Rewire 2023 Festival Programme

PRO GRA MME 2022

PROGRAMME

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Contents 2 Introduction

CONTEXT 6 Inter/relations 8 Heloisa Amaral

More to sound than meets the ears 12 Pak Yan Lau describes her sound universe, full of surprises 16 Mark Peter Wright

Micologies 20 Ellen Fullman ­Enormous lengths:­ ­Ellen Fullman discusses her work with the Long String Instrument 24 Budhaditya Chattopadhyay

An Equal Sound 28 Renata Yazzie

Through Space and Time 30 Peggy Kyoungwon Lee

Destroy With Your Own Hands 32 Alto Arc

The unlikely supergroup merging avant-garde with fantasy

36 40 58 82

MUSIC PROGRAMME Thursday 6 April Friday 7 April Saturday 8 April Sunday 9 April

98

FILM PROGRAMME

106

SPECIAL EVENTS

PRACTICAL 129 General Festival Info 130 Venues 132 Credits

Introduction From 6 to 9 April 2023, Rewire presents its 12th and most extensive ­festival edition to date, featuring leading artists and emerging talents from across the globe and close to home. Over 200 individual events — including 25 world premieres, newly commissioned performances and unique collaborations, live concerts, club nights, film screenings, an exhibition of sound art works, ­ an extensive context programme with conver­ sations, listening sessions, and workshops — underline Rewire’s commitment to fostering musical e ­ xperimentation, exploration, and innovation.

At a time when it has become impossible to address urgent issues separately, because they are all ‘entangled’ with each other, Rewire 2023 focuses on those interconnected, often elusive (inter)relations. By acknowledging that boundaries between humans, nature and technology, between past and present, and between different cultures are porous and fluid, and that new forms of collaboration instead of polarisation are needed to move forward in this entangled world, we can start rehearsing different, more equal relationships with others and our surroundings.

At this year’s festival, collaborative ­approaches take centre stage, with more 2 — Introduction

collaborations than ever before between artists from different genres, generations, and geographies — allowing artists to step out of their creative comfort zone and co-create. Rewire has commissioned Deafheaven frontman George Clarke, maverick pop producer Danny L Harle, Trayer Tryon from Hundred Waters, and make-up artist Isamaya Ffrench to present the first ever performance of their recently formed supergroup Alto Arc, translating a maximalist hybrid of club and metal music into a bewitching live show.

The distinctive percussion of drummer Julian Sartorius meets the virtuose electronics of Matthew Herbert live on stage in a world premiere performance. Rewire has commissioned the highly influential trombonist, composer, and producer Peter Zummo alongside the innovative electronic duo KAKUHAN for an intercontinental and intergenerational collaboration. Another world premiere is Pavel Milyakov & Perila’s mix of dreamy pop and poetic spoken word, matched with hazy electronics and guitars. Meanwhile, Nadah El Shazly & Elvin Brandhi team up for a new show that takes the canonical form of opera and brings it up to speed with contemporary culture. Rewire 2023 also hosts the world premiere of a unique collaboration between The Paper Ensemble & Ale Hop, which promises to deliver a sonic fabric woven from the smallest and softest sounds we can hear, in juxtaposition with the brutality of percussion and amplification.

Situated around the music line-up, the context- and film programme Inter/ relations provides a space for reflection and to bring the various practices of artists into conversation with one another. The

first part Instrumental Ecologies focuses on the ever-shifting role of technology in music and sound practice, and how artists and musicians research and experiment with the ways in which instruments and technologies are entangled with natural ecologies. Pierce Warnecke & Matthew Biederman’s audiovisual performance Spillover for instance, provides a metaphor for a systemic shift and a point of reflection for our relationship with environmental extraction.

The programme also focuses on how low-tech tools and instruments are revi­ sited and used in experimental music practices. Rewire has commissioned sound artists and experimental turntablists ­Maria Chavez, Mariam Rezaei, and Victoria Shen to present a new collaborative piece for turntables. For this performance, Victoria Shen will employ her “Needle ­ Nails,” acrylic nails with built-in turntable needles that allow for simultaneous playback of multiple sound sources on the same record.

Inviting the listener to discover details of the physics of string vibration itself, pioneering composer and performer Ellen Fullman will inhabit The Hague’s Nieuwe Kerk, alongside The Living Earth Show, with her Long String Instrument consisting of 136 20-metre-long strings, precisely tuned and configured for Elemental View, a singular work in six movements.

Times and Territories, the second part of the context programme, asks how artists challenge existing borders and linear notions of time, while fostering forms of intergenerational listening, and engaging with music and sound from various locations and positions. Notions of ritual time are for instance explored by Nwando Ebizie, who uses her music to open gates into the ritual cultures of the Black Atlantic. Her album The Swan is a work of sonic fiction moving into the imagined world of a matriarchal community, and unfolding like a time-­ warping ethnographic account of found

sound and footage that is both ancient and futuristic.

Okkyung Lee presents her Yeo-Neun Quartet for a performance of Yeo-Neun, which represents the culmination of one of the longest and most intimate arcs in her remarkable career. It elegantly binds modern classical composition and freely improvised music with the emotive drama of Korean traditional music and popular ballads. Joe Rainey channels and echoes the cultural histories that preceded them and approaches these influences with a contemporary sonic toolset. Rainey delves into the history of indigenous pow wow singing and recontextualizes these ancient song forms in exciting and new in-between places.

Rewire is also proud to present the world premiere of the audiovisual performance Correspondences, the result of an ongoing collaborative project and conversation between Soundwalk Collective and legendary artist, poet and performer Patti Smith that has spanned over 10 years and across multiple geographies, uncovering the sonic steps left by poets, film makers, revolutionaries and extraordinary events that have taken place in specific locations.

The third edition of Proximity Music, a playful and interdisciplinary exhibition, is titled Visceral Acts and presents a diverse range of works in and around Amare that bring into question ideas of health and sanity. Through the lens of personal, creative if not unorthodox approaches, the exhibiting artists help to trace paths backwards and forwards in time, connecting with different forms of knowledge.

The artists and projects discussed here are just a few of this year’s festival highlights. On the following pages you will find a complete guide to the Rewire 2023 programme. Download our festival app or check the website for updates.

We wish you an incredibly inspiring festival!

Introduction — 3

CON TE XT

Inter/relations

This year, Rewire’s context programme will revolve around the theme of Inter/relations, taking place at The Grey Space in The Middle, Nieuwe Kerk, and Page Not Found. Through listening sessions, conver­ sations, and assemblies, the programme will tune into entangled environments and sound technologies, while challenging existing borders and linear notions of time.

6 — Context

The festival’s context programme Inter/ relations will explore how recognizing fluid boundaries between humans, nature, and technology, and establishing connections between times and territories are fundamental for contemporary and experimental music and sound practices. Musicians and sound artists experiment with emerging and older technologies, exploring ways to tune into and expose the often invisible yet pervasive systems and networks of contemporary society. They find ways to improvise and collaborate across different time zones. Some approach the technologies they use critically, assessing forms of extraction and the ways in which natural landscapes or communities are exploited. Other artists are interested in the genealogy of instruments — the ways in which music and sound cultures travel — or in developing new contexts for forgotten or pre-colonial instruments. They invite us to listen more closely and collectively, and to recalibrate our relations with our environment.

The first part of the context programme Instrumental Ecologies focuses on the ever-­ shifting role of technology in music and sound practice, and how artists and musicians research and experiment with the ways in which instruments and technologies are entangled with natural ecologies.

It also asks how older, analogue, or lowtech tools and instruments are revisited and used in experimental music. The second part will look into interrelations between Times and Territories, challenging existing borders and linear notions of time.

During conversations, listening sessions, and assemblies, we will practice forms of intergenerational listening, while engaging with music and sound from various locations and positions. Artists joining the context programme are ABADIR, Afrorack, Andrius Arutiunian, Brandon LaBelle, ­Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Carla J. Maier, Deena Abdelwahed, Ellen Fullman, Giada Dalla Bontà, Hatis Noit, Hannes Liechti,

Heloisa Amaral, Hildegard Westerkamp (audio contribution), Joe Rainey, Liew Niyomkarn, Lucy Liyou, Maria Chávez, ­ ­Mariam Rezaei, Mark Peter Wright, Matteo Marangoni, Matthew Biederman, meLê yamomo, M I M I, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Nwando Ebizie, Pak Yan Lau, Pamela Z, Patti Smith and Soundwalk Collective, Paul Purgas, Pierce Warnecke, Stas Sharifullin, Vica ­ Pacheco, Victoria Shen, and Vivian Caccuri.

From the opening programme on Thursday onwards, The Grey Space in The Middle, space for fundamental creativity, and Page Not Found, space for artist’s publications, will operate as the main centers of gravity for the context programme. Radio WORM will be broadcasting live from The Grey Space, with interviews, live streams, and conversations. All context programme activities are freely accessible.

All in It Together

In conjunction with the context programme Inter/relations, Rewire and Norient launched the online publication All in It Together, with essays, audio pieces, and works of sonic fiction by authors from the Norient and Rewire network. How do artists relate to each other and their environments and how does it affect their music?

In which way can new forms of listening lead to new perspectives? And how can one think with rather than about music?

Dive into the publication All in It Together here:

Context — 7

More to sound than meets the ears

by Heloisa Amaral

In response to Rewire 2023’s theme Inter/relations, pianist, artistic researcher, and curator Heloisa Amaral contributes her essay, More to sound than meets the ears, on modes of listening and the possibility of multiphonic attention. During Rewire Festival 2023, Amaral will participate in the opening programme on Thursday 6 April.

Each context has its unique practice of listening that may spill over into other areas of our lives and have a significant impact on our behavior and thoughts. Some of these practices are taken for granted, despite the historical and ideological factors that shape them, and the potential implications they hold. The way we engage with music in the classical concert hall is an example of a listening practice that is less spontaneous than we may think. This form of listening focuses solely on the music. Silence is mandatory because it preserves the music from interruptions that might disrupt its temporal coherence. The music is “protected,” so to say, from the influence of its immediate physical environment. It appears to the listener as if emerging from a world and a time “apart.”

This silence is a Romantic invention, from a time when listening to music, especially classical music, was considered as a promise and a condition for the most private but also the most elevating experiences involving communication with the self and with the world. Silence, in this context, was an omen; it preceded the music as a “presence in the air” waiting to be revealed. Over time, silence has come to be valued as an ideal background for musical performance also beyond the concert hall. The history of the classical concert and the more recent history of the recording medium are marked by efforts to cleanse the acoustic environment of performance, removing or minimising all sounds extraneous to the music in order to create a background of silence upon which music can shine undisturbed.

Yet behind this silence and the existential experience it facilitates lies also another story, connected to the societal emphasis on sustained attention in the period surrounding the Industrial Revolution. Focusing one’s attention on a single object, to the exclusion of other perceptual stimuli, was considered necessary for the establishment of a productive relationship with that object. Within a rationalised capitalist context, forming these productive relationships was important because the harnessing and mastering of objects resulted in increased productivity and economic flow. Next to this, the bourgeois ruling class was involved in a process of self-­ emancipation affecting both educational and aesthetic spheres. To “produce oneself” by accumulating knowledge through sustained attention to cultural objects such as music, novels, or the visual arts was important for maintaining a social position or climbing the social ladder. New practices and norms of attention developed in art institutions, schools, and factories, as caricatured in actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), as disciplinary tools aimed at sharpening attention to the object or task at hand.

Within the emerging classical concert, listeners paid attention because they were spellbound by the music, but also because focus was one of the driving forces of society at the time. Focus was facilitated by the implementation of what communication and media theorists refer to as the principle of the “excluded middle,” presupposing that the materialities involved in the transmission of a message — the Context — 9

music — should disappear in the communication act. All sounds extraneous to the music should be either silenced, suppressed, or made discreet. This happened through a constant negotiation between performers, audiences, concert organisers, and other partakers of musical events, all of whom enacted and continue to enact conventions, rules, and strategies designed to create and to maintain silence.

The proliferation of concert halls and other attentive environments in the urban landscape of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as museums and public libraries, shows how the general concern with attention affected various aspects of life, with lasting effects on future generations. With time, the harnessing of attention becomes integrated into the habitus. Sociologically speaking, the habitus is a system of dispositions formed in specific social environments, such as family, school, work, and mass culture, and that largely determines how we engage with these environments. Bodily techniques are one example of how the habitus is formed. These are purposeful actions passed down through education or imitation. As they become deeply ingrained in our neural pathways, bodily techniques turn our bodies into social instruments and living archives of social memory. Neuroscientists have shown for instance how individuals have learned to orientate themselves effectively in a sonic landscape by disengaging certain sounds from a noisy background. In conclusion, individuals are not only expected to focus but are also trained to do so, even in unfavourable conditions.

The question of focus is particularly timely as transformations in the larger social environment affect the structure of our attention. While in the past, socialisation agents were relatively homogeneous, today they are hybrid and diverse. Different instances of socialisation coexist, with greater circularity of values and identity 10 — Context

references. Media, particularly, produce dispositions sometimes very different from what one learns at home or at school. In addition, it confronts us to massive amounts of stimuli and information. Our perception of the environment becomes more multilayered, with many impulses to relate to. When it comes to music, ever since the 1970s, portable technologies have been making it increasingly common to listen to music outside of its traditional venues and in acoustically messy environments. One relates to the music in a more fragmented way, interrupted by the unexpected situations encountered along the way. There are real concerns that such phenomena would diminish our capacity for paying attention, as well as about the way the market exploits new technologies for financial profit, orienting the consumers’ attention towards certain things over others. At the same time, and as our habitus becomes less sedimented, we become more interested in different things. Rather than being only disorientating, this can also be potentially rich and stimulating.

New forms of awareness emerge, challenging habitual practices such as the undisputed way in which sustained attention is commonly considered as something important and good. We become for instance more mindful of how focusing on certain stimuli to the detriment of others might offer a too narrow or incomplete perspective on the object of attention, most likely preventing other sensations or areas of knowledge from being activated. Furthermore, the habit of ignoring the environment or extracting from it the objects of one’s interest reproduces established structures and hierarchies, enhancing the distance between the individual and the environment in which perception occurs. It also enhances therewith the anthropocentric logic that positions humans outside the world that they control. By contrast, considering objects within the larger context in which they are embedded facilitates the

making of connections, since the individual will engage with objects or events that someone absorbed in the contemplation of one object would not be able to hear or see.

What also seems to be gained as the mind transitions between various stimuli, is a form of intensity and presence — the sensation, so rarely felt, of being in the now, arising from the fact that each interruption to the individual’s efforts to focus on one or the other sign, brings them back to the here and now where perception occurs.

We start imagining new functions and possibilities for music. While some musicians insist on focus, conceiving performances that emphasise deep attention, others explore new attentive realities as possibly productive modes of engaging with sound. This manifests itself in many artistic proposals conceived for non-conventional musical environments, or in reconfigurations of the concert hall which give listeners the possibility of, for example, entering and leaving the performance space at will. Without the optimal conditions for focused listening, the symbolic time of music is experienced differently: absorbed and synthetic listening aimed at grasping the music and its structure leaves way for more serendipitous forms of understanding that do not follow one direction only. We might become less sensitive to the larger temporal structure of the music, but more attentive to its microstructures or to the sounds themselves. This offers new understandings of music as a temporal phenomenon and creates space for the perception of environmental sounds traditionally considered as unwanted or disturbing. The temporal unfolding and acoustic characteristics of such emergent sounds are largely undetermined and unpredictable; considered along with rather than as a background to the music, they mobilise different temporal realities and listening modes.

