The first day of Rewire 2019 is here. We’ve put together a snapshot of today’s highlights.
We open Rewire 2019 with our very first symposium. Organised in collaboration with the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, the Instrumental Shifts Symposium will bring together leading researchers, academics and artists to explore new frontiers of computer science, music, and future technologies. Taking place at West Den Haag, the one-day programme sees the likes of Goldsmiths’ Professor Mick Grierson, machine learning and generative music experts Bob Sturm and Dr. Róisín Loughran as well as artists Ash Koosha and Laura Agnusdei lift the hood on the dynamic facets of artificial intelligence and how they contribute to evolving creative processes.
In another Rewire first, we’re thrilled to be making our festival debut at The Hague’s grand performing arts theatre, Koninklijke Schouwburg with a pair of unique collaborative performance. The first sees visionary American producer Jlin team up with the award-winning Company Wayne McGregor for a groundbreaking performance in contemporary dance build around the sequencing of a human genome. For the second, prolific Canadian composer and sound artist Tim Hecker is joined by an ensemble of traditional Gagaku performances that synthesises ancient Japanese royal court music with Hecker’s distinct blend of drone and rich harmonic noise.
The festival’s very first concert takes place at Koorenhuis. Dutch piano and percussion duo Niels Broos & Jamie Peet fuse contemporary idioms like jazz, hip-hop, and electronics with a dexterous improvisational style and an adventurous sonic parlance. Across the street, Paard opens its doors for performances by globetrotting singer and producer Lafawndah, who released her mesmerizing full-length debut ‘Ancestor Boy’ just last week, Actress + Young Paint, an astonishing digital duet between the UK club icon and an AI spawn, and Sega Bodega’s dizzying live performance featuring a stage design by Shaun Murphy.
The stunning surrounds of the Lutherse Kerk are home to a trio of distinctive performances on the Friday of Rewire 2019. First up is Mette Henriette, a Sámi-Norwegian composer and saxophonist who skirts genre convention to craft remarkably expressive and emotional worlds of sound, while Astrid Sonne, a Danish viola player turned electronic composer, presents the first performance of a new work entitled ‘Cycles of Lost and Found’ with the help of a string trio. Closing Friday’s Lutherse Kerk programme is LA-based composer and performer Tashi Wada. Joined by his friends Julia Holter and Corey Fogel, the trio unleash the rich blend of harmonic overtones, resonance, and dissonance that is their collaborative album, ‘Nue’.
Ushering us into the early hours of Saturday morning is an exhilarating club programme that kicks off at Paard II and winds its way to Het Magazijn’s basement. The rising stars of Uganda’s Nyege Nyege Tapes transporting us to the beating heart of East Africa’s burgeoning electronic music scene, with performances by Acholitronix mastermind Otim Alpha, Bamba Pana & Makaveli and their blistering 180 bpm singeli and DJ Kampire bridging the two. The Friday night ends with an all-nighter at Het Magazijn, starring the twisted reggaeton of Clara! y Maoupa before moving on to a trio of local stalwarts in Jasmín, upsammy and Spekki Webu.