Why does a 140-act festival skip the field entirely?
Most European electronic festivals still follow the same blueprint: a fenced field, a handful of stages, a beer garden, headliners at night. Meakusma has never worked that way. For its 21st edition, running September 3 to 6 in the East Belgian town of Eupen, the festival spreads 140 acts across four days without a single central site to anchor them. The main venue is Alter Schlachthof, a former slaughterhouse turned cultural space, but the real programme runs through the town itself: churches, museums and empty shopfronts get turned into performance rooms for the weekend.
That choice is the story. A festival built around a field has to sort its lineup into stages by genre and crowd size, techno on the big stage, ambient in a tent, and so on. Booking a town instead means a Detroit techno veteran, a Pulitzer-winning composer and a baile funk DJ can each get a room built for what they actually do, rather than being squeezed onto a shared bill that flattens all three into the same PA and the same crowd.
What's actually on the bill?
The four days mix club music, ambient, free improvisation and contemporary composition without a hierarchy between them. Garth Erasmus performs with the Broken String Ensemble; baile funk artist Anderson do Paraíso plays alongside Senegalese percussionist Dudù Kouaté. Demdike Stare and Valentina Magaletti sit on a bill that also carries Detroit techno figure Gerald Cleaver, whose career runs from Roscoe Mitchell's ensembles to the techno records he makes under his own name. Label showcases from moli del tro, Sagome, ReiheM and Tax Free Records fill out the programme, alongside a collaboration with Norway's Insomnia Festival.
A festival built around a field sorts its lineup by genre and crowd size. Booking a town instead means a Detroit techno veteran and a Pulitzer-winning composer each get a room built for what they do.
How far does the classical crossover go?
Furthest, this year. Meakusma's partnership with Ostbelgienfestival, the region's classical and contemporary music festival, puts Ensemble Musikfabrik and Nadar Ensemble squarely inside the electronic lineup rather than off to the side. Ensemble Musikfabrik marks the centenary of Morton Feldman, the American composer whose hours-long, near-silent pieces reshaped what notated music could sound like, with two dedicated performances. Nadar Ensemble stages three separate performances of Raven Chacon's Voiceless Mass, the piece that made Chacon the first Native American composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, in 2022. Both run inside the same four days as DJ sets and club sound, in rooms the festival built specifically for them, a church, in Voiceless Mass's case.
Can you still get a ticket?
Multi-day passes for the 2026 edition are already sold out. Single-event tickets and camping passes remain on sale through the festival's own site, meaning the only way in now is picking specific shows rather than the full run.