Music, inscribed in an environment that is fundamentally unpredictable, becomes

a relational, reactive, and contextual activity that develops in the interplay between the time of the music and the fluctuations of the physical present. It is “entangled and worldly,” to use an expression by theorist Donna Haraway. Experiencing the performance is centred on its situatedness, including the interactions between various agents, and the relations that audience and performers draw from these interactions.

This calls for a multiphonic form of attention in which several intensities and modalities might coexist, including “intentional” or focused attention, but also non-intentional, distracted, wandering, or floating. Multiphonic attention covers a sonic landscape broader than that of the music itself. The focus is on the sonic environment as a rich and important medium for the shaping of the artistic experience.

This environment is no longer like a lake in which we fish, but a lake in which we swim.

As a musician, I see this as an incentive for greater spontaneity: instead of protecting the music from “intruding” sounds, these are embraced and improvised with — music as the beginning of an experience rather than its end.

Heloisa Amaral is a pianist, artistic researcher, and curator. She lectures in curatorial practices at The Royal Conservatoire The Hague and is currently the director of the Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival. This text is based on her doctoral dissertation Mediating from Within: Alternative Environments for Musical Performance, defended last year at Leiden University, Leiden.

Listen to the audio recording of this essay on the Rewire website.

Context — 11

Pak Yan Lau describes her sound universe, full of surprises

The Brussels-based sound artist, improviser, musician, and composer Pak Yan Lau creates layered sonic ­constellations through a set-up of prepared pianos, toy pianos, synths, electronics, and various sound objects — skilfully blending electro-acoustic approaches for a bewildering universe of sound, tone, and ­ exture. During Rewire 2023, she performs her album t Bakunawa (2021) in full, delving and digging deep into the sound spectrum of a plethora of instruments.

“I find it very fascinating to be able to hear a whole world inside just one or two notes.”

Discourse — 13

What is the process like of developing your own instrumental ecology, the way you set-up, build, and arrange a set-up of instruments to compose, record, and perform your music on?

Not only do I have an obsession with toy pianos, but also with all sounding objects that resonate in a, for me, surprising way. Some of the instruments are found, some happen to cross my path by chance, some are made by limitations, and some are simply existing but modifiable or transformable. The first spark is always a kind of “wonder” of how it sounds or what could be done with it. The next is working with it and discovering the qualities and sonorities that then again inspire me to fuse it or combine it with other instruments or electronics. The overall process is generally very intuitive. I base myself mostly on what I hear and feel while working with sounds, leaving a lot of space open for “accidents” and “surprises.” When I record or perform (especially when I play alone), I also base my set-up on which space I would be sounding or playing. I might add or leave some instruments exactly because the room/church/space I’ll record/play in is very wet or just really dry. On the other hand, when I play with other musicians, I would base my set-up on what other musicians would already be bringing, and what I could add as an interesting or colourful touch.

Exploring acoustics, vibration, and overtones plays an important role in your music. What specific qualities are you looking for when you’re exploring new (or old) instruments to incorporate in your artistic process?

This “wondrous” feeling that questions and intrigues me when I hear a certain sound is a very important aspect. I find it very fascinating to be able to hear a whole world inside just one or two notes. The fact that some of these instruments are “out of tune” creates incredibly crazy overtones.

As I have a background of classical piano 14 — Context

(with its fixed tempered tuning), I am drawn to other tunings, where the frequencies can tell a very different story.

Usually I love to play with old objects, because somehow I think time has left an imprint, and they carry that within them when you make them sound.

In the case of Bakunawa, which you’ll perform during Rewire 2023, how do you know when you’ve found the constellation of instruments that works for you — when the possibilities of adding or changing instruments seem endless?

With Bakunawa it was a very specific desire. I wanted to maximise my solo setup, by not playing it by myself but with other musicians. It is true that you could add and change the constellation endlessly, but I have let my ears guide me. Somehow I knew exactly what I wanted. The music that could be, the different sounds, what I needed to create contrast and also who I wanted to play it — It was all there in my head. By having each musician (Giovanni Di Domenico, Vera Cavallin, João Lobo, Théo Lanau) already in my mind, I also wrote according to how I knew we would function as an ensemble. I ask these musicians to not play their own instruments, but to play mine. Not everyone would like to do so. I’m very lucky with these incredible musicians.

What are some of the possibilities that excite you when working with these instruments in a live context, vis-à-vis preparing your set-up for a studio recording?

“Accidents” and “surprises” are the things I like the most, the risk of something not going accordingly. Some of my instruments are pretty old, not to mention fragile. Honestly, if we would make a huge tour with Bakunawa, we probably won’t get very far. I think after five concerts in a row we’ll probably have broken half of the instruments. I like this challenge of having to make do with what you’ve chosen. When recording I can still change aspects that I

don’t like, but in a live context every sound counts. Then a mistake becomes a workable matter, a broken tone will give a new kind of sound. I like that.

Considering your wide-ranging and open-minded approach to instruments and their sonic characteristics, what would be some of the sonic territories and applications that you want to explore more in the future?

Currently I have started to make a few tiny steps into the world of water, glass and ceramics.

I have made music for inside a swimming pool (Sogni Liquidi / AMOK festival).

Underwater music fascinates me because sound behaves very differently underwater. We don’t hear with our ears, but through bone-conduction . . . Not to mention that we ourselves consist of like 60 % of water? Imagine how we feel music there! For OORtreders festival I have created an installation about water and glass

called (t)ears, based on human emotions.

22 mouth-blown glass tears are hanging in the space. Inside those glass tears are 6 hydrophones catching drops of water falling down at different speeds (I call it techno-tears), and some 12 passive speakers with each their own sound source. It’s like a small glass acousmonium. I would love to have the chance to further explore this ­installation. Last year I started making ­ceramic instruments, called ceramic woka­ limba (originally invented by Giovanni Di Domenico, who fused a metal wok with metal spikes and created the wokalimba).

This ceramic version surprised me with its high frequencies. I’m still working on it, but I have started to incorporate it in my set-up. So there’s still lots of experimenting to do, especially considering how fragile these instruments are, I have already broken a few, but there is this desire to make an album only out of ceramic wokalimbas and electronics.

Context — 15 Discourse

MICOLOGIES

by Mark Peter Wright

In response to Rewire 2023’s theme Instrumental Ecologies, artist and researcher Mark Peter Wright contributes his essay Micologies. The essay unpacks the microphone as an entangled instrument and ­fosters a listening practice that engages critically with the sounds one hears. During Rewire festival, Wright will participate in the opening programme on Thursday 6 April and the Instrumental Eco­logies assembly on Friday 7 April.

When I press record a supply chain of natural resources conducts and transforms the sound of an environment. Captured at 48 kHz and 24 bits per second, the field is stored temporarily on a polyvinyl chloride (PVC) SD card. Inside the microphone, a diaphragm made from thin plastic transduces sound waves — pressure vibrations — and begins the process of converting acoustic into electrical energy.

Copper coil responds and voltage is produced. Rare earth minerals such as cobalt or neodymium surround the coil to create a magnetic field and allow electrical current to flow. Plastic enshrines all materials and helps to create a technological Pandora’s box.

The full recipe list for how field recordings become field recordings is immense.

We must consider a network of actors from microphones, cables, recording devices, SD cards, and batteries. Copper, neodymium, PVC, rubber, silicon, silver, gold, aluminium, zinc, and manganese are just some of the natural resources that facilitate digital capture. Storage and playback are part of a critical media ecology too: speakers and screens cannot be separated from the microphone.

Practice and media are dependent on the Earth’s resources. Lithium for example is the time keeper of field recording. It forms the basis for batteries used in the field, where no power extension is possible.

Duration is marshalled by this alkali metal, found in abundance in Chile and created through chemical processes of distillation and refinement. What are the consequences of such entanglements? What are we not hearing when we grip the plastic casing of a microphone? What sonic ecologies exist beyond the instrument and the so-called “signal”? What footprint is going unheard?

Instrumental Ecology #1

Sat at a table with a selection of screw­ drivers, I try to disassemble a Røde-NT4 microphone. I begin towards the very end

of its complex five-pin cable input. No joy.

Near the top of the fixed X-Y stereo condenser microphone is a silver ring. After some force it begins to turn. An array of colourful wires and a circuit board link the longer, bottom section of the mic. Inside, the soldering is meticulous. I stare at its electrical guts for a while, spellbound. A drink of water, a nervous smile, and then paranoia sets in: how will I get these pieces back together? There is no further way up into the microphone head, and no way down. I manage to reconnect the two parts and slowly tighten the silver ring.

I look to the lower end of the microphone and notice a join in the casing.

There is nothing to unscrew but I hold both ends and give a sharp counter clockwise twist of the lower portion: it comes loose! Pulling back the casing I sense the microphone’s weight. It has a presence that makes the whole process somewhat terrifying, as if I am performing an operation on a patient, knowing full well I do not fit the job description. As the outer shell slides away, I turn into a bomb disposal expert; holding my breath, waiting for the worst possible outcome. The lower casing falls off. It leaves a hollow body, vulnerable as it lays strewn on the table top. The section is empty because it is where you can place two nine-volt batteries. Inside is a printed label that states “made in Australia” and a hand-written serial number.

I unscrew the top section again. Staring at the separated head and body, a few cables, a circuit board, and an empty section for batteries, it is striking how little there is inside. The outer casing is robust and heavy, it provides armour for the precious materials and processes within.

Sound capture needs a fortress of protection, but at what cost? Where does this microphone come from and where might it end up?

Context — 17

actual soundscape I hear — at my desk in Instrumental Ecology #2 London — is the ironic noise of the whirOpening a new browser tab on my laptop I ring fan in my laptop. These fields are full type Røde, the manufacturer, into Google of speculation and circumnavigation, not Earth. Minerals and magnets heat and cool immersion or fact. in the elsewhere fields of cloud computing.

I hover above what looks to be an industrial business area flanked by the Duck River Instrumental Ecology #3 (Sydney, Australia) and two or three large No recording is impartial; no recording is warehouse structures. I am closer yet more clean. The chain of accountability starts estranged than ever to my microphone when a microphone is gripped, a tacit conand its chain of production. Street View nection is made. The inaudible frequencies allows me to “ground” truth to my location. of natural resource extraction and exploitThe Røde-NT4 manual promises “immacu- ative labour practices graft (like a shadow) late stereo detail.” Peter Freedman, Røde onto the process of capture, and initiates a CEO, goes to great pains to stress the chain of distortion that veils as much as it clean labs and sterile environments in amplifies. which these microphones are produced I open another browser tab and type and assembled. The illusion of immaculate “Agbogbloshie” into Google Earth, a well sound capture, enabled by hands in dirt- documented site in the cycles of digital free labs, obfuscates the murky elsewhere media production — this time we are exfields that resonate a supply chain of sig- amining one of the world’s largest e-waste nal: the natural resources and exhausted sites. With one click I fly from Australia to landscapes of where technology comes Ghana in two seconds. The soundscape is from and where it ends up. dominated again by the whir of my laptop After extracting knowledge and mate- fan. I hover across a more inhabited space rials from China, Freedman wanted Røde than my previous searches. There are to be a self-sustainable operation with in- houses and living areas within a stretch of house processing and assembly at the grey land, speckled by cream pixels. Close centre of its manufacturing culture. Where to a river edge I notice a pile of burning the natural resources come from is a little waste. Smoke billows into the sky. Elecmore veiled. Copper, neodymium, or pe- tronic ashes float into the atmosphere: introleum-based plastics always start in the haled across bodies and frozen in screen ground. These elements are not grown in a time, the pixelated image offers a long-dislab, they are not synthetic products, arriv- tance pause. Where are the microphones, ing instead from environments, hands, batteries, and broken hard drives I no and machines. longer have? Are they in the land or lung?

Rare earths are in plentiful supply in Northern Australia, as is copper. I type Listening-with “Lynas Corporation’s Mount Weld Mine” Who or what is the instrument? Who are into Google Earth and soon I am flying what is being instrumentalised? Microagain, this time over scorched earth, phones, the prime interlocutors for soundochre-coloured and isolated from human arts practice are neither silent nor neutral. habitation. A landscape of pockmarks and They are not impartial conduits but entanlunar-like craters: is this where my micro- gled actors, and should be considered as phone comes from? part of an assembly of relations and sites I can only imagine a mechanical site-­ that impacts conceptually and materially, specific soundscape of extraction, the across human and non-human knowledge-­ hum of generators and diesel engines. The making bodies. Instrumental ecological 18 — Context

research must consider technology and the authorial hand that grips it as inseparable parts of hearing the affects of anthropogenic climate change. The dilemma, in conclusion, revolves around finding methods of listening, in the field or site of audition, to draw out that which one cannot hear.

Listening-with is a critical sensibility that might assist the search for sites and sounds or processes and consequences that are not immediately apparent. It is a mode that seeks to foster critical alliance toward the sounds I hear, or do not hear, rather than approach them as something to listen to or for. It encourages a listening practice that strives for meaning as a process of construction as opposed to identifying sonic signs. Listening-with asserts that there is no singular subject but instead a plethora of ears, bodies, perspectives, recordings, and mediations at stake: stretched across site and species and scaled over thresholds of audibility and equity. Listening-with is not a celebration of such entanglements. It acknowledges complexity and the consequent demand placed on the ear of the recordist as much as the elsewhere listener, to disentangle

and reassemble meaning as an ongoing process of responsibility and ethical commitment.

Listening-with is full of overlaps, contradictions, and gaps. Within this mesh of perforations, of knowledge lost and found, sonic research scans above, below, and around the sound object. It is a persistent process that reaches for sensory, cultural, and technological “data” that is always at the risk of being erased, forgotten, or outsourced.

Mark Peter Wright is an artist and researcher working at the intersection of sound arts, experimental pedagogy, and critical theory. His practice blends the field and lab, site and gallery, amplifying forms of power and poetics within the creative use of sound and documentary media.

He is a member of CRiSAP, UAL, and the author of Listening After Nature: Field Recording, Ecology, Critical Practice (Bloomsbury, 2022).

Listen to the audio recording of this essay on the Rewire website.

Context — 19

Enormous lengths: Ellen Fullman ­discusses her work with the Long String Instrument

Ellen Fullman has researched intonation tuning ­theory, string harmonics, and musical instrument design for over 40 years. Her main project, the Long String Instrument — two rows of suspended strings, twenty-metres long, separated by an empty c ­ orridor that the artist walks while sliding her ­fingers over the strings, creating a multiplicity of tunes — has reverberated inside dozens of architectural spaces around the world. Prior to the European premiere of a site-specific performance of Elemental View at ­Rewire Festival 2023, the American composer breaks down the interplay between acoustics and space and what it means to play strings — and music — as a ­performative act. ­

You developed the Long String Instrument (LSI) over 30 years ago. Could you start by sharing what prompted your interest in exploring and expanding the canonical instrument to such an architectural scale?

I was looking for something that sounded new to my ears, looking for freshness. I learned of Alvin Lucier’s Music on a Long Thin Wire and that prompted my curiosity about what a long wire could sound like. I tried different ways of sounding a suspended wire but accidentally discovered that it could be bowed length-wise when I walked past it, brushing it with my clothing. It sounded a very clear tone. As I worked with this sound, I continued to uncover more and more musical potential.

Since then you have installed and performed LSI in numerous venues worldwide, including religious settings such as cathedrals as well as cultural institutions. How does each space shape and inform the confluence of tones, microtones and overtones produced? To what extent is the architectural space itself also a protagonist within the performances?

I was introduced to DaEnormous lengths — 20 metres or so — are needed to bring the tone down into a musical range when string is vibrated longitudinally. Because of this limitation, the installation has brought me to experience many large and beautiful acoustic spaces. And the acoustics of these spaces play an integral role in the quality of my music. It’s something that I work with, but can’t fully anticipate or control. It goes intuitively. So the identity of the composition always shines through, but the music is adapted to the space. One of the most direct ways the space influences the work is through voicing. Length determines pitch in my instrument, so bringing a tuning down by an octave requires a doubling of the length. I might change which octave a chord is tuned to, or maybe just change one note up or down based on 22 — Context

the length of the room that I have available to work with. The overtones are going to be there in the string resonance no matter where I am, but may be more or less clear.

