Ahead of the first line-up announcement later this year, today Rewire is proud to share that avant-garde icon Diamanda Galás will be performing at Rewire 2027, the festival’s 16th edition, taking place from 8 to 11 April.

A cult (and occasionally occult) artist, Diamanda Galás has channeled the unique powers of her otherworldly vocal chords and her unrelenting and bravely experimental mindset for over 40 years. Her debut album The Litanies of Satan arrived earth-shatteringly in 1982, immediately catapulting her into the forefront of the US avant-garde milieu as a singular voice.

Wielding cacophonies of unfathomable shape, her work has long offered a space of resistance and strength for subjects of violence and despair. Pushing back against the failures and silences of those in power, her mystical yet deeply grounded compositions and performances claw at the gates of coherence and collapse, as she bellows unholy howls and leads listeners into wailing processions of grief and catharsis. This is felt strongly in her work across the late 1980s, particularly in the performance work Plague Mass, which addressed the AIDS crisis during a time of deafening political silence.

Releasing prolifically with Mute Records, the nineties saw Galás develop her experimental and collaborative practice, including an album with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones. In the late 2010s, Galás reobtained the rights to her recordings, leading to a series of remasters and rereleases with her own imprint Intravenal Sound Operations, and bringing her unhallowed compositions to a new generation of listeners. She has also released new offerings with the label in the form of De-formations First and Second Variations (2019 and 2025) and Broken Gargoyles (2022), The latter of which uses various advanced vocal and instrumental techniques to create a haunting sonic portrait of the experiences of post-traumatic soldiers and sick patients.

An oracle of end times, through her influential performances and compositions, Galás – as if harbouring insight from some other plain of existence – offers a confronting and uneasy sense of clarity about the world's ongoing state of uncertainty. Hers is music that is both dangerous and sensitive, devilish and devout, and ever overflowing with affect and humanity. Rewire is excited to present a Netherlands-exclusive performance of Diamanda Galás as part of its 2027 festival programme.

Book tickets for Rewire 2027
Rewire returns to The Hague in 2027 for its 16th edition, which will take place from Thursday 8 April to Sunday 11 April.⁠ A limited amount of Regular 3-Day and 4-Day Passes, as well as Student Passes, are on sale via rewirefestival.nl/tickets

Photo by Austin Young