July 29, 2026 · 3 min read

Dekmantel 2026 — Live Notes from the Edge of the Forest

This is a living post. We're publishing it on Wednesday, July 29 — the night Dekmantel 2026 opens — and updating it as the weekend unfolds. Newest notes on top of each section. If you're reading this from the Amsterdamse Bos on a dying phone battery: drink water, the Greenhouse is that way.

What's happening, for the uninitiated

Dekmantel is the Amsterdam festival that electronic music people treat less like an event and more like an annual pilgrimage — five days where the whole spectrum of the culture, from Detroit originators to people whose entire discography is three unmastered Bandcamp tracks, plays to crowds that actually came to listen. The 12th edition runs July 29 to August 2, 2026, and it's the most structurally ambitious one yet: over 160 acts, and two new ideas bolted onto the classic shape.

The classic shape: an opening concert in the Oude Kerk (Amsterdam's oldest building, a 13th-century church with the acoustics of a cathedral because it is one), then the main weekend in the Amsterdamse Bos — the forest at the city's edge — Friday through Sunday, with night programming scattered across RADION, Garage Noord, ISO, and RAUM.

The two new ideas:

• Dekmantel at Dawn — the forest days stretch to twelve hours each, 36 hours total, with a morning program on the RADAR terrain built for a different kind of listening: Jeff Mills debuting a new show called STARGATE, a rare Sampha DJ set, DJ Sprinkles' Deeperama, Eris Drew's Mystery of the Motherbeat, and the whole weekend commencing with a live-improv ceremony from James Holden & Surgeon. Morning sets from artists this heavy, under trees, is a genuinely new format for this festival.
• Into the City — Wednesday and Thursday move through Amsterdam proper: Space Afrika opening tonight in the Oude Kerk, then DARKSIDE, Headache, and Juan Atkins at Melkweg, with Speedy J, Barker and STOOR at Paradiso on Thursday.

Also new and quietly significant for sound obsessives: the ON2 soundsystem by NNNN and OJAS — co-created by Devon Turnbull, the hi-fi shrine builder — makes its Dekmantel debut in the Greenhouse. A festival commissioning a bespoke audiophile system for its smallest, sweatiest stage tells you everything about the priorities here.

The lineup, filtered through our taste

The full list is 160+ names deep; these are the ones the pile is orbiting around:

• Ben UFO & Call Super & Objekt & Pariah, b2b2b2b, Sunday. Four of the most surgical selectors alive sharing one booth. This will either be the set of the year or a very polite four-way negotiation; both outcomes are historic.
• Jeff Mills, STARGATE, at dawn. Mills has spent thirty years treating techno as space program; a purpose-built morning show in a forest is exactly the kind of format he was always heading toward.
• Helena Hauff — the reliable electro-EBM buzzsaw, presumably in blinding daylight this year, which somehow makes it more menacing.
• Ricardo Villalobos — you don't book Villalobos, you set aside four unexplained hours and let them happen.
• Underground Resistance — Detroit's paramilitary wing of joy, still the moral center of any lineup they appear on.
• A Guy Called Gerald doing Black Secret Technology live — one of the greatest UK electronic albums ever made, performed by the man himself.
• Actress & Carl Craig together, DJ Stingray 313, Aurora Halal, DJ Nobu & Wata Igarashi for the psychedelic techno heads, and Skrillex, whose presence on this lineup is the most Dekmantel booking imaginable precisely because nobody can agree whether it's a provocation or a homecoming.

Live notes

Wednesday, July 29 — Publishing this a few hours before Space Afrika opens the festival in the Oude Kerk. An ambient duo from Manchester in an 800-year-old church is the correct way to begin five days of this. Notes to follow.

(This section grows as the weekend does. Refresh, or better: drop the radio on while you wait.)

Why this festival is on a blog about soap and séances

Because ZING is, at its core, a pile of things one of us couldn't stop thinking about — and every August, this festival is that thing. The music that ends up on ZING FM comes disproportionately from the orbit of festivals like this one: sets recorded in the forest, artists we first heard at 11am under trees. Expect the pile to fill with Dekmantel debris over the coming week. That's not a content strategy; that's just what the heart is beating to right now.

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