SHIP Festival 2026 in Šibenik: Svemirko, TRAMM Trio and Hét Hat Club among the final additions to the program
The fourth edition of the SHIP festival and music conference takes place in Šibenik from September 10 to 13, 2026, and immediately before the start, the organizers further rounded out the international program with the names Svemirko, Azerbaijan's TRAMM Trio and the Hungarian collective Hét Hat Club. On September 8, HRT published an overview of these final additions, while official festival information confirms that over four days the city will host alternating concerts, showcase performances, conference talks, workshops, networking programs and special projects. SHIP is conceived as a place where audiences encounter performers from different parts of Europe and the world, but also as a business platform for music professionals looking for new artists, collaborators and markets. According to the organizers, this year's program brings together around 50 music projects and approximately one hundred speakers. In this way, Šibenik once again becomes one of Europe's more important hubs for presenting new and independent music in mid-September.
The number of stages is not stated entirely consistently in the official announcements: on September 8, HRT, like earlier festival announcements, listed six stages, while the organizer spoke of eight in the final August announcement. On the current festival website, St. Michael's Fortress, Azimut, the Arsen House of Arts and Tunel are highlighted as the main venues, along with additional program spaces and special formats. For visitors, it is therefore most important to follow the official daily schedule, because concerts and conference content take place simultaneously at multiple locations.
Svemirko at SHIP for the first time
Svemirko is among the most recognizable names in the final wave of the program, and the performance in Šibenik will be the project's first appearance at the SHIP festival. The organizers present it as one of the more established names on the regional independent scene, with a recognizable blend of synth-pop, retro aesthetics and contemporary indie production. Marko Vuković's project has built an audience over almost ten years through three albums and a large number of concerts, including sold-out performances in cities from Ljubljana to Skopje. It is precisely this combination of an already established live reputation and a festival concept focused on discovery and international connections between performers that gives Svemirko's arrival somewhat different weight from a typical showcase performance. According to the official daily program, Svemirko performs on Friday, September 11, when one of the festival's busiest concert days is scheduled.
Friday brings a broad range of performers and styles, from electronic music and alternative rock to world music, hip-hop and singer-songwriter pop. Alongside Svemirko, the announced acts include ABOP, Hét Hat Club, Igor Božanić, JayaHadADream, MORN, Renato D'Amico and Them Moose Rush. Such breadth reflects the logic of a showcase festival, where audiences move between stages and performers also play in front of bookers, agents, promoters, media representatives and other professionals.
TRAMM Trio brings Azerbaijani mugham into a contemporary festival context
TRAMM Trio comes to Šibenik from Azerbaijan with the project "Conflict of Generations", in which the music is built around the meeting of two generations and two historical experiences. According to the organizers' presentation and HRT's report, guitarist Rahman Mammadli developed his expression during the period behind the Iron Curtain, transferring elements of traditional Azerbaijani mugham to the electric guitar. His son Tural Mammadli, who plays keyboards, belongs to a generation that grew up in independent Azerbaijan and in considerably more open contact with global musical influences. The third member, percussionist Elnur Aliyev, connects these perspectives in a performance that does not treat tradition as a static folkloric pattern, but as material that changes through the experiences of different generations. It is precisely this relationship between heritage, political context and contemporary musical language that forms the central idea of the project that will be presented at SHIP.
The official festival schedule places TRAMM Trio on Sunday, September 13, the final day of this year's edition. Their artist page states that the performance is planned for noon on the Green stage, meaning the festival does not tie its finale exclusively to late-night concerts, but distributes the program across different parts of the day. Alongside TRAMM Trio, Mariaa Siga and monovan are announced in Sunday's daily lineup. In the broader context of the festival, the arrival of the Azerbaijani group shows how strongly SHIP is trying to expand its geographic range beyond the usual Central and Western European showcase routes. Back in February, the organizers announced that they had received a record 1,487 artist applications from 76 countries for the 2026 edition, including applications from Europe, both Americas, Asia, Australia and Africa.
