With each edition of Rewire, we strive to locate music’s place within wider social and cultural conversations. This year, we anchor our exploration around three key themes: Sense of Self, Network Music and Electronic Music Innovation In Historical Context.
With Network Music, we explore the non-linear ways in which we conceptualise, distribute and organise through music and how we’ve come to theorise globalisation, digital media, speed, symbiosis and complexity. We focus on artists who use or respond to digital technologies and network culture, operating in new ways that embrace online spaces as a means for connecting like-minded creatives.
With the introduction of new technologies, the ways in which we interact, communicate and mediate are both rapidly and radically changing. This is happening on all levels – from day-to-day social interactions to global scale affiliations – but how do these relations materialise? Network signals towards the unmappable process of globalisation, the internet and the distribution of goods and information. Network Music acknowledges how artistic practice has evolved with newly possible co-constituent processes, unfamiliar materials, formats and disorientating contexts, often hosted by ephemeral platforms that conflict our tendency away from temporality and inhabitability.
Explore the complete Network Music programme below.
The Rewire 2018 discourse programme is free. Festival and Day passes for the rest of the programmeare available atTickets.
Saturday, 7 April – Korzo
In much of her artistic work, Juliana Huxtable references her own body and history as she examines socio-political issues. She’s touched upon video games, the desire to identify as an avatar and the mediation between the body and digital screen whilst dealing with complex junctions of gender, queerness and race. Within the topic of Network Music, Juliana Huxtable retraces the steps of her intellectual wanderings, exploring how she navigates reality and challenges the cultural forces that lean upon her artistic practice.
Saturday, 7 April – Korzo
Also known as Recsund, Clifford Sage is a London-based CGI artist, animator, game designer and music producer. In this talk, Sage discusses his artistic practice and his involvement in the Quantum Natives collective, speculating on a particularly contemporary form of community-making, a public constituted predominantly online through shared production.
Saturday, 7 April – Korzo
What has the democratisation of music software really done for underground digital culture? How have Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon changed the music industry and is exteriority possible without an overhaul of the hegemonic platforms? In this lecture, Jon Davies maps counterculture where communication, production and distribution are provided fewer opportunities online to exist outside of the mainstream.
Saturday, 7 April + Sunday, 8 April – Het Nutshuis
Led by Estonian sound artist Alo Allik and electronic music producer and researcher Anna Xambó, this two-day workshop will introduce you to the SuperCollider programming environment and enables you to build collaborative synthesisers and sequencers that can be shared and exchanged between participants.
The workshop costs €50 for both days and you will need to bring a laptop with SuperCollider (free) pre-installed. Register here.
Friday, 6 April – Paard II
Founded as a two-day festival at Brooklyn’s hallowed ground Bossa Nova Civic Club back in 2014, Discwoman have evolved into a global platform, collective and agency that showcases the wealth of female-identified talent in the electronic music community. At Rewire, they’re represented by co-founder UMFANG, Brooklyn techno stalwart Volvox, Tunisian producer Deena Abdelwahed and Berlin-based artist Ziúr.
Saturday, 7 April – Paard II
Co-founder of African diaspora collective NON alongside Nkisi and Angel Ho, Chino Amobi is a producer, visual artist and sonic activist who weaves music and politics together in a way many other artists of his generation do not dare. Whether it’s on last year’s critically-acclaimed debut Paradiso or 2016’s Airport Music for Black Folk, Chino Amobi expertly harnesses sound as weapon to expose, confront and overcome the power structures in our global society.
Saturday, 7 April – Paard II
Fellow NON affiliate FAKA is the collective of South African artists and musicians Fela Gucci and Desire Marea.Conceived as a cultural movement with a mission to express the experience of “black queer bodies navigating the ‘cis-hetero-topia’ of post-colonial Africa,” FAKA dabble in a wide range of artistic expression, their musical output draws heavily from gqom and channels the raw brand of South African house into a daring exploration of love, identity and romance.
Saturday, 7 April – Korzo
A globally dispersed alliance of musicians and artists, Quantum Natives create new worlds of mutant electronic music and interactive online portals. At Rewire 2018, they present the world premiere of Nexus (II), a continuation of their Nexus project that transports collaborative environments into a mirrored performance space. The Nexus (II) application is designed visually by Recsund with the audio engine programmed by Brood Ma. Artists that will be showcased within their own levels in the application are Recsund, Yeongrak, White Goblin and YAN KIN.
→ https://www.youtube.com/embed/ezfFMPhskqI
Saturday, 7 April – The Grey Space
The alias of Liverpool-based electronic composer and sound artist Jon Davies, Kepla harvests salvaged audio from a vast range of secondary sources to crafts elaborate, seemingly dystopian sound worlds that are at once rooted in an earthly ecology and reflective of a distinctly alien lifeforce. Over the past three years, he has produced a self-released EP, co-created ‘Absent Personae’ with media theorist DeForrest Brown, Jr. and video artist Chris Boyd, and composed the soundtrack for post-human play, ‘The Happy Jug’.