Gop Tun 2026: South America’s House Music Heartbeat Lands in São Paulo

Some festival exist purely to fill a calendar slot. Others feel like a conversation between a city and itself, a moment where geography, culture, and sound become inseparable. The fifth edition of Gop Tun Festival, set for April 11 and 12, 2026 in Sao Paolo, sits comfortably in the latter. What began as a grassroots electronic music operation has steadily matured into one of South America's most respected annual gatherings for house, techno, and experimental club music. The 2026 instalment marks the festival's boldest move yet, trading its previous industrial home for a venue whose scale and history elevate the entire scene.

A Collective With Deep Roots

The story starts not with a festival but with a crew. Gop Tun shape in 2012 under the guidance of Fernando Nascii, Caio Taborda, Gui Scott, and Bruno Protti, a group of Sao Paolo based selectors and promoters with a shared appetite for sounds that rarely found their way onto Brazilian stages. Over the decade that followed, they cultivated a loyal following through club nights and label releases before graduating to festival scale. Their inaugural festival in 2022 proved the concept worked. The first edition drew around 5,000 people to a decommissioned swimming pool complex beside the Caninde football stadium, an unconventional setting that felt entirely in keeping with the collective's instinct for repurposing neglected urban space. By the second edition in April 2023, the scene had expanded to over 30 artists across four stages, with approximately 70 percent of international books making their Brazilian debut at that single event. The 2026 edition, framed by the organizers as a tribute to Sao Paolo on the centenary of architect Gregori Warchavchik's modernist architectural manifesto, carries that tradition of ambitious, place specific thinking forward.

A New Venue, A Landmark Setting

The shift in location for 2026 is significant. Where previous editions occupied the Live Stage Caninde site in the city's north, the fifth instalment relocates to the Mercado Livre Arena Pacaembu, a recently overhauled stadium complex that reopened to the public in January 2025 after several years of extensive works. Private operator Allegra Pacaembu undertook the transformation under a 35 year concession agreement with the city of Sao Paolo, with total investment approximately 800 million Brazillian reais and a revised seat capacity of around 26,000. The site has since been repositioned as multi-purpose urban hub that combines sporting infrastructure with retail, leisure, cultural events, and digital brand experience, making it well suited to an event as big as Gop Tun.

For the festival, the arena is not merely a container but a collaborator. The gym will house the Main Stage, the hard tennis court will. become the Danceteria, which is dedicated to house and disco sounds, and the clay court will host the Nao Existe stage, a space aimed at sonic experimentation and forward thinking performance. A fourth configuration, the Supernova stage, runs as a night programmer in partnership with Resident Advisor, pushing deep into Saturday night across its own ticketed session.

The House Music Lineup

The confirmed artist lineup for 2026 spans Jayda G, Chaos in the CBD, SHERELLE, Yu Su, Optimo (Espacio), Tama Sumo, and a b2b pairing of Ogazon and Ryan Elliot, among a broader cast of local and international artists. The Danceteria stage, built around house and disco, is where many of the weekend's most warmly anticipated moments are expected to land.

Leading the house lineup is Jayda G, a Canadian born, London based artist whose trajectory through electronic music has been anything but conventional. She initially pursued postgraduate research in environmental science before shifting her focus to music production, bringing the methodical curiosity to the record crate that she had previously applied to academic fieldwork. Her 2019 debut long player on Ninja Tune drew deeply from the Chicago house tradition, built on vintage drum machine textures and soulful arrangements, and established her as a producer of genuine substance rather than a DJ who happened to release records. The pandemic era single Both of Us, made alongside Fred Again, became one of the most widely praised dance track of its year, collecting year end honors from outlets including Pitchfork, NPR, Billboard and The Guardian alongside a Grammy nomination. Her most recent album, Guy, released in 2023, turned eleven hours of home video footage recorded by her late father into a suite of house, soul, and disco tracks that functioned simultaneously as personal dancefloor meaning. All of her sets are played entire on vinyl.

Joining her on the Danceteria stage are Chaos in the CBD, the Auckland raised, Peckham based brothers who approach to deep house has earned them a devoted global listenership. Louis and Ben Helliker Hales haven spent well over a decade refining their sound, accumulating more than 100 million streams through a style that fuses spectral jazz textures with deep structures and an unhurried, sun soaked temperament drawn from their New Zealand upbringing. Their debut album, released in May 2025 on their own 'In Dust We Trust' imprint after more than ten years of EPs and singles, climbed to number two on the UK Dance Albums Chart, confirming a fanbase that had long outgrown the underground.

Completing the house adjacent trio is SHERELLE, an East London artist who has spent recent years pushing electronic music toward an altogether more ferocious tempo. Her name appeared on Mixmag's list of the top producers who defined 2025, and she collected the DJ Mag Best of British Breakthrough Producer award the same year, capping a period of sustained recognition that began with a viral club performance in 2019. Running two record labels simultaneously, one focused on boundary pushing club music and the other dedicated to amplifying Black and LGBTQ voices in the industry, she brings an organizational and political seriousness to her work that sits alongside the raw energy of her DJ sets.

The Centre of South American House Music

Alongside events such as Mamba Negra and Sangra Muta, Gop Tun has played a measurable role in broadening both the sonic range and the audience for underground electronic music across Sao Paolo over the past decade. The move into the Mercado Livre Arena Pacaembu signals something larger still, a claim on cultural infrastructure that matches the festival's growing ambition. With Jayda G anchoring the house scene, Chaos in the CBD bringing back their characteristically sunlit depth, and SHERELLE delivering her high velocity take on dance music's Black British lineage, the fifth edition of Gop Tun is less a festival and more a statement of intent about where South American house music stands in 2026