SOTU Festival
SOTU (Sounds Of The Underground) Festival is an annual alternative music festival in Amsterdam since 2012. The 15th edition will take place from April 16 to 19, 2026, and as usual at various locations. SOTU has a passion for genre-bending sound and performances which is focused on the promotion of the experimental, avant-garde and underground.
The festival will end in Cavia this year, with a predominantly audiovisual program featuring experimental glass artist JO from Berlin, visual noise artist Eyeless from Damascus, Shlomo and the Blankferrett, VJ and piano duo National Loitery and ends with the anti-talent show The Worst Karaoke.
National Loitery – A brook flows into a saturated drum. The low rumble becomes distorted harmony. A drone is ornamented by obstinate rhythms. Organ. The screen flickers, more ornaments, two women dance. On death and dying. Low-resolution group photo. Party music for the revolutionary party. Raw music on which to build a stone house. Amsterdam based duo The National Loitery is formed by Johanna Ehde (SE) and Raphael Sousa Santos (BR).
Eyeless in Damascus – is the audiovisual project of Syrian artist, DJ and musician Adnan Samman. The project's approach mainly emphasizes live improvisation, merging field recordings and samples with electronics and synthesizers, creating soundscapes that are sometimes comforting, sometimes unsettling, but always curious and exploratory. After a decade of being an exclusive, intimate live experience for close friends in a living room, Eyeless in Damascus recently went public for the first time with performances at Utrecht's ACU and Rotterdam's WORM.
Jo – (Berlin) summons the Glasambel – her self-developed, ambivalent instrument – to distil a unique performance that explores the outer edges of sonic experience. In her music, Jo dives deep into the hidden and dirty sounds of everyday life, shaping them with sensitivity and weaving wayward patterns into her own sonic terrain. Since 2019 Jo has worked in several collaborations with Bleedingblackwood, Mute Swimmer, Drekka, and Alligator Gozaimasu. Furthermore, she is co-initiator and curator of Orange 'Ear.
Shlomo and the Blankferrett – A live audiovisual diorama combines sound and image into a single frequency. By using raw voltage, this performance serves as a dynamic real-time digital painting. It is an improvised translation of electricity, making the room's invisible signals visible in the dark.
The Worst Karaoke – is an anti-talentshow, born out of the primal desire to suck on stage, without having actual talent to back it up. Their hostess Yvette can be described as a ray of sunshine, if the sun would insult you constantly. Infamous in Utrecht, The Worst Karaoke is ready to take on Amsterdam, city of posers, to see how low they can go. They have a strict no pictures / no videos policy so your performance will stay in the moment . Apart from that there are basically no rules, as long as the song* you want to sing is under five minutes and you aren't being an asshole.
*Tequila by the Champs is absolutely forbidden