I always use sound reinforcement to bring out these higher frequencies. If the acoustics are really good I don’t use much amplification at all. Sound reinforcement puts energy back into the room supporting the feedback loop which is resonance to move the air.

In your 1980 work Streetwalker, you constructed a skirt as a sonic instrument and wore this to walk around a neighbourhood of Minneapolis. To what extent did this first project inform your research and experimentation into the relationship between body, space and sound? In what ways did the project challenge the ordinary gesture of walking the streets?

It is not lost on me that in both cases it is necessary to walk to make the sound, but I didn’t set out to make a walking instrument when I discovered bowing strings lengthwise. The Metal Skirt Sound Sculpture was a successful work but limited to simply walking, I couldn’t “play” it. The conical metal form and guitar strings tied to the platform shoes that I wore influenced the way I walked by the constriction it imposed. For me personally, the narrative was a rebellion against the limitations of traditional female identity by creating an absurd spectacle. I continued to search for new sounds that I could compose with, which I found in the long string instrument.

While playing the long string instrument, I have liked to think of my body in miniature, moving forward and back almost like the pendulum swing in hypnosis. There is an element of absurdity that runs through all of my work, but this idea of hypnosis is about entering a sensitised mental state of concentration where one can experience and enjoy details of changing harmonics.

By walking slowly among the strings and playing these with your rosin-coated fingers, you essentially create sound from within. What relationships are established between yourself as a physical performer and the creation of sound?

From the perspective of the musician how does this type of performance differ from that of playing a canonical instrument?

I suppose you mean “creating sound from within” to mean that I am inside of the instrument? This phrase also implies to me the depth of concentration that I aspire to when performing (alone in my studio or for audiences) and that I find positively transformational. Playing my instrument is gestural, tactile. Every tiny movement of my body is reflected in the sound, therefore I learned to walk very smoothly. I feel I am moulding sound with pressure changes from my fingers, shaping dynamics and timbre. I have internalised a mapping of nodal points and compose with a choreography of specific harmonics by the locations of my body. When I play other instruments, like autoharp or guitar, I feel similar

things but I have not really learned how to play any traditional instrument. I think strings in general are very tactilely responsive and coming from the visual arts, and specifically ceramics, I feel an affinity and familiarity with that quality.

How do you imagine your work with LSI evolving in the coming years? Are there any specific places where you would be interested in testing the performance?

With my recent piece, Elemental View, I designed a process for composing parts for other musicians, based on what I hear and feel radiating out from the sound of my solo performance. I am applying this technique to string quartet writing, so that the quartet composition supports what naturally occurs in the long string instrument as I play and walk. I feel like one of the next steps will be to write a quartet in this manner, and then delete myself, so that the long string instrument is referenced and implied but missing.

Published originally on and reprinted with permission by the digital magazine of Kooz­­Arch.

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An Equal Sound

by Budhaditya Chattopadhyay

In response to Rewire’s 2023 theme Times and ­Territories, artist, researcher, and writer Budhaditya ­Chattopadhyay contributes with an essay on how a critical engagement with Global Souths, diasporic and Indigenous artists and thinkers, and their listening cultures could contribute towards equitable planet­ ary conversations.

In an ideal conversation, listening and speaking are in equilibrium. One who speaks may aspire to be a good listener too. An equitable relationship between the listener and speaker nurtures the exchanges and consolidates the communication. Likewise, a lack of such equity ­results in conflict, tension, and misunderstanding, as philosopher Gemma Corradi Fiumara suggests in her book The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening (1990). A passive act of listening may be reciprocated by voicing observations and opinions if the speaking act is respectful and eager to listen, encouraging and accommodating news and views that sometimes do not fall within expected responses. When a speaker listens, the listener may voice and share the many layers of experienced truths. New knowledges are formed by paying attention to how the changes in positionality remain reciprocal, and how well this dynamic plays out.

The historical conversations between the so-called Global Norths and Global Souths (or the West and the East) often lacked an equilibrium. Scholars of globalization, coloniality, and migration pointed out how Europe’s relations with what it thought as its other, were now and again fraught with tension and misunderstanding, through imperial and colonial intentionality. These profoundly imbalanced conversations were ingrained in the colonially built hierarchies and extractive power structures that chose to ignore the possibilities of reciprocal exchanges. If we narrow our critical and scholarly attention to the field of sound and music, there have been numerous encounters, but the twoway communication fell through the labyrinthian corridors of power and colonial violence. The West hardly listened carefully to the East and Souths, but never hesitated to take them for granted. There are many instances of cultural appropriation from the East through an unequal distribution of knowledge with little interest in

the sonic differences, auditory cultural specificities, acoustic territorialities, and the potential of sonic confluences.

African American composer George E. Lewis differentiated between Eurological and Afrological methodologies in musicking and sound making, based on the listening perspectives and differences in cultural practices. This distinction was made to provincialize the field of music and sonic arts, acknowledging the historical interactions and confluences, but also to resist Europe’s unabashed entitlement to universalizing knowledge despite discouraging non-western participation in its production. The distinction, likewise, helped to listen to the Global Souths — i.e., Africa, South Asia, Latin Americas — and their rich auditory cultures, sonic practices, and knowledge systems that were often left on the margin of sonic discourses through a select canonization of the field that claimed to be “universal”, but was essentially Eurocentric.

Today in the sphere of sound and music practices, research, and curation, a diverse community of practitioners and researchers are trying to make their voices heard across the globe. But, developing an inclusive and equitable exchange of sound and listening, critically engaging with Global Souths’ sound practitioners, artists, and thinkers, has not yet been attempted, largely remaining underexplored and yet dominated by Eurocentric views, methodologies, and monolithic ideas of listening.

The works that are regularly discussed in sonic research and canonized in the global community of sound and music researchers by the sheer volume of citations and reviews have a negligible number of contributions from the Global Souths or from diasporic and Indigenous artists and thinkers. There is a serious lack of representation of the practitioners and researchers from the vast and diverse landscapes of the Global Souths in the curated events and the bibliographic resources Context — 25

and reference lists of these canonized works. One concerned with this problem of exclusion and unlistening may lament that contemporary music and sound practices indeed are overwhelmingly northbound, in other words, Eurocentric, in their curation and dissemination, and this geologic conservatism is limiting the fields’ epistemes and social formations. New perspectives could be generated by engaging with Global Souths and diasporic and Indigenous artists and thinkers regarding their diverse listening cultures, both by attending to their situated discourses and practices, as well as through the increasingly available access to many pertinent works. This critical engagement will contribute to a slowly emerging planetary knowledgebase invested in sound, music, and indigeneity, critical race theory, Asian/ Arabic/Black/Afrofuturist sound and music concepts, and their cultures of listening. These new knowledge bases need to be mindful of the distinctions in terms of sonic time and territories, auditory cultural specificities, ways of listening, and the potential of sonic confluences.

The historical specificities and differences in approaches and methods of sounding and listening between the East and the West — or between Global Souths and Norths — need to be understood comprehensively in order to create a premise for an equal sound exchange and sonic confluence. If we locate a few fundamental parameters of sounding and listening, such as time and space, these specificities will be easier to comprehend. For example, the regions and cultures of South Asia and Southeast Asia traditionally nurtured a measure of time which was not a linear one and was not dependent on the entity of logic and matter, but rather tended to imagine a metaphysical world with a profound respect for nature and the ethereal divinities. Likewise, rituals, ceremonies, and community practices were developed in constant communication with spirits 26 — Context

and deities to whom the sound makers and musicians dedicated their performance in order to maintain an equilibrium with nature. In these cultures, time was recorded less in writing — i.e., written scores or on recorded media — but more understood as a natural phenomenon. Time-based media, such as sound and music, were perceived as ephemeral, with an ineffable quality that needed to be left open-ended in their everyday cognition, and that needed to be disseminated outdoors in natural settings during their performance. In comparison, post-enlightenment European listening approaches preferred a linear curve of fixed compositional and listening time, consumed inside insular auditoriums and concert halls as settings or territories estranged from nature. In Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics (2018), sound art scholar Christoph Cox differentiated between distinct sonic temporalities of the West and East. The western listening approaches mark a narrative temporal framework of “beginnings, middles and endings,” which he relates to the classical musical composition and performance culture based on a concept of temporality that runs through the musical works enmeshed with European modernity. In this context, organised sounds attempt to hegemonise time’s elusive flow by making it a measured, closed dramaturgy that follows a linear, climax-driven narrative. Under­ standably, this musical temporality was a thoroughly anthropocentric conception of time — one that accords with the utilitarian, logical, and scientific traditions of the West that conceive of time as linear, progressive, and aimed at accelerated developments. This sense of time and space permeates in colonial models of understanding the world, enabling a hegemonic and extractive relationship with the “nonWest.” On the other hand, concepts of time in the East or in many parts of Global Souths’ listening cultures are circuitous, digressive, and improvisational. This approach

manifests in the traditional ways of storytelling, rituals, songs, and folk music, and in the performances of court music, religious sounds, and devotional music.

These historical demarcations and differences need to be located, comprehended, and respected to create an equitable premise of global exchanges and auditory interaction of a planetary scale towards an equal dialogue and a possible sonic confluence. The artists and thinkers from the Global Souths, many of whom are in constant interaction with the European institutions — festivals, funding bodies, ­ universities, conferences, and cultural organizations, etc. — in their post-global mobilities, as representatives of immigrant and diasporic communities in Europe, need to locate these tendencies in their work to self-determine and advance decolonial struggles. Only then, their work will achieve liberation from the colonial chains and clutches that constantly demand adhering to monolithic ways of listening to time, space, and territories through dehumanization, Europeanization, exoticization, erasure, and cultural cleansings. Once this self-determination is achieved, equal sounds can be found in planetary conversations.

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is an artist, composer, researcher, and writer. Chattopadhyay produces works for large-scale installation and live performance addressing contemporary issues of ecology, migration, race, and decoloniality. He has received numerous residencies, fellowships, and international awards. His sound works have been widely exhibited, performed, and presented across the globe.

Chattopadhyay has an expansive body of scholarly publications in sound theory and aesthetics in leading peer-reviewed journals. He is the author of four books: The Nomadic Listener (2020), The Auditory Setting (2021), Between the Headphones (2021), and Sound Practices in the Global South (2022). Chattopadhyay holds a PhD in artistic research and sound studies from the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University, Leiden, and is currently a visiting professor at the Critical Media Lab, Basel.

Listen to the audio recording of this essay on the Rewire website.

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay will contribute to the opening programme on Thursday 6 April and lead the Times and Territories assembly at Rewire festival on Saturday 8 April.

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Through Space and Time

by Renata Yazzie

For Indigenous people, listening to music can function as an act of kinship, where identities are strengthened and acknowledged through building relationships with their environment. Read an essay by Indigenous musicologist and pianist, Renata Yazzie, inspired by the music of powwow singer Joe Rainey.

Yá’át’ééh shí éí Renata Yazzie yinishyé. Tóʼaheedlíinii nishłį ́, ­Kinyaaʼáanii báshíshchíín. Bitʼahnii dashichei, Hónágháanii dashinálí.

Akotʼéego, Diné asdzą́ą́ nishłį ́.

Greetings, my name is Renata Yazzie. I have introduced myself to you as a Diné (Navajo) woman by means of my four clans.

In September 2022, I came across an article from 1927 about the beginnings of music education in the United States.

Catholic priests had brought music teachers to the Rio Grande Valley. The author dates the first music teacher, Cristóbal de Quiñones’s, arrival to San Felipe Pueblo sometime between 1598 and 1604 and the second teacher, Bernardo de Marta’s arrival to Zia Pueblo in 1605. These two men began teaching organ and voice before Johann Sebastian Bach was born. By 1630, music teachers at present-day Socorro, New Mexico, had also taught Navajos to play bells, trumpets, and clarions. In what we call the Southwest United States now, at least, Indigenous peoples have been engaging with western instruments and musics for hundreds of years.¹ In listening with Joe Rainey’s album Niineta (37d03d, 28 — Context

2022), a sound that provides comfort with the voices of old and new, I am reminded of my own people’s origins with music.

There is, however, a distinction to be made in most North American Indigenous languages between «song» and «music».

In many cases, Indigenous languages do not have a word that directly translates to «music». And our ontologies of song differ from something you might find in a book of German Lieder. Song is an extension of language rather than an extension of music.

Songs serve multipurpose functions that establish protocol, relate histories, and bestow healing, and aesthetics are secondary considerations. That isn’t to say we don’t create with beauty in mind. Rather, songs are meant to be both moral and aesthetic experiences. Both contain elements of beauty and both should be considered in an Indigenous listening experience.² July 18, 2016. It was my second week in the German countryside of a small town in North Rhine-Westphalia. I had never been away from the familiarity of my Diné community for that long—temporally and spatially.³ In the mornings, I would log onto the iconic Navajo radio station KTNN 660 AM where the midnight hour (as it was at home), marked a continuous playlist of old country and western music and Navajo bands and artists of varying genres. In the most lonely moments, I could feel home through listening. A more abstract sense of beauty found in a sense of comfort where the popular sounds of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations gently caressed me, encouraged me, and reaffirmed my existence as a Navajo person in a foreign land.

An Indigenous listening experience is one felt and experienced by Indigenous people alone and as such, English words cannot do a commentary of it justice. But, as we ingest sounds, listening can function as an act of kinship where our identities as Indigenous peoples are strengthened and acknowledged through relationship-building with the entities around us.⁴ We listen through space and time to transport ourselves to a place that encapsulates the feelings and emotions our parents and their parents might have felt. And these listening traditions will continue with our children, despite how far away they might be from home, they can listen to our sounds, our songs, and our music, and feel a sense of home and belonging.

Indigenous music and songs written today, including Joe Rainey’s music and beyond, carry the same effect. As I listen to «ch. 1222», I am reminded of the day I walked from the field where our college campus powwow was in full swing, to my Diné/Laguna friend’s senior recital in Keller Hall. Both were distinctly Indigenous listening experiences in Indigenous sound spaces despite being vastly different in execution. One day our children will listen in kinship with us, to feel a sense of belonging, of home, and embracement of who they are at their core. This is one kind of Indigenous listening.

How do you listen?

What purpose does listening serve you?

This essay is part of the Norient Special All in It Together, a collaboration between ­Rewire and Norient.

Renata Yazzie is a Diné musicologist, pianist, and writer from Albuquerque, NM whose research focuses on the intersections of Diné song and music with religion, theory, pedagogy, and popular culture.

She is the founder of the American Indian

Musicians’ Scholarship which aims to provide all-encompassing assistance to Native students pursuing careers in music.

¹ Lota M. Spell. 1927. «Music Teachings in New Mexico in the Seventeenth Century: The Beginnings of Music Education in the United States». New Mexico Historical Review 2 (1): 27—36. ² Here I am considering the word “beauty” in an aesthetic sense of sounds that are pleasant to the ear and in a moral sense in that sounds may not be melodious but may still intend to move and inform the listener for an overall positive and enlightening experience. ³ The Navajo Nation is situated across the states of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. At about 27,000 square kilometers, it is roughly the size of The Republic of Ireland. With approximately 400,000 enrolled citizens, we are the second-largest tribe in the United States. Not all citizens reside within the Nation. Most, including myself, reside in towns and cities close to the Nation while others choose to live further away and around the world. As Diné, we have called the Southwest our home for at least 10,000 years. ⁴ I am using the word «entities» to describe physical, abstract, and in some cases, spiritual phenomena around us.