Hét Hat Club combines Carpathian-Balkan traditions, hip-hop and global influences
The third highlighted addition is Hét Hat Club, an international collective based in Budapest that emerged roughly ten years ago from encounters among traveling street musicians. According to the festival's official description, the group draws on Balkan, Romanian, Hungarian, Roma, Turkish and Transylvanian traditional music, but connects it with hip-hop, Afro influences and a contemporary approach to rhythm and arrangement. The group describes its own sound with terms such as gyp-hop, maneleton and turbo folk jazz, emphasizing the hybrid character of the music it performs. HRT states that the collective's members have made their way from European streets to stages in North, Central and South America, and they perform songs in five languages. At SHIP, they will therefore present themselves as a project that is difficult to fit into a single genre category, which aligns well with the festival's orientation toward artists who cross boundaries between local traditions and contemporary global scenes.
Hét Hat Club performs on Friday, September 11, the same day as Svemirko. Placing two such different projects in the same daily program demonstrates the breadth of the festival selection: from regional synth-pop to acoustic and electric interpretations of traditional music, hip-hop and dance patterns. The organizers announced the trio of new names - Svemirko, TRAMM Trio and Hét Hat Club - after changes to the final lineup, when it was confirmed that Turkish Kebap, Easy Freak and Eva B. Csonka would not perform. Their replacements were not conceived as genre equivalents, but as a new program combination. As a result, the final version of the lineup gained additional stylistic and geographic breadth immediately before the festival began.
From 1,487 applications to a program with around fifty performers
One of the most important indicators of SHIP's international reach this year is the number of applications to the open call. The organizers announced in February that they had received 1,487 applications from 76 countries, more than the 1,300 applications recorded a year earlier. After a selection process lasting several months, the program was gradually announced in several waves, while the final August announcement referred to 50 performing projects and around 100 speakers. The official list of performers includes projects from Croatia, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Hungary, Azerbaijan and a number of other countries. The genre range encompasses post-punk, synth-pop, techno, breakbeat, surf rock, indie folk, alternative hip-hop, sevdah, jazz, world music and numerous hybrid forms.
SHIP focuses on discovering music and connecting performers with professionals, so a concert can become the beginning of an international collaboration, a festival booking or media interest. The organizers state that the 2025 edition brought together 114 speakers from 33 countries and more than 650 music professionals from 54 countries, which explains why the conference section is not merely an addition to the concerts.
The conference opens questions about artificial intelligence, streaming, contracts and career sustainability
The SHIP 2026 conference program covers topics that directly follow changes in the contemporary music industry. According to the official list of panels, the topics include music production in the age of artificial intelligence, sources of income beyond streaming and touring, relationships between labels and artists, fairness of contracts, music synchronization for film and television, the role of curators and tastemakers, the influence of algorithms on awards and visibility, and professional burnout in the music sector. Speed-networking programs with music supervisors, sync agents and agencies are also planned, as well as workshops focused on building more sustainable careers. Such content shows that the festival directs the professional part of the program toward practical issues that affect artists' development after the performance itself.
Among the announced international professionals are Kevin Cole, a long-standing figure associated with the American station KEXP, music supervisor Anne Booty, agent Anastasia Klochkivska from UTA and Ben Mandelson, one of the founders of WOMEX. The organizers built the list of participants through several waves of announcements during the summer, while the final panels were published at the end of August.
Kevin Cole presents the double vinyl "Croatia on the Move"
One of the special projects of this year's SHIP connects the festival conference, music selection and promotion of the contemporary Croatian scene. We Move Music Croatia, the national music export office, gave Kevin Cole a broad selection of domestic performers, from which he selected 23 names for the double-vinyl release "Croatia on the Move". According to the festival's September 4 announcement, those selected include ABOP, Bad Daughter, Chui, Daliborovo Granje, DJECA!, ETHER, freekind., IDEM, Irena Žilić, Jonathan, Kries, LHD, Nemanja, Neon Lies, Nipplepeople, pocket palma, Porto Morto, Sara Renar, Them Moose Rush, Tidal Pull, Trokut, Žen and ŽIVA. Some of these performers are also appearing at this year's SHIP, so the release also functions as a kind of overview of the scene that international professionals will be able to encounter during the festival. The first copies of the album will be presented on September 11 at 12:15 at the Arsen House of Arts.
