Rewire’s 15th anniversary edition promises a trove of performances at the cutting-edge of experimental music and sound. With over 100 performances happening across The Hague, there are countless artists and projects to discover over the weekend. To help guide you along the journey, Rewire shares 10 hidden gems from its most extensive festival edition yet.
From hyper-emo to dial-up dance, weed420's immaculate and labyrinthian processions of maximalist vaporwave and lo-fi are overflowing with ideas, creativity, and joyful abandon. They are a collective of DIY musicians based in Venezuela. As text-to-speech poetics meet DJ tag mania, their bricolage style moves between sombre cloud-rap and wafty ambient to maximal mashup and dancefloor quakers; they pull from the sounds of their surroundings, connecting reggaeton bass with chopped ‘n’ screwed trap. Amid political turmoil, weed420's music offers a soundtrack to a lost generation of Venezuelan youth, conjuring sounds and visions of blissful adolescent twilights and late nights on Discord group calls.
Fri 10 April, 20:00–21:00 at PAARD II
Experimental jazz trio Flur’s debut album, Plunge, released in September with Parisian label Latency – who have released Rewire alumni such as TLF Trio, goat (jp), and Valentina Magaletti. On Plunge, Flur delivers a generous glimpse into their world of macro-minimal spiritual jazz, which pays homage to the artists who crystalised this sound – such as Alice Coltrane – while sounding thoroughly contemporary through its bright production and experimental, exploratory approach.
Friday 10 Apr, 22:15–23:00 at Lutherse Kerk
Through their exploration of traditional songs and archival material, triple harpist and composer Cerys Hafana takes traditional music and transforms it into something mutated and new. Their third album Angel, excels as an exploration of minimalism, traditional, and avant-folk music; peering backwards yet moving forwards it meanders through time and cadence, is performed with soft confidence, and is sung heart-stirringly in Hafana's native Welsh. Their music is a reminder of the capacity for music to transcend the legibility of one's spoken language and communicate beyond the boundaries of implicit understanding to tell tales and summon emotions as old as time.
Fri 10 April, 00:20–01:05 at Korzo – Zaal
European premiere
A holy trinity of drums, guitar, and modular synthesis combine to create the unholy and glorious wall of droning sound that defines Apparitions. Their latest album, Volcanic Reality earns its namesake, as it spews ash and quakes foundations with its snarling drone metal brilliance. In moments, like the track "Résiduel," their cataclysmic percussion and distortion-drenched guitar simmers out so that beaming shimmers of ambience can shine through like sunbeams through mist. But it's not long before the group's fuzzy droning cacophony reemerges, as the ground shifts and a new molten eruption cascades forth.
Sat 11 April, 17:15–18:00 at Theater aan het Spui – Zaal 1
Performing music from their forthcoming album twice at the festival, Standing on the Corner are a New York–based avant-garde music collective and art ensemble formed by primary vocalist and songwriter Gio Escobar. Their two previous full-length releases are Red Burns and their eponymous debut from 2016 which introduced audiences to their unique sound somewhere in the sonic outskirts between hip hop, lo-fi, and soul. The ingredients they throw into their frothy frying pan include jazz, indie rock, and funk, yet what they serve on the plate isn't quite like anything that's come before. Their multicoloured productions blend genres giddily, sounding at times like home recordings unearthed from the attic of some undiscovered eccentric genius.
Sat 11 April, 18:00–18:45 at Concordia
Sun 12 April, 14:30–15:15 at Theater aan het Spui – Zaal 1
Alejandra Cárdenas's music bursts with curiosity. Her playful and off-kilter electronics and left-field guitar style are melodically intriguing and brim with the gaiety of someone who is familiar with skirting conventions (under her Ale Hop moniker). Her latest album, A Body Like a Home, centres on Cárdenas’s own voice, which takes on the dual role of witness and confessor, speaking to political upheaval and change in her home country. From collage-like field recordings and spoken word to haunting violin and whirring electronics, Cárdenas's confessional songs are moving and personal while also feeling abstract and uncanny. Cárdenas will be joined live by Gibrana Cervantes on violin and Ignacio Briceño on guitar.
Sat 11 April, 19:45–20:30 at Nieuwe Kerk
Cárdenas also appears in conversation with Giada Dalla Bontà on Sat 11 April, 15:30–16:15 at Page Not Found
On her latest release, Night CRIÚ, Irish artist Hilary Woods returns to using her voice – parting the veil of mystery that ruminates in her compositions, placing herself into the fray of her experimental ambient slowcore production. Night CRIÚ’s sonic palette features floods of texture, brass, strings, drone, and field recordings, which converge around Woods's refined yet powerful vocals. Moving between lightness and darkness, between moments of ecstatic reveal and hushed sections of restraint, Woods's dusky songs linger in the heart as much as they do in the ear.
Sat 11 April, 21:15–22:00 at Lutherse Kerk
Known for her work across jazz, theatre, and classical music contexts, Berlinde Deman is a tuba player and sound sculptor who is a part of the Flat Earth Society Orchestra. Cinematic and sombre, Deman's output is moving and unique, thanks in part to the incredible timbres of her instrument of choice: she uses a sixteenth-century instrument called the serpent, a distant, mysterious predecessor of the tuba which was developed in the Renaissance era. Through the use of layering and looping, she constructs an ever-expanding sound of subtle melodic growth and swarming harmonic dissonance.
Sun 12 April, 17:00–17:40 at Korzo – Zaal
Jennifer Walton is a seasoned composer, producer, DJ, and musician. It was during a 2018 US tour as drummer with Kero Kero Bonito when the ideas for Walton's debut album Daughters began to form – inspired by the strange liminality of touring motel-life, the scenes of wealth disparity she saw, and, most of all, by the life-altering news that her father had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. As such, a transitory sense of evolving grief is a throughline in the record, but Walton's music is not necessarily morbid. Taking the guitar as her instrument of choice, she playfully and artfully disintegrates it into a blurry, woozy, maximal collage of digital sounds. Her wistful and emotive form of hyper pop is a kinetic puzzle of jovial maximalism that's warmly distorted and crunchy with compression.
Sun 12 April, 19:00–19:45 at Koorenhuis
Walton also appears as part of the conversation and listening session Fragile Minutes with james K and Malibu, moderated by Federica Notari, on Sun 12 April 13:00–14:00 at Page Not Found
AWICHAS, the new project from Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti, draws from Andean microtonal ritual music to envision a giddy sound assembled from electronics, percussion, and voice. Stemming from a trip to Bolivia where she engaged in different rituals and teachings, Guardia Ferragutti took recordings and data from this journey and worked with sound artist Jochem van Tol to translate them into electronic music – using the Buchla 100 and 200 synthesiser to form the skeleton of the project. This skeleton was given flesh through an all-star ensemble of artists – including Frank Rosaly, Jacob Maskell-Key (of Nihiloxica), Lida Brouskari, Julia Werner, and van Tol – who composed the vibrant, jazz-inflected, drum-filled, and noisy devotional music one can expect at this performance of AWICHAS.
Sun 12 April, 21:15–22:15 at Koorenhuis
Photo by Parcifal Werkman