Context — 29

Destroy With Your Own Hands

by Peggy Kyoungwon Lee

What happens when a record player is played with acrylic nails instead of a needle? Read an essay by the scholar and writer Peggy Kyoungwon Lee in which she evokes a world that refuses to be reproduced.

The audacity, to touch a playback technology in ways that weren’t meant to be used.¹ Take the record in your hands and break it.

If the spindle hole is still attached, put it on the turntable.

Yes, on top of whatever was already on rotation. There is a topography now. You’re scaling, not playing, the needle will jump up and down on the jagged edge of the break.

Destroy more records, let the samples find you.

«Loss» «Loss» «Loss»²

Cue Loop Static

Loss is not the same as vessel. Loss is an infinity mirror of sound. You reach out and touch air and spectral space.

(If you must, grieve what cannot be—those silent fragments that will not play, shed onto the floor).

The Vessel Was Never a Real Thing Anyway.

«The self is a cloister full of remembered sounds»³ and to feel the edges of his mortality, he will hear himself in the seashore of repetition, each wave’s salty revolve, and in his dreams, the profound return of Mother’s voice, his sonic point of origination 30 — Context

Take back the event, resist reproduction.

Give (m)other back. she is not an itinerary of desire; she is her own sensual ear: each rotating turntable creates lines, lines which never rhyme. can you listen without want? can you listen with her? you hold one end of the line, as she enjambs the wire between value and sign, because she can and didn’t you know, every scratch, every break, is a sister’s birthday?⁴ The audacity: to compose with four turntables, a solo performance.⁵ Playing a Margaret Thatcher speech, she interrupts her, again and again.

She refuses civility, so Thatcher can barely finish one statistic: «One in, one in, one in…» Thatcher’s speech is aggressively spliced and scratched, pitched and stabbed; eventually, her voice drowns within layers of dense, exhaustive noise. The prophet, Stuart Hall, on Thatcherism and its legacies — the policing, white nationalist conservatism, neoliberal capitalism — describes politics as a theory of interruptions.⁶ Empire is a circle, disrupt and destroy, again and again, with your own hands.

The audacity: to play the record with all her fingers, greedily, clawing it with long, acrylic nails the color of hot coral.⁷ Under each nail, hides a stylus. Her fingers ride the warped, scalloped grooves of vinyl as you feel through sound, riding the bump; the nails allow the polyphonic shrill of a Beijing opera record, on a high RPM; she removes and throws the nails into a spinning brass singing bowl, clattering.

She tinkers with the cultural baggage of their visual referent, owning it: nonwhite working-class women, hypersexuality, «stripper nails», feminine excess, the racialized labor of the «Asian nail person».

And she reconceptualizes its referent, by by grating the noise, standing up and even breaking the table of her instruments, or self-grooming with a mike comb, noisily.

At Rewire Festival 2023, the artists ­Maria Chávez, Mariam Rezaei, and Victoria Shen will collaborate and perform with 12 turntables, using Shen’s acrylic nail styluses. In their architecture of presence, chance, and sound, you will not be transported or returned. You will be challenged to listen and feel their wild breaks, uncomfortably close, radically opaque. Be curious; wait to hear the edges of your silence, confusion, loss.

This essay is part of the Norient Special All in It Together, a collaboration between Rewire and Norient.

Peggy Kyoungwon Lee is a writer and professor based in Washington, D.C. You can learn more about her creative writing and scholarship on race, sound, performance, and literature at: https://peggyleewrites.com/ ¹ vpro Vrije Geluiden extra. 2018. «Maria Chavez: Ruining Vinyl Records», 2:52. YouTube. November 25.

Accessed March 1. (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=1kKGAMQVzw4). ² vrije geluiden. 2018. «Maria Chavez: The Language of Chance», 1:46. Youtube. November 25. Accessed March 1. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFkKNbbfRzs). ³ Stevens, Wallace. 1989. «The Woman That Had More Babies Than That», in Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose, ed. by Milton J. Bates. New York: Vintage Books: 104. ⁴ Clive Campbell aka DJ Kool Herc’s younger sister, Cindy Campbell’s birthday on August 11, 1973. ⁵ Rezaei, Mariam. Wolf’s Tail. 2021, bandcamp. (https:// mariamrezaei.bandcamp.com/album/wolfs-tail). ⁶ Stuart Hall. 1983. «Thatcherism — Rolling Back the Welfare State». Thesis Eleven 7 (1): 6—19. ⁷ Experimental Sound Studio. 2022. «Option Presents: Victoria Shen — Evicshen». Youtube. June 13. Accessed March 1. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dPpZchcsNA). ⁸ Cook, Greg. 2013. «Art Salon: Painting Nails to Rethink Art History». WBUR. March 21. Accessed March 1. https://www.wbur.org/news/2013/03/21/ victoria-shen-manicure.

Context — 31

The unlikely supergroup merging avant-garde with fantasy by Günseli Yalcinkaya

photography by Elizaveta Porodina

Deafheaven’s George Clarke, PC Music’s Danny L Harle, Hundred Waters’s Trayer Tryon, and make-up artist Isamaya Ffrench have teamed up as supergroup Alto Arc for a spellbinding debut that verges on the grotesque, the sublime, and the macabre.

“We are dealing in theatre.

It’s archetypes and melodrama . . . and romance.”

Context — 33

When I first heard that you were all forming a supergroup, I almost couldn’t believe it. How did it all come together?

George Clarke: I know that Trayer and Danny were working together previously. I think they collaborated through production for other artists prior to this, and Danny had certain sections of tracks that he’d been working on. I know that by the time I had met Trayer, they had already tried a couple vocalists who were more traditional, and said that whatever it was that they were aiming for just wasn’t happening. I opted to do my version of it. This is for “Nocebo,” which is the first track we worked on. Him and Danny seemed to agree that they liked the direction. And, really shortly after, I assume because Danny and Isamaya were already working together, Danny brought the idea of having Isamaya join — and it was a natural fit. I think we got like one track over and maybe had a conversation, but we were kind of immediately like, yeah, this makes total sense.

What about you, Isamaya?

Isamaya Ffrench: I was introduced to Danny through Sega Bodega, because we’d been talking about doing something the three of us and then this was in the forefront of Danny’s mind. He just invited me to do like a session with him, a free for all type thing, and it seemed to make sense.

Like, my voice definitely not lend itself to pop — and, luckily, this isn’t very popular music. It all came together quite naturally.

I couldn’t believe that George was singing.

In no capacity could I ever imagine working with him. So, I couldn’t say no. The voices work quite well together.

Yeah, I find the way both your voices play off each other is almost like Isamaya is life and George is death, with the two continually crashing and colliding against one another.

IF: I think there’s definitely something about there’s an intellectual, subversive character. And then there’s the in the clouds-­higher consciousness.

34 — Context

And where did the name Alto Arc come from?

GC: I came up with the name. To be honest with you, I just really liked the way that the two words worked together. I had been thinking about a short, interesting wordplay. And something about the Alto Arc was interesting to me. And it doesn’t really go beyond that. But it leaves us to be very open ended due to its kind of mysterious nature.

Listening to the album has a really visceral quality, like it brings up all these rich images and narratives. What was the thinking behind it?

IF: It’s a very visual project, almost as much as the music. We were talking about it the other day, and it’s all very theatrical and it’s very avant garde. Each of us are avant garde artists in our own world and our own work. Like there’s a huge element of theatre in it all, like, really over the top. I think we don’t want to shy away from that.

It’s very helpful to go full force with that kind of approach.

There’s parts of it that feel distinctly medieval or fantasy, like they should accompany a Chaucer story, or the Green Knight.

GC: Absolutely, yes. Fantasy was a very early keyword that we were tossing around.

There’s an intent for it to be fantastical. And there’s an intent for it to be magical. Something Danny had mentioned really early on is that he wanted something that we could enjoy as much as like a 10-year-old or 11-year-old could enjoy. This really broad fantasy world that of course he’s he’s already very much into and so knows a tonne about that that’s the other thing is that I’ve been able to get more into like this English history and and kind of delve more into this world working with these two then you know, then I ever would in the states.

The sounds are also very extreme and that makes me think how all your artistry is extreme in one way or another. What attracts you to it?

IF: It’s really hard to talk about this without sounding wanky. But, for me, there’s a lot of the internal epic, the unconscious, the instincts and all of that. For example, The Wicker Man, the very archetypal and animalistic and ritualistic impulses that drive a lot of those characters.

For me, it’s the internal conflicts and the nitty gritty subconscious. That’s what I’m more interested in exploring and then how that looks on the outside, how that manifests itself in lyrics or visually. I think there’s just so much power in a really simple melody or really simple vocal. But the twistedness comes in the duality of that.

What are you most excited about with this project?

IF: I just absolutely love what George does. And Trey and Danny. Because they

really showcase their own individual talents in in such an incredible way. I’m like, wow guys, you fucking know this. It’s just so nice to be part of something where I really respect the people.

GC: Everyone in the project has so much trust in each other that we really allow room for everyone to individually create and bring to the table. And it does it works. It always works no matter what it is in some way. It’s such a strange beast that we can kind of manoeuvre it in any direction we see fit.

This edited interview is published originally by and reprinted with permission from Dazed Digital.

Context — 35

THU OPENING PROGRAMME

APR 6

Inter/relations — opening programme

The Grey Space in The Middle, Thursday 6 April, 17:00—23:00 Opening Rewire 2023, the festival will kick-off with a freely accessible opening programme at The Grey Space in The Middle, with conversations and listening sessions introducing the festival’s theme Inter/­ relations.

The Soundscape Speaks — Listening Session

By: Hildegard Westerkamp (audio contribution) The Grey Space in The Middle, Thursday 6 April, 17:00—17:45 In The Soundscape Speaks, composer, radio artist, and sound ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp turns to her archive of sound recordings, inviting us to listen to the environment across time and space.

Westerkamp’s pioneering musical works and writing at the intersections of environmentalism, acoustic communication, radio arts, listening practices and soundwalking activate an awareness, that sound is a decisive dimension of the world — an idea that underpins contemporary thinking across social, political, artistic, and scientific practices of environmental respect and concern. “For The Soundscape Speaks, I have brought together many of my recordings and compositional approaches in a fluid stream of listening while also softly speaking my mind about issues of soundscape ecology. It is an invitation to open yourselves to the complexities of listening itself and the possibilities it may offer to recalibrating your own relationship to the environment.”

Inter/relations — ­Assembly

With: Heloisa Amaral, Mark Peter Wright, Carla J. Maier, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay

The Grey Space in The Middle, Thursday 6 April, 18:00—18:45 This year, Rewire’s context programme ­Inter/relations will explore how recognizing fluid boundaries between humans, nature, and technology, and establishing connections between times and territories are fundamental for contemporary and experimental music and sound practices.

During this open assembly, with contributions by Heloisa Amaral, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Carla J. Maier, and Mark Peter Wright, we will introduce and discuss the various themes, listening practices and conversations that will unfold over the festival days. How to listen more closely and collectively, and how to tune in to our interrelated environments?

Sonus and Sonic ­Entanglements — Video-­ Lecture-Performance and Conversation

By: meLê yamomo The Grey Space in The Middle, Thursday 6 April, 19:00—20:00 During this video-lecture-performance and conversation, meLê yamomo will discuss his research on “sonus,” the sound that is archived in colonized bodies, and how to listen closely to the permeation of individual memory and translocal histories. meLê yamomo is a researcher, theatre director, and composer, currently living and working in Amsterdam and Berlin. His work focuses on time and place, sonic entanglements, and the materiality of sound.

He is assistant professor of performance studies, sound studies, artistic research, and decoloniality at the University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam. He is project leader of Sonic Entanglements and Decolonizing Southeast Asian Sound Archives, and author of Sounding Modernities: Theater and Music in Manila and the Asia Pacific 1869— 1946 (2018). He is resident artist at Ballhaus

38 — Thursday, 6.4. Opening Programme

Naunynstraße, Berlin where his works Echoing Europe, sonus — the sound within us, and Forces of Overtones are on repertoire. He also curates the Decolonial Frequencies Festival.

Visceral Acts (of Environmental Listening) — Conversation

With: Matteo Marangoni, Vica Pacheco, Vivian Caccuri, and Naomi Rincón Gallardo The Grey Space in The Middle, Thursday 6 April, 20:15—21:15 Prior to the opening of the exhibition Proximity Music: Visceral Acts on Friday April 7 in and around Amare, artist and curator Matteo Marangoni, and artists Vivian ­Caccuri, Vica Pacheco, and Naomi Rincón Gallardo will be demonstrating and discussing their approaches and instruments that invite us to recalibrate our relations to natural elements and complex ecological systems, while connecting with different forms of knowledge. From Vica Pacheco’s pre-Columbian whistling vessels to Vivian Caccuri and Thiago Lanis’s recreated sounds from the forest. And from Naomi Rincon Gallardo’s entangled stories of counter-worlds, to Matteo Marangoni and Dieter Vandoren’s swarm of artificial creatures that respond to the sun, the clouds, and the shadows of trees.

TIMEZONES: Staying Creative Between Beauty and Chaos in Rio de Janeiro, and Ears on/of Makiling

by Norient — Listening Session

asking: what does living and working in culture and the arts involve in different countries, cities, and contexts today? Episode 5 of the podcast series by artist ­Vivian Caccuri, explores how Rio de ­Janeiro has shaped its music over the centuries and invented its future through the vision of artists, creators, and scholars. Behind the picture-postcard landscapes and the stereotypical images of carnival, beaches, and beautiful women lies an enigmatic and broken city. Rio’s musical and creative identity, such as samba and carnival, seems to be ever transforming and flirting with traditional forms, yet at the same time, those forms have a history of struggle, intimately connected to Afro-Brazilian musical and religious expressions. This listening session will be preceded by an introduction with artist Vivian Caccuri and Norient curator and editor Hannes Liechti.

Episode 9 in the series by artists meLê yamomo and Nono Pardalis, explores the stories and sounds of Mount Makiling, located 80 km south of the Philippine capital of Manila. Makiling is the sacred site of local legends, the setting for numerous classical works of literature, and a pilgrimage destination for many mystics. It is also the home of many artists and arts students.

This listening session will be introduced by meLê yamomo and Norient curator and editor Hannes Liechti.

TIMEZONES is a project by Norient, co-initiated with the Goethe-Institut.

With: Hannes Liechti, Vivian Caccuri, meLê yamomo The Grey Space in The Middle, Thursday April 6, 21:30—22:45 The TIMEZONES podcast series plunges into the world of artists and their practices, Thursday, 6.4. Opening Programme — 39

FRI APR 7

ABADIR feat. HOGIR

Afrorack

Combining experimental, club, and ambient, ABADIR fuses disparate sonic influences into spirited electronic music that skews categorisation but leans towards intense dance floor workouts. By blending the syncopated rhythms of drum and bass, jungle, footwork, and juke with traces of Arabic vocals and percussion, ABADIR creates original club cuts that feel truly global.

There’s no better example of this than his recent album Mutate (2022) on Shanghai-based label SVBKVLT, which delivers a true tour de force of intense rave blends.

Joined on stage by the multi-faceted Turkish musician HOGIR, ABADIR further explores the rhythmic dynamics of his captivating music. HOGIR is a highly versatile percussionist who is comfortable in any genre of music. Collaborative by nature, HOGIR seeks to create a form of “Synthesis” music: dynamic, spontaneous, playful, and powerful. Joining forces on stage, the two musicians give a new live dimension to the engrossing songs of ABADIR.

