores of Normandy, Violette LaGouine is a Budapest-based singer-songwriter with folk-punk influences and a self-sculpted steel nail-clipper adding a metallic drone to her dark and mellow compositions; originating in Montréal, based in Budapest, Public Reptile is gutter beats, industrial lounge, collage electronics, noise and post-organ musicke from the industrial wasteland – with occasional comedy; Pondró is the new epic drone/heavy ambient duo of Raymond Kiss and Bálint Biczók, local noise rock heroes.

A French-American artist based in Brooklyn, Leila Bordreuil embraces the cello as a primary medium for crafting an intense music that moves fluidly between noise, contemporary composition, improvisation, and drone; free music trio from Vienna and São Paolo (through Berlin) of trumpeter and composer Franz Hautzinger, Lukas König on drums and electronics and Vinicius Cajado on a super fast reactive bass; John Brennan and Peter Kutin's duo is a blast of free jazz, noise and pummelling sonics; Sun Dog drifts between a form of static and restless ambient, it's a duo of erikM (live electronics) and Isabelle Duthoit (voice); Gaute Granli and Gabriela Gonzalez Rondon have been merging their respective artistic realms into a singular psychedelic audio-visual performance using an improvisational approach to live music and video, it's GGHed.

The festival invites Serbian born, Basel based Svetlana Maraš, a musician working across live electronic performance, electro-acoustic composition, sound installation, and the construction of hybrid instruments; Polish composer, sound artist, and improviser Robert Piotrowicz who returns to UH Fest after 14 years; Pimpon aka Szymon Gąsiorek is a polish drummer and composer creating genre-full music bending borders of acoustic percussion, contemporary electronics, avant-pop, noise, field recordings and improvised music; fujara player and composer Michaela Antalová and organist and improviser Štefan Szabó explore the possibilities and limitations of the mechanical organ in their collaboration, and deliberately work with sounds that we usually try to overlook.

As a collaboration with Next festival of Bratislava and Lunchmeat of Prague, UH Fest presents three residencies between Hungarian, Slovakian and Czech musicians, visual artists and choreographers. Crossdisciplinary and experimental performer Júlia Vavra teams up with musician and filmmaker Eva Sajanová aka holé baby; visual and sound artist Dipteran will present her new record backed up by the digital characters and animation of NIVVA; in Tangled in Narratives composer and musician nan Cifra is collaborating with performer and choreographer Jitka Sara Pánikova and set designer and visual artist Jan Matýsek, another participant is the custom-built instrument Harpo.

Limen is Márk Bartha's electroacoustic project with cello, double bass and electronics; Orsolya Kaincz's solo work with modular electronics is shaped by open-form composition and free improvisation, unfolding through subtle transformations of timbre, texture, and microstructures; qoomoob is the new project of Árpád Gulyás aka lanuk, the center of the sound is a clean, detailed, transparent amplifier, and a bass guitar, the approach is minimalist and concentrated: the silences is as important as the sounds themselves.

Aiwa, also known as Lajos Nádházi, creates live, improvisational music built from the repetition of dance music motifs, positioned somewhere at the boundary of experimental electronics and at the intersection of ambient-dub-bass music; Ato Hara is a solo project by Büki László Szása and focuses on pushing electronic sounds and devices to their limits, producing artifacts and glitches, and using these imperfections to its own advantage; 96zen is a DJ of the new generation Budapest club scene, whose sets showcase blends of trance, latin club, hard dance and techno; GRGNA is a Budapest-based noisecreator from Transcarpathia, her sound draws heavily from IDM, experimental electronics and freetekno; Frontin is a member of the Pénz rave crew, he is fast and furious and fun (with breakbeats).

An original fusion of low-end pressure, live dub techniques, and industrial sound aesthetics, also inspired by traditional dub, roots, dub techno, shoegaze, and drone, framed in futuristic sound design and mesmerising, slow-mo dubbed gyrations, it's Ghost Dubs; with Radio Hito, Zen My Nguyen has spent the last two years adapting a poem by Claude Royet-Journoud into a ten-sequences Italian song cycle called L'uso e gli attributi del cuore for soundfonts and voice; Able Noise is an experimental baritone guitar and drum duo, based between The Hague and Athens; found music, polyrhythms and vocals: Hebbex D'expectatio Expectata is a Norwegian experimental music trio based in Stavanger, an evolution of a long-standing duo consisting of Kjetil Brandsdal and Thore Warland, joined by vocalist Helge Thornes; Sarajevo born and Belgian resident since 1989, Mia Prce aka Miaux is a songwriter and composer on electronics; Horacio Pollard manages to be absurd, entertaining and challenging all at the same time, and who can resist the fun-charged pull of these primitive patterns and near-ugly sounds?

UH Fest in 2026 is between 28th September and 4th October, the venues of the festival are Trafó House, Gólya, the French Institute, NoSpace, Turbina, Atno, Három Holló and the Evangelical Church of the Buda Mountains.

Weekly passes and tickets for individual events are available here. For full daily schedules and venue information all information will be available on our website soon as well, but you can follow our Instagram and Facebook pages for updates too.

See you soon!

Photos and artworks: Gummo (Mestizx), Pichamali Studios (Jay Mitta), Jaa Quality Pictures (Anti Vairas), Devon Rexi, Randy Ryandi (Leila Bordreuil), Hautzinger/Cajado/König, Dipteran & NIVVA, Iza Nagy (Orsolya Kaincz), iambarnie (Aiwa), Reiner Phisterer (Ghost Dubs), Marina Fragkioudaki (Able Noise), Zsanna Kili (UH Fest)

UH Fest is run and supported by volunteers, and co-financed by the Flanders State of the Art, the Embassy of Netherlands, the Polish Institute, the Austrian Cultural Forum, Pro Helvetia, the Embassy of Norway, the French Institute, Trafó House, Visegrad Fund, Hegyvidék, Józsefváros, Ferencváros, Pro Cultura Urbis, National Cultural Council.