For a festival that defines itself through music discovery and export, such a project is more important than a conventional promotional souvenir. The selection by a foreign radio curator places local production within an international curatorial framework, while the physical release gives performers additional visibility beyond a brief festival appearance. In the festival announcement, Cole emphasized the diversity of Croatia's contemporary music scene and the fact that a selection of 23 performers cannot encompass every relevant project. In the context of SHIP, the project connects with conference discussions about the role of curators, music media and tastemakers at a time when a large portion of music discovery takes place through digital platforms and algorithmic recommendations.
IDEM on a boat, a silent film with LHD and a program that begins before the official opening
Among the festival's special features is "Sink This Boat", a concert by the project IDEM that will be held on a boat for just 100 visitors. The organizers announced the format as an additional stage outside the existing festival venues, and the performance is scheduled for Friday, September 11. Antun Aleksa's project thus receives a deliberately limited, intimate concert format in which the audience is physically much closer to the performer than on a standard festival stage. The boat concert also makes use of Šibenik's specific position on the Adriatic coast and turns the location itself into part of the performance concept. For visitors planning several days at the festival and needing a base in the city, accommodation offers in Šibenik are available, and because the program takes place at multiple locations, it is practical to check in advance the distance between the accommodation, the city center and the main festival venues.
This year, SHIP also expands its program beyond conventional concerts. For September 9, as a kind of "day zero", the organizer announced the KSET50 exhibition dedicated to five decades of Zagreb's student club KSET, a presentation of Boris Jokić's book "60 Beats: Musical Reading", a program connected with Kornel Šeper's monograph on Milan Manojlović Mance, and the sound-visual work "Where 2+2=5" by French artist Hugo Baranger. The work connects moss, photosynthesis, analog synthesizers and chess games, bringing the musical program into the realm of sound art and experimentation. The following day, September 10 at 5 p.m. at the Arsen House of Arts, LHD performs an original musical accompaniment to "The Tavern", a Croatian silent film by Jozo Ivakić from 1929, digitally restored from nitrate film sources. In this way, already at the opening SHIP demonstrates that this year's edition is not limited solely to evening showcase concerts.
Šibenik as a festival network rather than one main stage
SHIP's spatial structure is one of its recognizable characteristics. Instead of the entire program taking place at a single festival location, the official website lists St. Michael's Fortress, the Azimut club, the Arsen House of Arts and Tunel as the main venues, while additional content appears at other points around the city. Such an arrangement turns Šibenik's historic center and various cultural spaces into a connected festival route. St. Michael's Fortress provides the atmosphere of an open-air historic stage, Arsen enables concert, film and conference formats, Azimut functions as a club and cultural venue, while Tunel gives the program an underground club character. Because of simultaneous performances, audiences will have to choose between artists and create their own route through the daily schedule.
This is also the logic of a showcase festival: a large number of shorter performances and professional encounters are arranged so that as many new projects as possible can be heard over several days. The program from September 10 to 13 includes performers from different parts of Europe and beyond, while the conference section connects musicians with people who make decisions about festivals, tours, media visibility, synchronization, publishing and international distribution. Svemirko, TRAMM Trio and Hét Hat Club are therefore not merely three new concert names, but three examples of different paths that SHIP wants to place in the same space: an established regional indie project, an intergenerational interpretation of Azerbaijani tradition and a transnational collective created at the intersection of street music, folklore and contemporary genres. The fourth edition thus combines music discovery with a conversation about how it finds audiences beyond its own scene.
Sources:
- HRT / Hina - publication of September 8, 2026 about the arrival of Svemirko, TRAMM Trio and Hét Hat Club and the special program of the SHIP festival (link)
- SHIP Festival - final lineup changes, information on around 50 performers and approximately 100 speakers, and presentation of the three new performers (link)
- SHIP Festival - daily performer schedule from September 10 to 13, 2026 (link)
- SHIP Festival - list of conference panels and topics for the 2026 edition (link)
- SHIP Festival - official overview of the main festival venues in Šibenik (link)
- SHIP Festival - information on a record 1,487 artist applications from 76 countries and the festival's international reach (link)
- SHIP Festival - presentation of the double vinyl "Croatia on the Move" curated by Kevin Cole (link)
- SHIP Festival - special programs, KSET50, books, sound art and LHD's performance accompanying the silent film "The Tavern" (link)
- SHIP Festival - announcement of IDEM's exclusive "Sink This Boat" concert on a boat for 100 visitors (link)