By building his entire synthesiser set-up from scratch, Bamanya Brian (aka Afrorack) has found a unique way to ride the modular synth wave, channelling the tech-savvy electronic music through his highly distinctive framework based on his influences in and around Uganda. Winkingly referencing the sought-after Eurorack synthesisers, Afrorack also functions as a commentary on the Eurocentric focus of electronic music’s production and reception. In the process, the Ugandan multidisciplinary artist has become one of the pioneering musicians making electronic music instruments in Africa. His highly praised debut The Afrorack (2022) is not only a forceful showcase of his custom-built synthrack, but also a playful and ambitious exploration of polyrhythmic dance music with marvellous sound design. Presenting his unique instrument on stage, Afrorack promises to deliver distinctive sounds to a packed dancefloor.

Co-presented by Carhartt WIP

42 — Friday, 7.4.

Aquarian Honouring the aquatic techno bounce of Detroit duo Drexciya, the prowess of Rufige Kru’s jungle, and the heftiness of early UK grime, the Berlin-based artist Aquarian creates raw, arresting, and urgent music aimed squarely at the dancefloor. While his debut LP The Snake That Eats Itself (2020) found refreshing ways of stretching out the tensions in his music, it also explored how his productions could be expanded upon in a more narrative context.

His most recent double EP for Dekmantel’s UFO imprint signifies a true dedication to the immediacy and galvanising joy of club music, with full-on hybrid dance bangers for a packed dance floor. As a DJ, his genre-bending and breakneck approach is as potent as ever, mirroring his production ethos and threading the needle across a field of disparate genres: fast techno meets pitched up gqom, prog-garage collides with baile funk, while footwork is pieced together with power house and italo disco.

Aura Satz, Rhodri Davies & Julia Eckhardt

Occam Delta XX — world premiere

Eliane Radigue is widely regarded as a highly innovative and influential contemporary composer, from her early electronic music through to her acoustic work of the last 15 years. Radigue stopped producing electronic music in 2001 and started creating collaborative works with instrumentalists under the name Occam Ocean in 2011.

The creative process relies almost solely on oral and aural transmission: musicians visit Radigue at her home, to devise their parts collaboratively. Expanding the cycle of Radigue’s Occam Ocean acoustic works, 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.

Aura Satz, Rhodri Davies & Julia Eckhardt ‘Occam Delta 20’ is commissioned by ­Rewire.

Friday, 7.4. — 43

Binkbeats

Bitter Babe b2b Manuka Honey

Frank Wienk, aka Binkbeats, is an innovative producer and live performer from the Netherlands. While known for his highly personal blend of electronic and hip hop beats, with organic elements of jazz, funk, and soul, Wienk constantly expands his musical horizons by further exploring the boundaries between acoustic and electronic music. 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. A quadraphonic speaker setup drowns the audience in sound as the subtlest aural shifts are followed up by thunderous mayhem. Taking inspiration from ritual instruments and techno, Wienk’s polyrhythmic compositions draw the audience into a truly immersive sonic experience.

Teaming up for their first back to back set ever, Colombian-born and Miami-based Bitter Babe and London-based Manuka Honey bring their signature deconstructed treatment of baile funk, reggaeton, and dembow to Rewire. The arresting EP ­Industrial Princess (2021) powerfully warped Manuka Honey’s musical influences into genre-defining club bangers, while the collaboration between Bitter Babe and Nick León — including the incredible ­Delirio EP (2022) — expertly transforms Colombian guaracha, Venezuelan raptor house, and bubbling styles from Amsterdam into all-out dance tunes. 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. Manuka Honey describes her DJ style as “sexy, unpredictable, and hard,” which indicates where a free-wheeling b2b set can take the audience.

OHM

44 — Friday, 7.4.

Co-presented by Carhartt WIP

Coby Sey

CS + Kreme

Hailing from South East London, vocalist, DJ, and multiinstrumentalist Coby Sey has emerged as a distinctive presence in the exciting intersection of contemporary club, DIY art, and music production. This prolific performer and producer offers a shifting, disorienting vision of club music. As a long-time collaborator with Mica Levi, Tirzah, Babyfather, Klein, and Kwes, Coby’s recorded work spans the realms of live instrumentation, sample-based productions, and experimental music, melding recognisable motifs of, amongst others, hip hop, drone, jazz, and grime into a dubbed-out anaesthesia. Live, these dreamlike compositions are imbued with a heavy, uneasy dancefloor energy, often abetted by intimate vocals. Following a trio performance in 2022, Coby Sey makes his return to ­Rewire to mark the release of debut album Conduit (2022), this time in a five-piece formation.

When seasoned Australian musicians Conrad Standish and Sam Karmel teamed up as CS + Kreme, the result felt natural and revelatory. Anchoring Standish’s bass guitar in heavy dub processing, sweeping post-punk, and chamber music soundscapes, the duo crafts what they describe as slow and meditative “horizontal-music,” which is just as inquisitive as it is consoling.

With its meditative and seducing qualities, CS + Kreme’s 2020 album Snoopy functioned for many as a comforting weighted blanket during the early pandemic moment. Follow-up album Orange (2022) takes their signature sound to the next level with unmistakably original, skittering drum programming, startlingly fresh instrumental interjections, creepily invocatory voices, and dubwise treatments. During Rewire 2023, CS + Kreme will perform their alluring music in the Netherlands for the very first time.

Co-presented by Carhartt WIP

Friday, 7.4. — 45

Dienne

Dreamcrusher

The Belgian composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Dienne builds songs and soundscapes which portray the images and stories that play behind her eyes.

Combining analogue instruments like the oboe, the piano, and the flute with reverb-drenched vocals and shimmers of processed electronic sources, she creates hazy pieces of music full of the melancholy of remembrance and loss. Her debut album Addio (2022) was released on Nicolás Jaar’s Other People imprint. Following the passing of her grandmother due to COVID-19, and being unable to properly say goodbye due to travel restrictions, ­Dienne set out to give her farewell in musical form. The result is a deeply intimate work that channels classical instrumentation through foggy electronic experimentation. Memories, biographies, and family histories merge in this simultaneously sombre and optimistic work which plays out like a universal and comforting ode to loved ones lost.

Dreamcrusher is an enigmatic and boundary-pushing New York City-based musician and artist, who describes their project as “nihilist queer revolt musik.” At once personal and abstract, revealing and antagonistic, the performances and recordings of Dreamcrusher shift between genres while subjecting the characteristic elements — melodies, beats, instrumentation — to distortion until the point of total transformation. The results are raw and unapologetic sonic assaults on the senses, ranging from noise, punk, and industrial to experimental electronics. Informed by their intersecting identities, this fearless artist continues to shatter noise and genre conventions, result­ing in electrifying performances on stage that retain a uniquely intimate character.

This project performs during Rewire 2023 with the support of Flemish Arts Centre de Brakke Grond, VierNulVier & STUK. 46 — Friday, 7.4.

Dylan Henner Deep ambient loops, gently unfolding arpeggios, and angelic choirs coexist on the captivating pieces of music made by Dylan Henner. Rather than aiming for the uncanny valley of hybrid electronics, Henner achieves a delicate balance between his various sound sources, resulting in sublime music that raises existential questions, while comforting its listeners. On his debut album The Invention of the Human (2020), Henner questions what makes us human and what good can come from civilisation when there’s so much misery attached to it. Follow-up You Will Always Be (2022) gives solace to the brevity of human life and explores the cycles of life and death. Both albums, released on AD93, are serene and cerebral works, referencing ambient and experimental music, sound design, and field recordings. During Rewire 2023, Henner performs his music exclusively with live vocal processing and voice synthesis.

Ellen Arkbro & Johan Graden Ellen Arkbro & Johan Graden embody the limitless curiosity and fearless innovation of the Swedish and Berlin new music scenes they inhabit. Arkbro is a celebrated composer and musician, whose performance of For Organ & Brass at Rewire 2018 was a memorable highlight, while Graden is one of Sweden’s most sought-after pianists, moving freely between classical music and the European contemporary jazz scene. Currently living in Amman, he is an active member of the Jordanian experimental pop scene. Arkbro & Graden’s I get along without you very well (2022) expands on the duo’s intoxicating exploration of meditative, spiritual sonics in unexpected ways. Most notably, the album showcases the incredible vocal range of Arkbro, singing on a record for the very first time. During Rewire 2023, the pair will be joined by a full band to perform material from the album in an intimate setting.

Friday, 7.4. — 47

Ellen Fullman & The Living Earth Show

Elemental View — European premiere 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. Through her research in just intonation tuning theory, string harmonics and musical instrument design, Fullman has developed a compositional and performative approach that expands harmonic motion through a focus on upper partial tones. 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 and promises to be a true highlight of the festival.

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Enxin/Onyx group A’s Tommi Tokyo and Hiro Kone’s Nicky Mao unite their dark, unsettling, and impermanent electronic music sensibilities as Enxin/Onyx, delivering intense and mutable tracks that teeter precariously between discord and harmony. Tokyo’s haunted voice cuts through the darkness and muck of shifting electronics and disquieting noise. Equal parts unsettling and hypnotic, the constant interplay between elements of the individual practices of these artists (one based in Berlin and the other in New York) give way to a sonic experience that knows no bounds. As also showcased on their bewitching debut EP Dorothy (2022), a performance of Enxin/ Onyx is an atmospheric exploration of noise, incantation, and dance.

Fever Ray

HTRK

As Fever Ray, Karin Dreijer Andersson continues to push musical boundaries with their cohesive, richly detailed body of work. On their 2009 debut, a glacial sheen and minimal arrangements pulled their style into stark relief. 2017’s maximalist Plunge sees an equal parts playful and political exploration of desire. On their latest opus Radical Romantics, Fever Ray invents a nameless character from whose eyes we see love from many angles — hookups both languorous and furtive, worries about the future, watching it all fall apart, settling into the mundane, fearing that a lover’s approval is beginning to eclipse one’s sense of self. Expansive yet focused, Radical Romantics speaks to both the heart and the head, the dance floor and the bedroom. Dreijer is one of pop’s true visionaries, and in their hands, crude and familiar clay is twisted into endlessly beautiful and terrible forms that balance strength with vulnerability, anxiety with safety.

Few groups in history, recent or otherwise, elevate mood to such singular, smouldering supremacy as the Australian duo of musicians Jonnine Standish and Nigel Yang, aka HTRK (pronounced “Hate Rock”).

Across nearly two decades of work their sound has shape-shifted between densities and intensities, noise and nakedness, but never wavered in its delicate poetic gravity. Theirs is a chemistry of smoke, echo, and the undertows of desire, the dislocation of cities and memory, the melancholy of distance, and deepening night.

It’s music of solitude and sensuality, for small hours and lost weekends, spoken in an intimate shadowplay language of skeletal electronics, velvet vocals, and noir guitar, beautifully rendered on their adored album Rhinestones, released to much acclaim in 2021. For their first live performance in the Netherlands since 2009, HTRK transforms their spectral torch songs into quiet storms of tension, texture, and transcendence.

Friday, 7.4. — 49

LSDXOXO

Lucy Gooch

Ever since the versatile 2014 EP Whorecore, LSDXOXO has been an undeniable mainstay in the contemporary club scene — resulting in high profile remixes for Lady Gaga, Shygirl, Pink Pantheress, and more.

His sly and sexy music can range between sensual trap, joyous dance cuts, and fierce vogue tracks. Surrounded by peers like Shygirl and VTSS, and collaborating with heavyweight vocalists like Cakes da Killa, Eartheater, and Rochelle Jordan, LSDXOXO crafts the perfect sonic environment for erotically charged dance tunes, as heard recently on powerhouse EP Dedicated 2 Disrespect and his latest single Freak, which prominently showcases the snappy and sultry vocal chops of the producer, vocalist, and DJ. Expect a freaky, vulnerable and fun live performance to vibe out with and dance to.

Musicians often look for the cinematic qualities of music, and Bristol-based artist and vocalist Lucy Gooch reinforces that connection with her deeply atmospheric EP Rain’s Break (2021). She drew inspiration from the brilliant technicolour films by British auteurs Powell and Pressburger, who managed to transform the austerity of post-war Britain into elegiac fairytales filled with yearning. Invoking and honouring these masters of film, Gooch paints her own sonic world filled with vivid colours and radiant soundscapes. Ecclesiastical and intimate, Gooch’s music conveys an emotional and spiritual journey that is filled with stories to become immersed in.

Her looping vocals and evolving ambient electronics draw you in and invite you to listen more closely. Behind this reverberated veil reside worlds of gentle ambient dream pop — sensual, dramatic, melancholy, and beautiful.

(live)

Co-presented by Carhartt WIP

50 — Friday, 7.4.

Lucy Liyou Philadelphia-based artist Lucy Liyou synthesises field recordings, text-to-speech readings, poetry, and elements from Korean folk opera into sonic narratives that explore the implications of Orientalism and westernisation. Though their music reflects the work of genres such as post-industrial and musique-concrète, Liyou is influenced by audiobooks as well as music from the Impressionist period and Neoclassical period. Combining all these disparate sonic elements into critically cohesive pieces, the musical world of Lucy Liyou alternates between beautiful serenity and unsettling entropy. Gorgeous bits of neoclassical music fragment into decaying shards, voices get warped beyond recognition, and shimmering light makes way for bitcrushed noise. This fragile equilibrium translates perfectly to the stage, where Lucy Liyou will perform as a duo with Nick Zanca, combining piano, vocals, guitar, and electronics.

Maoupa Mazzocchetti with Luna Maria Cedrón & Samir Aouad

The Heels of Joy — world premiere

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. On stage, Belgian-based multi-instrumentalist Maoupa Mazzocchetti alternates freely between electronic instruments, vocals, horns, and guitar, alongside Oud player Samir Aouad and musician and Flamenco singer Luna Maria Cedrón. Besides a refined musical experience, The Heels of Joy features a striking stage design by Belgian contemporary artist duo Deborah Bowmann.

Friday, 7.4. — 51

Martha Skye Murphy

Mathilde Nobel

Martha Skye Murphy is a singer/songwriter from South London. Her powerful, melancholic voice led her to sing backing vocals for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, before launching a solo project which has been widely praised for its stark, melancholic production and arresting vocals. By now, she’s a rising star with a couple of solo EPs and other releases under her name, including the critically acclaimed EP Concrete. On it, you can hear traces of Kate Bush and Julee Cruise, while the songs remain entirely original and distinct.

Combining dark and brooding avant-folk with her dreamlike singing, the music of Martha Skye Murphy showcases her adventurous sensibilities and willingness to experiment, innovate and explore within various musical territories, resulting in unexpected and fresh songs that capture both unease and ecstasy.

The Netherlands-based musician and visual artist Mathilde Nobel takes a deconstructed club approach to her ethereal music, in which unrolling pads and angelic voices are often interspersed with clattering drums. Painterly by nature, Nobel’s music employs dynamic compositions where darkness and light fight over space on the sonic canvas. Her evocative music heavily features manipulated and processed vocals, recalling the way Björk pushes the envelope of contemporary pop towards a more emotional and intuitive place. Following her EP May + Be (2022), Nobel released her full-length Founds on Land in the same year, while simultaneously developing a liveshow that features her own productions and vocals alongside her own visual design that she presents during Rewire 2023.

52 — Friday, 7.4.

Matthew Herbert & Julian Sartorius world premiere

Recorded live on one day, on 25 November, 2021 in London, the distinctive percussion of Swiss drummer Julian Sartorius met the virtuose electronics of Matthew Herbert to create the collaborative album Drum Solo (2022). This unique album exhibits Sartorius’s collection of drums, percussion, and augmented objects as the sole sound source. Intoxicating rhythmical formations are expertly formed by Sartorius’s idiosyncratic yet precise multi-layered style, with Herbert using these sounds and patterns to make deep sonic landscapes in real-time. Recorded within an extremely compressed timeframe, with no overdubs or production trickery, Drum Solo is an exploration into an introspective dialogue between two of Europe’s most compelling improvisers. Rewire 2023 presents a world premiere of a collaborative performance between Herbert and Sartorius, that sees the duo expand on their ambitious album in a live setting.

