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Embrace improvisation and sonic extremes at Rewire 2021

As we make the last preparations before going live on Friday, take some time to dive into the programme as we provide you with some ‘festival routes’, giving some tips on things to check out over the weekend. Next, we shift focus to some of the artists who dance around the peripheries of genre classification, whilst pushing music to its sonic and theoretical limits and extremes. From intense walls of noise and intricate, heart-racing polyrhythms, to cerebral free improvisation and math-rock, get ready to embrace the adventurous nature of the festival with this route.

Please note: due to restrictions in place at the offline edition, once a performance has begun you will not be able to enter the venue, so make sure to plan ahead to avoid missing out. These routes have been designed with this in mind, so whilst we encourage you to use these as a loose guide to plan your festival weekend, be adventurous in your selections!

The last few tickets are still available, get yours here: https://www.rewirefestival.nl/tickets 

Friday:

Start your Friday evening at Theatre aan het Spui by catching Peru-born, Berlin-based artist, researcher and instrumentalist Ale Hop. Her performances are erratic, incandescent affairs, ranging from guitar-based noise pounces to punishing drones. Ale Hop’s music covers specific subjects with a visceral, inquisitive disposition, whether it's the childhood memories of her homeland or the behaviour of insects.

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Chinese-born, Berlin-based performance artist/composer Pan Daijing entertains refreshing, playful notions on creating and performing, notions that deviate from familiar, more accustomed forms. Daijing’s all-embracing disposition allows her to playfully prod at reality’s default states, frequently creating intrusive happenings that trigger the senses in novel ways. For the Rewire 2021 offline edition she presents a new live performance entitled ‘Half a Name: Act II’, based on her recent recording work.

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To round off your Friday night, check out the duo of Belgian percussionist and composer Karen Willems & Machinefabriek. Willems is a serial collaborator, but in her many years of working with musicians, she has never collaborated with an electronic artist before, making Rewire 2021's collaboration with Machinefabriek an intriguing challenge. Dutch producer Rutger Zuydervelt aka Machinefabriek works with drone, noise, ambient music and field recordings to create glacial soundscapes, eerie electro-acoustic environments and crushing walls of static. After the world premiere of their collaboration at the online edition in May, catch them live in The Hague for the Rewire 2021 offline edition.

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Saturday:

To kick off your Saturday evening, check out the duo Farida Amadou & Floris Vanhoof. Amadou is one of the most innovative bass players of our era, constructing a uniquely percussive style that employs noise bursts and drones in baffling, unheard of ways. Floris Vanhoof might be considered by some as a necromancer of sound and visual art, using old techniques and media to spark innovative ideas. Like an erudite inventor from some bygone era, he builds instruments from scratch that intersperse light, image and sound, repurposing archaic tools to serve his trail-blazing vision. With the two of them holding a residence at Les Ateliers Claus in Brussels, there’s no telling what kind of brain-expanding results have manifested there. Rewire 2021 is without question the right place to find out.

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The work of legendary instrumentalist Limpe Fuchs encourages the notion that the bulk of music’s potential is still very much untapped. As an endlessly prolific creator of self-built instruments and sounds, even after many decades, Fuchs preserved a whimsical personality to performance, freely alternating between custom-made wood horns, bamboo flutes, percussion pieces, string instruments and her unique self-taught brand of birdsong. Considering her gift for unearthing tactile sounds most human ears have never heard before, this is a live experience like none you have ever witnessed.

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The Baltimore-based rare bird types of Horse Lords are an anomaly you have to witness yourself to fully grasp and appreciate. This cacaphonous collective generates an ecosystem of sound with a sometimes scary geometric precision: sinister math-jazz forays buzz like a crisply coordinated swarm of locusts and dynamics stretch from post-hardcore briskness to an Afrobeat glide with just the flick of a wrist. After impressing at Rewire 2017, they return to The Hague in support of their latest album’ The Common Task’.

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Duma from Kenya have power-drilled themselves into uncharted musical territory with their ferocious, shell-shocking alchemy of noise, black metal, grindcore, power electronics and industrial. Behold the haunting ghost-in-the-machine screeches and growls, polyrhythmic beats and percussion firing with machine-gun efficiency as bursts of feverish, radioactive static splits the neurons to smithereens. Duma never let the listener settle into contentment: their music is always on the prowl, on the cusp of another hazardous transition or rude awakening. After their outstanding contribution to the online edition in May, catch them live on the Saturday night of the festival.

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Nazar is a 26-year-old Angolan producer who grew up in Belgium until his late teens, when he returned after the civil war and is now based in Europe. Nazar coined the term Rough Kuduro on his Soundcloud page, as an interpretation of the Angolan music and dance style, ‘weaponising’ it on his first EP 'Enclave' released in late 2018, translating the normally upbeat style to expose the uglier side of what he saw in Angola. On his 2020 album Guerrilla Nazar used Rough Kuduro to sensitively examine and digitalise his family’s collective memory and country's past, threading together oral histories, political realities and most significantly re-imaginings of direct horrors.

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