Welcome to Rewire! After 2.5 years, we're finally back in The Hague presenting adventurous music to in-person audiences. For the first day of the festival, we've prepared a list of tips for different things to check out throughout the day in numerous venues across the city.
*Please note, Weekend Passes and Saturday tickets are now sold out! There are still a few individual Friday tickets available at: https://www.rewirefestival.nl/tickets
If you haven't already, we encourage you to check out out Covid safety policy which will be in place during the entire festival. You can also find out everything else you need to know, including where to collect your wristbands or register for performances with this handy practical guide: Read carefully here.
Ale Hop (19.00, Theatre aan het Spui I)
Watching an experimental musician operate a plethora of instruments can strike onlookers as an insular process that’s sometimes tricky to grasp. Ale Hop – the moniker of Alejandra Cardenas – is the antithesis of that bias: the performances of this Peru-born, Berlin-based artist, researcher and instrumentalist are erratic, incandescent affairs, ranging from guitar-based noise pounces to punishing drones. A longtime spearhead in the underground scene of Lima, Cardenas’ music covers specific subjects with a visceral, inquisitive disposition, whether it's the childhood memories of her homeland or the behaviour of insects.
Andrius Arutiunian (15.00 & 20.15, Korzo)
Andrius Arutiunian is an Armenian-Lithuanian sound artist and composer based in The Hague whose interest in musical peripheries strongly informs his electro-acoustic practice. His music often investigates different sonic traditions, using electronics, field recordings, and found sound objects. For Rewire he presents Seven Common Ways of Disappearing, a new piece for retuned piano, modular electronics, and performers. Using an enneagram to notate its hypnotic sound world, this work performed by Helena Basilova and Keiko Shichijo deals with the complex relationship between dissonance, tuning, and time. Drawing influences from several esoteric sources, Seven Common Ways of Disappearing is connected to gharib - a tradition associated with the underground, clandestine activities of music making, the historical psychotropic substance trade, and political dissent.
Please note that, next to his evening concert in Korzo, Andrius will present a special concert On Friday 10 September at 15:00 in Korzo for individuals who are sensitive to sensory information, in collaboration with Onbeperkt Genieten. This concert requires a separate ticket, which can be purchased here.
Lea Bertucci & String Quartet (21.30, Lutherse Kerk)
New York-based composer, multi-instrumentalist performer and sound designer Lea Bertucci explores the relationship between acoustic phenomena and biological resonance. Through magnetic tape manipulations, Bertucci developed a body of work that encompasses performance, installation and multi channeled activations of space. The results are haunting acousmatic documents of an artist’s intimate interaction with their environment. At the Lutherse Kerk she presents a new composition entitled 'Vapours' accompanied by a string quartet.
Pan Daijing (21.45, Theatre ann het Spui I)
Chinese-born, Berlin-based performance artist/composer Pan Daijing entertains refreshing, playful notions on creating and performing, notions that deviate from familiar, more accustomed forms. Daijing’s all-embracing disposition allows her to playfully prod at reality’s default states, frequently creating intrusive happenings that trigger the senses in novel ways. For the Rewire 2021 offline edition she presents a new live performance entitled 'Half a Name: Act II' based on her recent recording work.
Lyra Pramuk (23.15, Paard I)
The limits of the human voice are, quite honestly, endless. Following in the footsteps of Björk’s ‘Medúlla’, Lyra Pramuk’s heart-wrenching breakthrough album ‘Fountain’ is composed entirely of vocals. Even more so than a critical milestone on how far the musical synthesis between the organic and artificial has come, the Berlin-based artist has summoned a futuristic paean for the transfeminine experience. Her adventurous production methods – such as sampling older recordings, loops and flirting with dance floor euphoria – aren’t just for aesthetic purposes: they are intricate documentations on the act of becoming through physical performance, memory and improvisation.
Benjamin Abel & The Unrequired Love (23.45, Theatre aan het Spui II)
Incidentally, inspiration can sprout from something as banal as a gaffe. Enter Belgian outfit Benjamin Abel & The Unrequired Love, which was supposed to say “unrequited love”, but a simple typo sparked something that made even more sense to opera singer Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe and composer Laurens Mariën. Having made the human sexual anatomy somewhat a case study with various projects, the duo introduced their coy, dramaturgical brand of pop on the aptly-titled LP Spectacles. These songs bring an uncensored passion play to the stage that subverts universal ideas on love, pornography and ritual. Naturally, Benjamin Abel & The Unrequired Love pull out all the stops on stage, adding striking visuals, stage props, dancers and performance artists to an already unforgettable juxtaposition of musical styles.
Proximity Music
Our collaboration with artist-led initiative iii, 'Proximity Music' kicks off from 12.00 on the first day of the festival. We present a set of installations scattered across The Hague which engage with the senses and the body, with instruments and machines, with ritual and play. Find out more about this project, which is totally free to access without a ticket, here.