Oscar Peters

Echos — world premiere The Hague-based sound artist and composer Oscar Peters has a deep-rooted fascination with the pipe organ. His recent research and artistic outputs have been focussed on the unconventional use of pipe organs and this instrument’s sonic behaviour in acoustic spaces. He has designed and created six of his own experimental organs that have allowed him to further investigate their sonic qualities.

His album Breath, composed for and performed on his organs, is released on the same label that has featured music by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Rewire 2021 alumnus FUJI|||||||||||TA. During Rewire 2023, Peters will premiere a new project that has been written for his self-built organs and features two saxophonists as collaborators. In this new project, Peters delicately weaves together soundscapes that oscillate between hushed noises and lush, prolonged drones, creating a deeply immersive and evocative listening experience.

Commissioned by Rewire.

Friday, 7.4. — 53

Peter Zummo & KAKUHAN

Rainy Miller

Rewire has commissioned the highly influential American trombonist, composer, and producer Peter Zummo for an artistic residence in The Hague, alongside the innovative Japanese electronic duo ­KAKUHAN to collaborate on new music, to be performed during Rewire 2023. As a leading voice in the interdisciplinary avant-­garde of New York City’s downtown scene, Zummo has collaborated with a highly varied list of seminal artists and acts, including Arthur Russell, Love of Life orchestra, Downtown Ensemble, Flying Hearts, and Lounge Lizards, through which he developed his unique take on music he wryly termed “minimalism plus a whole lot more.” This modus operandi could also apply to the sparse yet impressive sound practices of electronic producer Koshiro Hino and musician and cellist Yuki Nakagawa, who, as KAKUHAN, melt cello and electronically processed sounds into overwhelming and staggering music that explores the outer boundaries of experimental club music. Rewire 2023 sees this extraordinary pairing present the first results of their collaborative residence.

Hailing from Preston in the North-West of England, producer, songwriter, and performer Rainy Miller is a peer of like-minded musicians like Blackhaine, Iceboy Violet, and Space Afrika, whose songs skew pop, ambient, and rap and turns them into incredibly intimate and personal, brooding works. His latest album Desquamation (Fire, Burn. Nobody) (2022) is an ambitious and personal work that sees Miller pushing the boundaries of his production style with stretches of lamenting ambient interrupted by propulsive flashes of noise and percussion. The affective soundscapes make space for Miller’s introspective vocals, often warped and transformed with mournful Auto-Tune effects. The result is hazy bedroom pop with bursts of pummeling drill and chest-bursting rave — highly potent and immersive music, especially when translated to an intimate and intense live performance.

54 — Friday, 7.4.

Safety Trance

Youniss

Born in Venezuela and based in Barcelona, DJ, artist, and producer Luis Garban — also known under his other alias ­Cardopusher — has spent the last decade creating a wide variety of noisy dancefloor assaults. He emerged in the world of fast paced electronics in the early 2000s by starting out in the breakcore and rave scene, In recent years his productions have gravitated towards a more industrial type of sound, fusing different genres including EBM, wave, hardcore, acid, techno, and reggaeton. From working with Boys Noize to co-producing music for legendary UK band The Horrors, Garban is always looking to steer his music into exciting, new directions. His Safety Trance moniker is a full-on dedication to the pulsating rhythms, rumbling bass, and hyped-up vocals of the reggaeton Garban 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.

On his second album White Space, released on VIERNULVIER Records, the Belgian musician and visual artist Youniss reflects on his own personal “panic attack” instilled by the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. With heralding vocals bathing in polyphonic fragility, shrieking guitar sounds, and rattling patched-up drumwork with electronic-like textures, he delivers his own take on a perfectly imperfect 90s punk rock meets IDM cassette tape — all the while giving a voice to his inner existential outcries. As an exploration of identity and self-expression, Antwerp-based Youniss moves his way through the awkward, intrusive feelings that accompany performing as a Black man with an Arabic name through the gaze of the western world. Translating this album to stage, Youniss and drummer Tim Caramin explore and express Youniss’s discomfort through music, costume design, set pieces, and projection.

Co-presented by Carhartt WIP

This performance is a co-production of VierNulVier, de Brakke Grond, deSingel & STUK. Friday, 7.4. — 55

Context Tuning In — Listening Session

By: Liew Niyomkarn The Grey Space in The Middle, Friday 7 April, 13:30—14:30

Zoë Mc Pherson & Alessandra Leone Pitch Blender

As co-founders of Berlin-based label SFX, Zoë Mc Pherson & Alessandra Leone find overlaps and hybrids between adventurous, experimental electronic music and various forms of visual media. For Rewire 2023, they collaborate on a new show, where Leone provides a visual framework for a performance based around Mc Pherson’s third full-length album Pitch Blender (2023), a collection of cybernetic sound system experiments that explore the intersection of rave and art. Known for their energetic live performances, the stage presence of Mc Pherson embodies what their music is made of. They’re an artist who’s somehow able to match the raw energy of post-punk and no-wave music with the brain-altering potential of the best experimental club tracks. The results are mind-boggling pieces of rave music with all the signature, dopamine-inducing sounds we’ve grown to love, but cast in a distinctive mould of experimental rhythmic structures and formidable sound design.

Co-presented by Carhartt WIP 56 — Friday, 7.4.

In response to this year’s theme of Instrumental Ecologies, sound artists and musician Liew Niyomkarn will open Rewire’s context programme on Friday with a listening session at Page Not Found. Through crowd-sourced field recordings by friends near and far, we will open our ears and tune into a series of sonic environments in micro and macro forms.

Sounding with the Serge Modular — a workshop by Thomas Ankersmit

The Grey Space in The Middle, Friday 7 April, 14:00—16:00

With the upcoming 50th anniversary in 2023 of the Serge synthesizer, developed

by Russian American composer and electronic instrument builder Serge Tcherepnin, the work of Berlin-based sound artist Thomas Ankersmit is revelatory. Working almost exclusively with the instrument for over fifteen years, Ankersmit has attained a scholarly and near-alchemical knowledge of the Serge synthesizer. On Friday 7 April, prior to his performance the day after, Ankersmit will host a workshop in which he will demonstrate his ways of working with the Serge Modular and in which participants are invited to join his experiments in sounding.

For this workshop, you need an extra ticket.

TIMEZONES — A Podcast between Anthropology, Audio Collage, and Journalism by Norient — ­listening station

The Grey Space in The Middle, Friday 7 April, 16:30–18:00

The TIMEZONES podcast series plunges into the world of artists and their practices, asking: what does living and working in culture and the arts involve in different countries, cities, and contexts today? The artists’ thoughts on their moods, their social, political, and intellectual realities and their philosophies of life have been worked up into experimental audio collages. The podcasts run the gamut of formats and content, from straight journalism to experimental and documentary approaches, ethnography and fiction, sound art and improvisation.

TIMEZONES is a project by Norient, co-initiated with the Goethe-Institut.

Poetics of Listening — Seminar

with: Brandon LaBelle Page Not Found, Friday 7 April, 15:00—16:00

In conjunction with the release of the publication The Listening Biennial Reader, these two seminars with artist and writer Brandon LaBelle focus on listening as a framework for nurturing expanded relationalities across time and territory. In what ways does listening move us, supporting connections with others? As many artists and scholars attest, listening is a transformative power that impacts onto processes of social recognition, care and mutuality. Over the course of the two seminars on Friday and Saturday, listening will be highlighted as a conduit for enabling recognition that also moves beyond human worlds and the logic of binary thought.

Taking stock of listening’s power, we’ll collectively consider listening as a special form of dreaming, as what delivers messages from other worlds, and that acts as a type of possession transforming what we know of each other.

Instrumental Ecologies — Assembly

with: Matthew Biederman, Liew Niyomkarn, Carla J. Maier, Pierce Warnecke, Mark ­Peter Wright The Grey Space in The Middle, Friday 7 April, 16:30–17:45 As part of Rewire’s context programme 2023, 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 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.

Radio WORM x Rewire Rewire is collaborating with Radio WORM, who will be broadcasting live from The Grey Space, with interviews, live streams and conversations, reflecting and reporting over the course of the festival days.

Friday, 7.4. — 57

SAT APR 8

33 (Billy Bultheel & Alexander Iezzi) Billy Bultheel and Alexander Iezzi team up as 33 for an equal-parts brutal and beautiful array of banging hardcore rave, inward-looking chamber music, and artful punk. The fact that composer and performance-maker Bultheel and artist Iezzi come from very different artistic backgrounds contributes to the creative freedom that their collaborative output radiates. Stomping techno fills, blistering samples, and sudden bolts of noise punctuate funereal choral chants, mournful string sections, and melancholic piano notes. Picture a woeful opera house that has been taken over for an experimental club night, or a royal concert hall made from slabs of concrete and you’re nearly there. For this live show Bultheel and Iezzi are performing alongside cellist Patrick Belaga and the vocalists Ivan Cheng and Steve Katona.

60 — Saturday, 8.4.

Aleksandra Słyz

A Vibrant Touch

Aleksandra Słyż is a Polish composer, sound artist, and sound engineer, who on her second full-length album A Vibrant Touch (2022) tackles sound as a physical phenomenon. The work identifies and explores the connections between acoustic and synthetic sounds, intertwining them into plentiful and slowly yet intensively pulsating drone structures which resonate within the space they fill up. The vibrating sound waves generate nearly electrical tensions, immersing the listener and letting them experience the sound in its pure, physical shape. During Rewire 2023, Słyż and a quartet of musicians — Kosma Műller, Kamil Babka, Anna Szmatoła, and Gerard Lebik — playing violin, viola, cello, and alto saxophone respectively, will perform the music of A Vibrant Touch in a live setting.

The brilliantly executed dynamic between the various instruments and their respective sound qualities result in striking, nearhypnotic microtonal explorations that underpin the compositional sensibilities and musical prowess of Słyż.

Alto Arc (George Clarke, Danny L Harle, Trayer Tryon & Isamaya Ffrench) world premiere

Perhaps it’s an unlikely formation on paper, but experiencing the audiovisual output of Alto Arc makes total sense. This supergroup, consisting of Deafheaven frontman George Clarke, maverick pop producer Danny L Harle, Trayer Tryon from Hundred Waters, and make-up artist Isamaya Ffrench, is a match made in heaven — or in hell. Alto Arc’s eponymous 2022 release is highly stylized, maximalist, spellbinding music that verges on the grotesque, the sublime, and the macabre. The ethereal vocals of Ffrench and the warped grunts of Clarke underline the clash between light and darkness that underpins Alto Arc (2022). Created during the pandemic, the artists were never able to physically meet and work together in person, instead sending files and stems back and forth.

Rewire has commissioned them to perform together for the first time, translating the maximalist style of their release into a bewitching and entrancing live show that traverses across opera, metal, and deconstructed club. Commissioned by Rewire.

Amnesia Scanner & Freeka Tet Snaptrance.webcam

As Amnesia Scanner, the Berlin-based Finnish duo Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala reflect on the system vulnerabilities, informational overload, and sensory excess of the late capitalist present with acute music and intense visuals. Blurring the boundaries between cultural critics and abrasive club act, Amnesia Scanner have captured our anxious zeitgeist like no other. Landmark releases like AS Live [][][][][], AS, and AS Truth were forceful entries in the rapidly evolving niche of deconstructed club music, while albums Another Life and Tearless showcased the duo’s knack for longform, narrative-driven albums. The duo has teamed up with New York City-based digital artist Freeka Tet for snaptrance.webcam, which is developed out of their Unplugged performance, described by the artists as an “album which will never be released,” but can only be heard and experienced during live performances. For Rewire 2023, Amnesia Scanner & Freeka Tet developed snaptrance.webcam as a site-specific performance in The Hague, featuring bespoke stage and visual design.

Saturday, 8.4. — 61

Authentically Plastic

Dale Cornish

As a DJ, producer, and artist based in Kampala, Authentically Plastic’s sound is necessarily political. Dubbed “Demon of the Nile” by conservative Ugandan media and politicians, Authentically Plastic has never shied away from disrupting norms and expectations. They run a roving, riotous, club night in Kampala called ANTI-MASS which opens up space for femme, queer, and experimental artists in an increasingly repressive social climate. Risk-taking in this political environment informs Authentically Plastic’s sound, which has an accelerated, densely layered, and improvisational feel. Their sets, at once dark and playful, use Gqom, Vogue, and Techno as a base for exploring other unknown sounds. Their music is influenced by anything from quasi-­ electronic Northern Ugandan rhythms, to early acid experiments and Afrofuturism.

Through his wickedly experimental approach to electronic music, South London’s Dale Cornish has explored the outer-edges and inner-workings of dance tunes. Ever since he played a pioneering role in London’s electroclash movement at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Cornish has been gleefully deconstructing club and experimental music and reassembling it in his own fashion. The cumulative effect of Cornish’s versatile output has coalesced into his 12th album and latest opus Traditional Music of South London (2022), released on The Death Of Rave. In what feels like his most personal record to date, Traditional Music of South London serves as a “psychosexual-geography of London’s lost gay club haunts,” offering Cornish’s reflections on the city, sounds, lifestyles, and cultures that formed him, personally and musically. Expect a wild, clever and intimate journey into the heart of dance with this electronic music maverick.

Co-presented by Carhartt WIP

62 — Saturday, 8.4.

Daniel Blumberg

Deena Abdelwahed

GUT

world premiere

London-based musician, songwriter, and composer Daniel Blumberg presents the first performance of his striking new work GUT, an intensely personal piece of music performed solo in an intimate live environment. Led by his soaring vocals and supported by an exploratory palette of bass harmonica, Steinberger bass, and drum machine, Blumberg channels a unique inner world with unflinching emotional directness. With GUT, Blumberg starts the next chapter in his artistic journey, truly forging a new path in his practice. Following the release of two solo albums on Mute, Minus (2018) and On&On (2020), and his Ivor Novello-winning score for the film The World To Come (2020, dir. Mona Fastvold), his third album will be released in Spring 2023 on Mute.

The Tunisian producer and DJ Deena Abdelwahed arrived in France at the age of 26 after earning her stripes on the Tunis scene.

Known for her fearless DJ sets and the production of intense and rebellious pieces of electronic dance music, Abdelwahed uses her music to reflect on issues regarding identity and geography, while never missing a beat when it comes to providing exciting and powerful dance music. Besides her additional production work on two Fever Ray songs, Abdelwahed caught global attention with forceful releases like the EPs Klabb (2017) and Dhakar (2020) and full-length album Khonnar (2018). Before this she performed her first ever live set at Rewire 2018. Currently, Abdelwahed is gearing up for the release of her new album. During Rewire 2023, she will present a new show fully based on material from her upcoming release.

Saturday, 8.4. — 63

Elvin Brandhi An improvising lyricist, producer, and sound artist from Bridgend, who builds aberrant beats from field recordings, tape, vinyl, instrument, and voice, Elvin Brandhi is a fearless experimentalist and musical livewire act. Besides her work in the father and daughter duo Yeah You, Brandhi is an extremely prolific collaborative artist, creating varied music as the duo Bad@Maths and the band BAHK alongside Daniel Blumberg. During Rewire 2023, she will perform a solo set with new material to be released later this year. Using sound and voice, and warping and processing it in real time, her live shows are unyielding bursts of erupting animation where her caustic stream of consciousness cavorts with restless, glitched-out heaviness. Elvin Brandhi also performs new material in a collaborative show with Nadah El Shazly at Rewire 2023.

