Following the successful collaboration in 2019, Rewire teams up with The Hague-based Festival Dag in de Branding to present a full day and night of concerts on Saturday 18 September, adding an extra closing day to the recently announced Rewire 2021 - offline edition on 10, 11 and 12 September. Check out the programme for this collaboration below, the first batch of tickets are now available here.

→ Attend the Facebook event.

Both festivals – Dag in de Branding focusing on Dutch contemporary music, Rewire focusing on the international avant-garde – stand for musical adventure and experimentation at the intersection of composition, improvisation, electronic and video. The event comes following the successful collaboration between the two festivals in 2019. Taking place in a number of different venues in The Hague, the collaboration will conclude the Rewire 2021 - offline edition, which runs across 10, 11, 12 and 18 September. 

The programme draws together a number of different artists and projects from the world of contemporary music. Capturing the spirit of the collaboration of the two festivals, we will present ensemble performances of new pieces, unique audiovisual works and site-specific reinterpretations of older compositions. The lineup includes Zeno van den Broek & Slagwerk Den Haag, Timoteo Carbone & Federico Zurani, Meriç Artaç, Celia Swart & Kluster5, Maria W Horn, and Gareth Davis Group. Read more about the programme below.

Zeno van den Broek & Slagwerk Den Haag – Ma(n|chine)
Theater aan het Spui – zaal 1
Composer and visual artist Zeno van den Broek designed Ma(n|chine) – an audio-visual installation played by percussionists – for Slagwerk Den Haag. Ma(n|chine) explores the tensions between the technology of algorithms and the human capacity to create music. 

Timoteo Carbone & Federico Zurani – Sounds for an Abandoned Space II
Theater aan het Spui – zaal 2
Sounds for an Abandoned Space II is a multimedia work by Italian composer Timoteo Carbone and Italian artist Federico Zurani. Simultaneously fragile and raw, musical and visual elements form an imaginary space re-created from old warehouses, overgrown country houses, dilapidated apartment buildings and other abandoned places throughout Italy. The work thus creates a liminal space between the concrete and the etheric.

Meriç Artaç – Rudan
Theater aan het Spui – Studio
Rudan is a busy businessman whose thoughts never rest. He is not able to make contact with his frenetic inner self. The music reflects the dark, depressed world of his musings in a long stream of consciousness. Echoes and repetitions allow us to feel how Rudan’s thoughts cascade uncontrollably. As listeners, it’s as if we are in Rudan’s head, experiencing the hopelessness of his situation. 

Mertiç Artaç has presented her character Rudan previously at Dag in de Branding, but now she has designed a new instrumentation for this dramatic protagonist (baritone, violin, viola, cello) Rudan is one of the characters that make up Artaç’s opera Mr. Zanzun, with which she will bid farewell to Dag in de Branding in November. 

Kluster5 performs Celia Swart - Elevation of self-validation 
Korzo
No one escapes: the smartphone dominates a huge part of our lives. Also that of composer Celia Swart, who is acutely aware of the pitfalls of social media: ‘In this parallel internet world, you always show your best side. I’m no different. I would never write that I’ve had a bad week, or post a photo of my room looking a mess. This means we’ve created a new world where nothing is now what it seems.’

In the multimedia piece Elevation of self-validation which she wrote for Kluster5, Swart shows how a young woman loses herself in this virtual dimension. Lonely violinist Cecí Gold’s world gradually becomes more complex and layered. The distinction between real and fake is ever more difficult to make out, even for herself. 

Maria W Horn – Dies Irae
Lutherse Kerk
Swedish composer Maria W Horn was inspired by the Dies Irae from the Latin requiem, which for centuries has accompanied the Catholic dead on their way to the grave. The Dies Irae (‘day of wrath’) describes the Last Judgment – for many believers the moment of truth, and therefore in most requiems an orchestral ‘hellfire and damnation’. But Horn makes this terrifying moment serene, pure and heavenly. Four singers seem like angels, transcending the earthly, whilst Maria W Horn supports the vocal quartet with subtle, dreamy, live electronic sounds. An exceptional element is the improvisation for four tuned glasses of water, which the musicians make sing by running their fingers around the rims. This is an homage to The Tuning Meditation by American twentieth-century pioneer Pauline Oliveros. 

Gareth Davis Group - 'Stockhausen - Aus den sieben Tagen'
Lutherse Kerk
Karlheinz Stockhausen was not only the founding father of electronic music, but also an inspiration for artists such as Björk, Prince and The Beatles. Aus den Sieben Tagen is a cycle of fifteen compositions Stockhausen wrote in 1968. He developed the concept of ‘intuitive music’, in which he didn’t use musical notation but gave the musicians instructions using short texts such as: “Play a vibration” or “Change the sound into gold”. 

This site specific event reinvents this composition for the present by combining space, light and sound. The ensemble of performers reaches from all directions and includes electronic musician Robin Rimbaud - Scanner, Motorpsycho drummer Tomas Jarmyr, Gareth Davis (Merzbow, Christian Marclay), Roland Dahinden (Miles Davis, Anthony Braxton), Dario Calderone (Klangforum Wien), Agathe Max (Rhys Chatham, Animal Hospital) and Marketa Schaffartzik. Along with lighting designer Vinny Jones, this eclectic lineup takes elements of experimental rock, improv, jazz and neue musik in creating a work that deals directly with the here and now.