As the first full day of the Rewire 2023 programme is kicking off today, we’re giving you some pointers within an expansive programme of performances, talks, installations and screenings! Dive into Friday of Rewire and plan your festival trip with our tips for the day ahead!
Proximity Music, the joint exhibition program initiated in 2021 by iii and Rewire, returns to Rewire 2023, seeking to connect music, architecture, technology, ritual, and play through physical experiences engaging with all the senses. Today marks the kick-off of Proximity Music: Visceral Acts, an exhibition that invites us to engage playfully with mind and body.
Presenting a diverse range of works emerging from the backdrop of a health crisis, it brings into question ideas of health and sanity. Dive into the performances, installation, screenings and other artistic interventions around the city centre of The Hague! Explore the full
Proximity Music programme here.
Today also means the official start of Rewire’s extensive Film Programme, featuring a special focus on Black Audio Film Collective’s Trevor Mathison, whose sound work formed a critical part of the collective’s audiovisual experimentations. Check out Black Audio Film Collective’s powerful Handsworth Songs (1986) in Filmhuis Den Haag, or experience When There Is No More Music To Write, and other Roman Stories, which features three short films by Eric Baudelaire that evoke the figure of avant-garde composer Alvin Curran. Also screening today is Anyox by Jessica Johnson & Ryan Ermacora, a striking exploration of labor, industry and natural extraction in a former mining town in remote northwest British Columbia.
Dive into the full film programme here.
Rewire 2023 features an all-encompassing context programme with the theme Inter/relations. Within that programme, the theme of Instrumental Ecologies will focus on the ways in which musicians and sound artists find ways of listening with the environment, while critically assessing the environmental impact of the technologies they use, and how they are entangled with natural ecologies. In this opening assembly, artist and researcher Mark Peter Wright, sound artist and musician Liew Niyomkarn, researcher and editor Carla Maier, and audiovisual artists Matthew Biederman and Pierce Warnecke will enter into a conversation on their work, the politics of field recording, and modes of environmental listening. Wright will open the assembly with an introduction, following his essay Micologies, highlighting hidden interactions between humans, non-humans, and sound technologies.
For over four decades, American composer Ellen Fullman has maintained a singular focus on her project, The Long String Instrument, an installation of dozens of tuned strings dozens metres or more in length which have resonated architectural spaces in festivals across the world. Collaborating with experimental chamber music ensemble The Living Earth Show, Ellen Fullman presents the European premiere of a site-specific performance of Elemental View at Rewire 2023, inhabiting The Hague’s Nieuwe Kerk with a custom-built instrument of 136 20-metre-long strings.
Elemental View will be performed three times on Friday 7 April and promises to be a true highlight of the festival. Please register via our digital ticket office in order to reserve your seat.
Expanding the cycle of Occam Ocean acoustic works by the legendary composer Eliane Radigue, Occam Delta XX is a newly commissioned trio composition featuring Aura Satz (film), Rhodri Davies (harp), and Julia Eckhardt (viola). Rather than producing a film that documents the music and sits outside of it, the film participates in the logic of the score and is developed in an open weave with the musicians. Exploring a cinematic language that enacts the rippling effects of Radigue’s sound, the film diffracts musical gesture into acoustic moire.
Frank Wienk, aka Binkbeats, is an innovative producer and live performer from the Netherlands. For his new project OHM he collaborated with multi-disciplinary artist Henk Schut, who created an installation that combines electro-acoustical objects with ritual percussion, while leaving room for modern electronic music gear. For OHM, Binkbeats wrote complex rhythmical pieces which he plays entirely live, with no looping involved. Traditional ritual drums meet drum-machine sounds, with big resonating metal plates positioned around the audience.
Their duo with their brother, Olof, The Knife, introduced them internationally, showcasing their bold aesthetics and distinctive voice. Solo, as Fever Ray, they’ve continued to push the boundaries, collaborating with a number of different producers to create a cohesive, richly detailed body of work. With their latest album Radical Romantics just released, this show by Fever Ray in PAARD I promises to be a brilliant and mind-blowing performance.
Rewire has commissioned the highly influential American trombonist, composer, and producer Peter Zummo for a unique artistic residence in The Hague, alongside the innovative Japanese electronic duo KAKUHAN to collaborate on new music, to be performed during Rewire 2023. Experience for yourself which radical directions this collaboration between a leading voice in the interdisciplinary avant-garde of New York City and one of Japan’s most vital electronic music acts will take the audience.
Besides their performance alongside Peter Zummo, KAKUHAN is also slated for an individual performance during Rewire 2023.
Presenting the world premiere of an original live music show combining Andalusian folklore, South American styles, Pop, urban, and avant-garde club music, Maoupa Mazzocchetti poetically reflects the theme of the love triangle, trying to discover what is common and unchanging about it over the centuries and across civilizations. The show alternates between many atmospheres, from attraction to fusional love to hatred and reconciliations, inspired by the dramaturgy of opera-ballet and contemporary dance.
Head into Rewire’s nightlife in PAARD II with three acts that will surely keep the dancefloor energised with their high intensity music. By blending the syncopated rhythms of drum and bass, jungle, footwork, and juke with traces of Arabic vocals and percussion, ABADIR kicks the club night off with club music that feels truly global. Only adding to the intensity is the live percussion of HOGIR, giving a new live dimension to the engrossing dance tunes.
Next up is an already iconic pair of Bitter Babe, playing b2b with Manuka Honey. Teaming up for their first back to back set ever, Colombian-born and Miami-based Bitter Babe and London-based Manuka Honey will bring their signature deconstructed treatment of baile funk, reggaeton, and dembow to Rewire. While reimagining the sound of the Latinx diaspora in ravey, abrasive club tracks, this duo of musicians, producers, and DJs never fails to skip out on the pleasure principle, so expect a rowdy dancefloor for this one.
The perfect condition for Safety Trance to wrap the club night up with his full-on dedication to the pulsating rhythms, rumbling bass, and hyped-up vocals of the reggaeton he grew up listening to in Caracas. In a similar vein as his long-time friend and collaborator Arca, Safety Trance filters classic reggaeton through razor sharp contemporary sound design, creating fun, edgy, and adventurous club music in the process.