64 — Saturday, 8.4.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor Simultaneously cathartic and apocalyptic, the epic yet doom-laden music of Godspeed You! Black Emperor remains the perfect soundtrack for the late-capitalist hell world. With their masterful debut album F # A # ∞ (1997), the Canadian postrock group managed to capture immediately the nihilistic cultural zeitgeist of that moment, reshaping it in their signature cinematic fashion. 25 years and a couple of hiatuses after their big break and the enigmatic band is still at the forefront of post-rock with grand albums and even bigger live performances. Their most recent work G_d’s Pee at State’s End! (2021) is everything you’d expect of a GY!BE album and even more: thick layers of muck and noise, raptured by boisterous anthems and rebellious suites. This is widescreen post-rock — devastatingly beautiful, haunting, and elegiac. On stage, their immersive sound world is expanded by expressionist 16mm film projections.

Goldblum

Hatis Noit

As Goldblum, the duo Marijn Verbiesen and Michiel Klein create lo-fi sound collages working with flea market cassettes, tape-loops, keyboards and vocals in both English and Dutch. Their live performances are completely improvised — sometimes chaotic, sometimes fragile, but always playful, spontaneous and adventurous.

Embracing the decaying sound quality of forgotten classics on tape, Goldblum skews the past and present altogether, creating their own musical biotope where fragments of golden oldies, crippled rhythms, noisy outbursts and melancholic melodies come together in dreamlike songs and soundscapes, all of course submerged in that signature tape hiss. Their otherworldly music traverses the uncanny valley, creating something refreshingly new out of something weirdly familiar, a compelling and energising form of sound alchemy that on stage never sounds the same.

The London-based Japanese vocal performer Hatis Noit originally hails from Shiretoko on the Hokkaido peninsula. Inspired by a wide range of musical influences, from the classical Japanese gagaku music, operatic styles, Bulgarian and Gregorian Chanting, to avant-garde vocalists like Meredith Monk and Holly Herndon, Hatis Noit’s accomplished range is astonishingly self-taught. It was at the age of 16, during a trek in Nepal to the Buddha’s birthplace and an encounter with a female monk singing Budhhist chants that she realised singing was her calling. For her, the voice is a primal and instinctive instrument that connects us to the very essence of humanity, nature, and our universe. Her music, as heard on enigmatic debut EP Illogical Dance (2018) and the sublime follow-up LP Aura (2021), has a distinctly modern approach — with detailed sound design and fascinating composition — while her craft stays true to the timeless nature of the human voice.

Saturday, 8.4. — 65

Himera

(live A/V) — world premiere Crystal-clear arpeggiated synths and dramatic trance stabs collide with bouncy percussion and playful sound design on Sharing Secrets (2022), the sparkling debut album of Amsterdam-based producer Himera. Channelling the sugary sounds of the hyperpop pioneers from PC Music, the extremely online esthetics of Drain Gang, and the epic trance maximalism of Evian Christ, Himera has crafted a delightfully digital form of extreme pop music. Catchy vocal features by the likes of Hannah Diamond and Golin only underline the pop sensibilities at the heart of Himera’s music.

For Rewire 2023, Himera will rework Sharing Secrets into a new A/V show, with visuals from designer and artist Otso Reitala, who designed the colourful artwork for Sharing Secrets.

Co-presented by Carhartt WIP

66 — Saturday, 8.4.

Hiro Kone Menacing waves of dark ambient crash through the brooding electronic music of Hiro Kone, a New York-based musician and producer who cultivates a distinct, shapeshifting sound — a visceral meditation on rhythm, noise, and melody. Using her modular hardware set-up to manipulate macabre sonic disorientations into enchanting new shapes, her music exposes the unsettling and the sublime. Fluidly navigating the outer-edges of dark electronics and experimental club music, while incorporating traces of chamber music, field recordings, and industrial, Kone crafts evocative music that’s texturally rich and rhythmically pulsating. Her previous, critically acclaimed albums Love is the Capital (2017), Pure Expenditure (2018), and A Fossil Begins To Bray (2019) showcase the range in Hiro Kone’s alchemical sound, all of which is beautifully crystalised on her most recent release Silvercoat the Throng (2021) — Kone’s most personal record to date, made as a response to the lockdown years.

Horse Lords Horse Lords is a genre-defying band, originally from Baltimore, Maryland, known for their hypnotic rhythms, intricate polyrhythms, and innovative use of traditional and electronic instruments. Their methodical compositions deliver a visceral experience, with driving beats and intertwining melodies that can build to ecstatic heights.

Their live performances are known for their intensity and openness for improvisation, with each individual member able to redirect parts of the dynamic interplay that defines their sound. As heard on their latest album Comradely Objects (2022), the band finds a playful streak within their tightly-locked compositions, playing with ideas of how to structure a song and the way you can then disrupt it and create something wholly new and exciting all at the same time — which on stage translates to spontaneous sets that allow the band to explore their circuitous music in fun and unexpected ways.

Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals “This isn’t an album meant for you to smile to,” writes vocalist Brian Ennals about his latest collaborative project with producer Infinity Knives, “except when I say something funny.” Instead, King Cobra (2022) is an album to immerse yourself into, to experience the vitriol, rage, philosophy, humour, and myth-making at the heart of Ennals’s poetic vocals and Infinity Knives’s urgent and unpredictable instrumentals. Following their monumental 2020 release Rhino XXL and 2020’s Dear, Sudan, Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals have, with King Cobra, solidified their reputation as one of the most exciting, eclectic, and wildly experimental hip-hop formations hailing from Baltimore.

Bending hip-hop frameworks to uniquely idiosyncratic styles, King Cobra ranges from spaced-out funk, janky rap anthems, and stark trap manifestos to sprawling, synthesiser rap ballads.

Saturday, 8.4. — 67

Julia Reidy

KAKUHAN

Prolific Berlin-based guitarist and composer Julia Reidy mostly explores the outer ranges of the guitar. Their microtonal, ambient compositions employ non-conventional tonal arrangements, electronic processing tools, and auto-tuned vocals to realise experimental and emotive sound pieces. Pitch-shifted guitar tremolos, shimmering electronics, and fleeting vocals drift through vast vistas that convey lone figures in desolate landscapes. Reidy’s latest album World in World (2022), released

by Black Truffle, highlights their unique approach to guitar-based music. It’s a spacious work, with evolving finger-picked guitar lines and echoing reverb. The intimacy of the music is heightened by the frequent pedal clicks, emphasising the in the moment-ness of Reidy’s beautifully unorthodox playing style.

The word KAKUHAN in Japanese means “stirring” of various different elements. It perfectly describes this duo’s alchemic ­approach to music and the ways they have stirred the boundaries of seemingly binary categorizations such as electronic/string, contemporary/club music, traditional/­con­ temporary, physical/metaphysical, and com­ ­­po­sition/improvisation. Formed by electronic producer Koshiro Hino — a frontman of Goat and a leading figure in the avant-­ garde and experimental scene of Osaka — and musician and cellist Yuki Nakagawa, KAKUHAN brings together raw digital music and bowed cello in thrilling, syncopated songs that embark on unexplored ter­ ritory in experimental electronic music.

Simultaneously dissonant and utterly compelling, their critically acclaimed debut album Metal Zone (2022) combines grimey, cybernetic club music with striking sound design, freakish rhythmic interplay, and dense sonic textures.

68 — Saturday, 8.4.

Liew Niyomkarn

Lucinda Chua

Taking an equal parts experimental and intimate approach to sound and performance, the work of LA-based sound artist and musician Liew Niyomkarn focuses on listening practices and the conveyance of memories through sound. She uses field recordings to detect time, (non)-human’s voices, everyday routines, text, archrival sounds, and different tuning systems in nature — to combine them with a sonic palette and the properties of sound itself such as sounds of spaces. The results are deeply personal and texturally layered works that capture the complexities and multiplicity of lived life. Best heard on the diaristic, ambient soundscapes of her recent album I Think Of Another Time When You Heard It (2022) that channels the artists’ memories of her childhood home in Thailand, Niyomkarn’s delicate treatment of sound channels subjective experiences into compelling pieces of experimental music, conjuring fragile narrative worlds that draw the listener in.

London-born artist Lucinda Chua creates elemental soundscapes that hold delicate songs. A seasoned cellist, she toured in Stars of The Lid and FKA twigs’s live band before releasing two EPs, Antidotes 1 & 2, as a singer-producer-songwriter. Chua’s debut solo album YIAN, set for release this March on 4AD, is a meditation on identity, love, grief, and personal growth. A deeply introspective and fully realised vessel of creative expression, YIAN emerges as a sensual landscape of emotional textures – blending strings, soft keys and intimate vocals. Having performed in unorthodox venues, from the depths of the planetarium to a multi-story carpark at sunset, her cinematic performances bring the music to life, where she approaches the room and everyone in it as her instrument.

Saturday, 8.4. — 69

Malibu

MIMI

Soothing, stirring, and ethereal music coalesces in the sublime compositions of Malibu, an electronic musician whose enigmatic, sparse output was immediately received with rapturous critical acclaim. Held, her contribution to influential nu-­ambient PAN compilation album Mono No Aware (2017), was an alluring entrypoint into the musical sensibilities of Malibu: gentle layers of reverb, gleaming melodic chord progressions, and swelling ambient hums carrying shimmers of epic and bombastic rave synths to new dimensions. Her debut EP One Life (2019) was curated by musician Julianna Barwick on the label Joyful Noise.

Together with follow-up Palaces of Pity (2022), they reveal the magnificent depth at the heart of Malibu’s work, which combines the best aspects of trance, new age, and ambient, turning these elements into a personal and perplexing new whole.

M I M I is a Lusaka-born, Brussels-based DJ and multidisciplinary artist. An integral part of the Belgian nightlife, her prolific work is widely regarded in Belgium and abroad. M I M I’s artistic sensibilities are driven by an ongoing conversation with nature, drawing inspiration from the boundaries between the natural world and the manufactured, with a specific focus on the impact of the anthropocene. As a musician, she explores the paradoxical relationship between classical music, club music, all infused with the rhythms and melodies of her African heritage. Incorporating her Afro-European cultural heritage and shamanic practices through various mediums, she seamlessly blends multiple genres, palettes, and textures to create a unique and forward-thinking sound.

70 — Saturday, 8.4.

Moin

Morita Vargas

Besides giving a unique twist to club music with the skeletal grime of their formation Raime, musicians Tom Halstead and Joe Andrews also operate under the guise of Moin alongside percussionist Valentina Magaletti. Shifting focus from grime’s piercing electronics, Moin is more about adding layers of rhythm, melody, and sound to a form of guitar-driven music. Alternating between clockwork precision and looser improvisation, and combined with traces of electronic music and found audio, Moin is a musical force to be reckoned with, both as a recording band and as a performing act. While Moin may wear some of their influences — including post-hardcore and post-rock — on their sleeve, the resulting musical output is unlike anything else out there right now.

Point in case is their most recent album Paste (2022) which rejuvinates the post-­ hardcore scene of yore and turns it into a fresh new musical endeavour.

Morita Vargas is a musician, composer, and producer whose work is characterised by a unique blend of traditional and contemporary elements. Born and raised in Argentina, Vargas’s music draws from her rich cultural heritage, while immersing herself in digital music, opening up to a world of electronic tools to capture their sounds, interacting with the “ambient” genre, “dream pop” and “hybrid fantasy.” She manipulates her voice through reverbs, delays, and whispers, singing in a self-invented language. The sound of Vargas’s voice is a portal into her thriving, dreamlike world brimming, shimmering, and beating with unrefined natural sensations which stimulate something primordial yet strangely contemporary. Vargas belongs to a new women’s movement from South America, builders of a new way of art for a sensitive society, open to curiosity and conscious listening. Providing a show full of aesthetic resources with visual interventions, Vargas plays at being the sound narrator of a new language.

Saturday, 8.4. — 71

Nadah El Shazly & Elvin Brandhi

The Swan

As two voices pushing the standards of the accepted feminine vocal spectrum in very different ways, Nadah El Shazly and Elvin Brandhi are colliding to investigate what a postmodern opera would sound like. Conceived en route between Cairo, Kampala, and Paris, Pollution Opera incorporates what the artists call a “cacophony carbon orchestra,” embracing dissonance and looking into poetic ways of re-establishing intimacy. El Shazly is known for her fearless performances and is a prominent voice in the electronic music underworld of her hometown, Cairo, while Brandhi is known for her eccentric beats, made with field recordings, tape, vinyl, instrument, and voice.

Taking the canonical form of the opera and bringing it up to speed with contemporary culture, the cross-continental pairing uses their collaborative project to reflect on geo­political issues, global industrialisation, and dissonant ecosystems.

During Rewire 2023, the British Nigerian multidisciplinary artist Nwando Ebizie will perform a live rendition of her long awaited debut album The Swan (2022) together with her band. A sprawling, Afrofuturist, genre-bending opus of polyrhythmic bliss, The Swan is rebellious and radical music with kaleidoscopic vocals, ecstatic percussion, and soul-stirring sound design. Carving out a bold new Afrofuturist imaginary, Ebizie uses her music to open gates into the ritual cultures of the Black Atlantic.

The Swan is a work of sonic fiction moving into the imagined world of a matriarchal community, and unfolding like a time-­ warping ethnographic account of found sound and footage that is both ancient and futuristic. The project brings together Ebizie’s left-field electronic experiments, cross-border musical influences, radical live art practices, and interests in Black Atlantic ritual cultures and speculative fiction.

Pollution Opera features visuals by Omar El Sadek with video footage shot by Arno Mery.

72 — Saturday, 8.4.

Nwando Ebizie

Oscar Peters

Echos — world premiere The Hague-based sound artist and composer Oscar Peters has a deep-rooted fascination with the pipe organ. His recent research and artistic outputs have been focussed on the unconventional use of pipe organs and this instrument’s sonic behaviour in acoustic spaces. He has designed and created six of his own experimental organs that have allowed him to further investigate their sonic qualities.

His album Breath, composed for and performed on his organs, is released on the same label that has featured music by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Rewire 2021 alumnus FUJI|||||||||||TA. During Rewire 2023, Peters will premiere a new project that has been written for his self-built organs and features two saxophonists as collaborators. In this new project, Peters delicately weaves together soundscapes that oscillate between hushed noises and lush, prolonged drones, creating a deeply immersive and evocative listening experience.

Osheyack IDM meets the rougher edges of club music in the distinctive sound world of USborn producer Osheyack. An integral member of Shanghai’s burgeoning electronic music scene that centres around ALL Club, Osheyack is a shining example of the new hybrid form of club music, hailing from pioneering labels like SVBKVLT. His intense electronic music fuses techno, gabber, ambient, and drone, and combines perplexing sound design with destabilising percussion and tectonic bass. The result seems to capture the confusing state of being terminally online — as demonstrated on his recent album Intimate P ­ ublics (2022) — and the desire to break free from bodily and societal constraints. There’s a merciless intensity to Osheyack’s music, but listen closely through the chaos and noise and you can feel the urgency and immediacy that radiates from his revelatory dance music.

Co-presented by Carhartt WIP

Saturday, 8.4. — 73

Paul Purgas

Rewire × Carhartt WIP instore

Exploring the intersections of sound, technology, and culture, Paul Purgas — a founding member of Emptyset alongside James Ginzburg — is an artist, musician, and curator known for his immersive soundscapes that blend traditional instruments with electronic manipulation and modular synthesis. With Tape Music, Purgas explores the past and future of analogue tape composition. Inspired by the traditions of musique concrète and the experimental output of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop with reel-to-reel tape machines, alongside the avant-garde cybernetic music compositions of David Tudor, this performance incorporates tape systems and feedback loops in order to mirror biological principles through sound. Taking a contemporary reflection on these archaic machines, the project explores how current forms of digital technology can reanimate these historic techniques, offering new sonic possibilities and enabling a return to the elegance and tactile nature of tape composition.

