‘The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system ​(e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in it's growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.’

― Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume I: Consumption (1949)

Saturation, spontaneity, the Icarian drive, paeans to polyphony, illegibility and the fever dream: the 2026 iteration of the London Contemporary Music Festival (LCMF) will be Hot with Excess. Embracing the overlaps between music, opera, the visual arts, performance and the moving image, this 11th edition of the festival will deliberately – and gloriously – burst its banks over 14 events and four venues.

Renouncing austerity, scarcity and aesthetic coolness, we uncover the radical possibility of surplus. In contrast to capitalist efficiency, each night embraces restlessness as a way for imagination, dissent, hope and failure, to be created for its own sake. 

Using the Gesamtkunstwerk as a starting point and framing mechanism, LCMF 2026 features its signature mix of restagings and new commissions of trans-disciplinary performance, showcasing the most forward-thinking musicians, visual artists and filmmakers working today.

Exploring the operatic turn in art, orchestral maximalism, CoreCore cinema, the music of New Complexity, a focus on Japan’s wildest improvisers, and the liberation of long-duration: expect a challenge to the audience’s collective limit-experience. In offering abundance, we offer the expansive possibility to do more, think more, imagine more.

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The London Contemporary Music Festival (LCMF) was founded in 2013 to provide a home for the promiscuous music lover. Since then we’ve presented 10 critically-acclaimed multidisciplinary festivals and premiered over 100 works. Artists who we have commissioned and hosted, or whose works we’ve premiered, include: Cosey Fanni Tutti, Eliane Radigue, Julius Eastman, Cerith Wyn Evans, Roscoe Mitchell, Pauline Oliveros, Mica Levi, Lina Lapelyte, Tony Conrad, Klein, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Jennifer Walshe, Yvonne Rainer, Charlemagne Palestine, Elaine Mitchener, EVOL, Rebecca Saunders, Glenn Branca, Moor Mother, Ed Atkins, Annea Lockwood, John Giorno, Laraaji, Timothy Morton, Amalia Ulman, Bhanu Kapil, Toby Jones, Nkisi, Gábor Lázár, Maryanne Amacher, Laurence Crane, Cassandra Miller, CA Conrad, Christian Marclay, Joan La Barbara, Fatima Al Qadiri, Morton Subotnick, Maggie Nicols, Gerald Barry, Katalin Ladik, Rashad Becker, Tyshawn Sorey, James Ferraro, Anne Bean, Ragnar Kjartansson, Pan Daijing, Robert Ashley, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Sophia Al-Maria, Michael Finnissy, Mark Leckey. 

In 2016 we curated the world’s first retrospective dedicated to the work of composer Julius Eastman. In 2018 we founded the LCMF Orchestra, dedicated to commissioning work by composers who’d never written for the orchestra before, to those whose work rarely gets heard in Britain and to ambitious, spatialised orchestral pieces. In 2022 we became a charity and a biennial. In 2025, at the Wigmore Hall, we presented one concert, exploring the pre-history of AI-adjacent music. 

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