Head over to The Hague-based record store 3345 on Saturday afternoon for another instore event presented by Rewire and Carhartt WIP. The event is freely accessible and bills Zoë Mc Pherson, Bitter Babe, Noise Diva and Nazar. Come over to listen to some tunes or to shop the limited edition Carhartt WIP × Rewire 2023 shirts.

Also on offer in 3345 is Remotely Together, the inaugural release on Rewire’s newly launched record label. 3345 is also selling various other vinyl and merch throughout Rewire at various festival locations.

3345 is an on- and offline independent retailer of new and second hand music in all physical formats. Located in The Hague, the Netherlands, their stock houses a wide array of music ranging from the more traditional likes of pop, rock, soul, and funk, to the more contemporary sides of electronic music. They cover every genre in its full spectrum, working from the known towards the niche.

Tape Music

74 — Saturday, 8.4.

Sarahsson

Sélébéyone

Theatrical and grotesque, the visiual arresting live performances of Sarahsson are something to behold. By fusing classical music with metal, experimental electronics, and hardcore, the Bristol-based composer, producer, performance artist, and DJ creates a distinctly personal sound world in which she explores themes like queerness, identity, history, and belonging. Moments of sublime beauty are pierced by extreme sound design, destabilising rhythms, and earth-shattering percussion. A distinctly unique voice in the current landscape of electronic music, Sarahsson brings together her unique ear for melody, rich textural harmony, and dramatic narratives to achieve something genuinely awe-inspiring and timeless on her debut album The Horgenaith (2022).

The live rendition of her album is just as intense and immediate, a visceral experience that rejects categorisation and simply needs to be experienced.

Jazz-rap crossovers tend to take the most recognizable elements of the two genres and stitch them together as a bland hybridisation of both. This couldn’t be further from the truth for Sélébéyone, a truly adventurous and enchanting collective comprised of MCs HPrizm (New York) and Gaston Bandimic (Dakar), and saxophonists Steve Lehman (Los Angeles) and Maciek Lasserre (Paris). Combining bold yet catchy jazz experimentalism with English and ­Wofol rap, Sélébéyone finds new ways to expand on the rhythmic, melodic, and rhetorical qualities of jazz and hip hop. ­ The group’s eponymous 2016 debut was hailed as a game-changing synthesis of underground hip hop, modern jazz, and live electronic music. On their recently released sophomore album Xaybu (2022), Sélébéyone — which means “intersection” in Wolof — continue to build on their groundbreaking work with shifting rhythms and state-of-the art sound design.

Co-presented by Carhartt WIP

Saturday, 8.4. — 75

Slikback × Weirdcore

VOID

The subversive visuals of Weirdcore are a thrilling match for Slikback, a prolific musician who has emerged as one of the most exciting club artists from East Africa in recent years. Known for his dark sound design and mischievous approach to sampling and composition, Slikback has found a terrific aesthetic mould for his unique fusion of contemporary club styles like techno, dubstep, jungle, breakbeat, footwork, trap, and drill. Last year, the duo was invited to Rewire to present the world premiere of a brand new audiovisual performance called VOID, but due to visa issues they had to adjust the work into a shorter remote presentation. Over the last year the duo have further developed the piece, resulting in a thunderous and mind-blowing audiovisual live show. At Rewire 2023 VOID will finally be performed in full.

VOID is curated by Unsound, commissioned

by Rewire, Donaufestival, and Unsound.

76 — Saturday, 8.4.

Soft Break Rotterdam-based Yessica Deira, aka Soft Break, is a DJ and multidisciplinary designer, who experiments in re-constructing collective consciousness through design, film, sound, and performance with a strong interest in digital culture and art, electronic music, and the preservation of Dutch, Black, female heritage. Early encounters with her city’s jungle, dubstep, and grime scenes are heavily reflected in her eclectic sets that move through gentle vocals, percussion, hard drums, footwork, hip hop, and sub-destroying bass. Expect genre-busting, energy-driven aural narratives, full of unexpected twists and turns.

Since graduating from No Shade DJ Mentoring Program 2020 in Berlin, Soft Break has become a vibrant new voice in the club scene of the Netherlands and abroad with a variety of outstanding sets, frequently sharing the stage with her companion Nala Brown. Deira is also a founding member of the collective AMPFEMININE, curating mixes by femme-identifying DJs, booking talent, and hosting events and parties.

The Dwarfs of East Agouza The Dwarfs Of East Agouza are a leading force of improvised musical excitement.

Founded in Cairo by Maurice Louca (Alif, Bikya), Sam Shalabi (Land of Kush, Shalabi Effect), and Alan Bishop (Sun City Girls, The Invisible Hands), the trio have developed a unique, always-recognisable sound, shapeshifting from free jazz and krautrock to Arabic influences and Egyptian Shaabi music. Not necessarily interested in “‘free improvisation”’ per se — the group prefers to call their creative process “composing on your feet”, the results of which can be heard on their album Bes (2016), consisting of hypnotic jazz, delirious noise, and near-cosmic jams. Recently, The Dwarfs Of East Agouza presented their forceful and dynamic fifth studio album High Tide In The Lowlands. On stage, the group obviously ventures again into exciting, new, and fresh musical territories.

The Paper Ensemble & Ale Hop

#17 — world premiere

As an ongoing project from interdisciplinary artists Jochem van Tol and Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti, The Paper Ensemble uses the versatile material of paper to build sonic worlds of paper sculptures. During Rewire 2023, they are joined on stage by one-of-a-kind sound artist Ale Hop for a unique electro-acoustic musical exploration. Ale Hop came up in Lima’s experimental underground during the 2000s, and currently resides in Berlin, where she caught the attention of the city’s electronic scene with her visceral live guitar performances. In her musical practice, she builds densely woven atmospheres by blending a complex repertoire of guitar techniques processed by synthesis devices, creating a music of deep physical intensity. The world premiere of this special performance sees a fascinating interplay between the organic/acoustic sound qualities that are a signature of The Paper Ensemble with the processed, noisy and highly textured electronic music of Ale Hop, alongside the percussive punctuations by Frank Rosaly and Paul Koek.

Saturday, 8.4. — 77

The Social Lover

Thomas Ankersmit

Co-running music labels BAKK and Rubber, Ruben Verkuylen (aka The Social Lover) has been a mainstay in The Hague’s local music scene. Championing contemporary, experimental, and progressive music — that often feels light-years ahead — the DJ and producer aims to constantly refresh his takes on club music and broadcasting.

Through high contrasts and wayward intensity, The Social Lover’s modus operandi is that of collage — seeking relations of sonic harmony and competition from which new meanings emerge. Within his playful sound, atmospheres move rapidly from dark and sombre towards the fun and lighthearted, triggering both mind and movement in the process.

Working almost exclusively with the Serge synthesiser for over 15 years, the Berlin-based sound artist Thomas Ankersmit has attained a scholarly and near-alchemical knowledge of the modular synth system. His dynamic studio compositions and live performances highlight the sonic prowess of the device, while also leaning into its all-analog peculiarities. By amplifying the imperfections of the instrument, Ankersmit finds ways to push the sonic boundaries of what this highly versatile synthesiser can produce. Ankersmit’s previous work has generally focussed on the more acute physical dimensions of sound.

Recently, his artistic practice has shifted towards a different kind of physicality, one that involves the composition of imaginary spaces through sound, or perhaps “a ­cinema for the ears.” During Rewire 2023, Ankersmit will repurpose those imaginary panoramas of cinematic sound and translate them back into a physical context again.

78 — Saturday, 8.4.

TLF Trio

Tzusing

TLF Trio is an experimental chamber music ensemble consisting of cellist Cæcilie Trier, pianist Jakob Littauer and guitarist M. K. Frøslev. Moving between written composition and improvisation they channel minimalism, free jazz and modes of Central-­ European Classical of the Late Renaissance and Early Baroque. The Danish trio, who is based in Berlin and Copenhagen, released their first collaborative album Sweet Harmony on the French electronic and experimental label Latency in 2022, introducing their de/re-constructive chamber music, that seems more sculptural than narrative and that fluidly shapeshifts between being an object in the room to being the room itself.

As a DJ, Tzusing’s sets mix streamlined techno, industrial electronics, non-western dance music, and contemporary club music. He adds to this a sincere belief in the redemptive power of pop music, ready to drop sophisticated, classic Asian pop into the middle of club sets. In his own productions Tzusing recombines these influences into aggressive, cathartic music, inflected with off-kilter half step rhythms, strange harmonic textures, and thick, unnaturally resonant drums. Tzusing’s releases on formative club imprint L.I.E.S. go against the grain of conventional notions of “Chinese-ness,” authenticity, and belonging, asking what these signifiers mean and who they belong to, as diasporas mutate beyond national borders. With 绿帽 Green Hat, his debut LP on PAN, Tzusing expands on his sonic prowess and artistic vision, seeking out visceral, fun, and critical subversion in equal parts.

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Context Veering Voices — Conversation

with: Lucy Liyou, Hatis Noit, and Pamela Z The Grey Space in The Middle, Saturday 8 April, 13:15—14:00 As part of the context programme Instrumental Ecologies, artists Lucy Liyou, Hatis Noit, and Pamela Z are invited to enter into a conversation on the poetics and politics of working with the earliest instrument: the voice. While discussing each of their unique approaches to voice processing and expanding its possibilities as an instrument, they will address questions around silencing and amplifying voices, and how voices channel grief, translate histories, and hold emancipatory power.

Poetics of Listening — Seminar

with: Brandon LaBelle Page Not Found, Saturday 8 April, 14:15—15:15

In conjunction with the release of the publication The Listening Biennial Reader, these two seminars with artist and writer Brandon LaBelle focus on listening as a framework for nurturing expanded relationalities across time and territory. In what ways does listening move us, supporting connections with others? As many artists and scholars attest, listening is a transformative power that impacts onto processes of social recognition, care and mutuality. Over the course of the two seminars on Friday and Saturday, listening will be highlighted as a conduit for enabling recognition that also moves beyond human worlds and the logic of binary thought.

Taking stock of listening’s power, we’ll collectively consider listening as a special 80 — Saturday, 8.4.

form of dreaming, as what delivers messages from other worlds, and that acts as a type of possession transforming what we know of each other.

Elements of Sounding

with: Ellen Fullman and Pak Yan Lau The Grey Space in The Middle, Saturday 8 April, 15:30—16:15 As part of the context programme’s track Instrumental Ecologies, artists and composers Ellen Fullman and Pak Yan Lau will enter into a conversation on listening and sounding mediated by their self-built or assembled instruments. The artists share a deep interest in working with acoustics, vibration, and overtones, and in seeing how our modes of listening and being attentive to sound transform throughout time. Fullman will speak more about building, composing, and performing with The Long String Instrument, an installation of dozens of tuned strings which have resonated in architectural spaces across the world. Pak Yan will walk us through her electro-acoustic sound universe, with its prepared pianos, toy pianos, synths, electronics, and various sound objects, producing immersive sound palettes, overtones, and harmonics.

Times and Territories — Assembly

with: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Afrorack, Maria Chávez, Nadah El Shazly, Paul ­Purgas, Joe Rainey, Stas Sharifullin (remote), meLê yamomo The Grey Space in The Middle, Saturday 8 April, 16:30—18:00 As part of Rewire’s context programme 2023, Times and Territories will focus on how establishing connections across time and space, while challenging existing borders and linear notions of time, are fundamental for contemporary and experimental music and sound practices. During this

assembly, artists are invited to discuss their working methods and collective desires to resist colonial models of listening, by expressing themselves in terms of their arts and craft and their critical faculties.

Led by artist, researcher, and writer Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, artists performing at Rewire will enter into one on one conversations as critical friends, reviewing each other’s work and discussing the role of temporality and spatiality, fostering equitable modes of collective sounding and listening together.

Turntablism

with: Maria Chávez, Mariam Rezaei, and Victoria Shen The Grey Space in The Middle, Saturday 8 April, 18:15–19:00 Sound artists, composers, and performers Maria Chávez, Mariam Rezaei, and Victoria Shen share an affinity for the turntable as an instrument for musical experimentation and improvisation. All three artists have become internationally renowned for their unique kind of turntablism, giving a new framework for a near-archaic and inherently lo-fi form of music making. During this session, Chávez, Rezaei, and Shen will enter into a conversation on their collaboration and the performance for 12 turntables that they will present at Rewire, as well as demonstrating and discussing how their idiosyncratic techniques and approaches to the instrument have evolved over time.

asking: what does living and working in culture and the arts involve in different countries, cities, and contexts today? The artists’ thoughts on their moods, their social, political, and intellectual realities and their philosophies of life have been worked up into experimental audio collages. The podcasts run the gamut of formats and content, from straight journalism to experimental and documentary approaches, ethnography and fiction, sound art and improvisation.

TIMEZONES is a project by Norient, co-initiated with the Goethe-Institut.

Radio WORM × Rewire Rewire is collaborating with Radio WORM, who will be broadcasting live from The Grey Space, with interviews, live streams and conversations, reflecting and reporting over the course of the festival days.

TIMEZONES — A Podcast between Anthropology, Audio Collage, and Journalism by Norient — listening station

The Grey Space in The Middle, Saturday 16:30–18:00

The TIMEZONES podcast series plunges into the world of artists and their practices, Saturday, 8.4. — 81

SUN APR 9

Ana Roxanne Embodying the radiance of R&B vocalists, the immaculateness of church hymns, and the soul-stirring power of devotional music, musician Ana Roxanne makes incredibly intimate pieces of music that combine meditative drone, calming ambient soundscapes, and angelic vocals. Being both enamoured with the sacredness of choral music and the divinity of classical Hindustani singing, and obsessed with the brilliance of R&B and pop divas, Roxanne channels all these inspirations into her emotionally expressive, vulnerable work.

Her debut album ~~~ (2019) was created during her last years residing in the Bay Area, where Roxanne attended the experimental Mills College, and functions as a tribute to the formative musicians and musical styles that inspired her. Follow-up Because of a Flower (2020) is a heartbreaking, poetic meditation on notions of gender identity, beauty, and cruelty. Roxanne describes her process as beginning with “a drone element and a mood,” then she incrementally intuits melody, syllables, and lyrics, like sacred shapes materialising from mist.

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Church Andrews & Matt Davies Channelling the rhythmically diverse MIDI experimentations of Mark Fell or Autechre and soaking them in bright synthesiser sound design, Church Andrews & Matt Davies have found a unique approach to their compositions and performances of electronic music, in which Andrews’s synth sounds and Davies’s drum performances act in response to one another. As heard on recent debut album Axis, the results are a series of sonic organisms — semi-mechanical ecosystems that click and whirr with subtle, shifting focuses. On a compositional level, the British duo often work with alternate tunings, employing just intonation or observed tunings derived from instruments and musical styles from all across the world. Heavily experimenting with time signatures and morphing temporals, their minimal sound palette feels rhythmically and aesthetically diverse.

Even on stage, Andrews’s synth sounds will inform what Davies plays and vice versa, generating organic, exploratory, spontaneous, and incredibly fun electronic music.

Dawuna

European premiere The experimental yet effortless R&B of Dawuna conjures an intoxicating story world in which Dawuna is the mysterious protagonist. After releasing his staggeringly beautiful album Glass Lit Dream, Dawuna became somewhat of an internet sensation himself, garnering widespread acclaim from the who’s who of contemporary music. The underground hit beautifully renders gospel, soul, R&B, and dance into a texturally rich, emotionally inviting, and otherworldly whole. Dawuna’s incredible range as a vocalist — all crooning, whispering, lamenting — is perfectly carried by his minimal productions that include shades of ambient, lo-fi hip hop, and intoxicating synth lines. During Rewire 2023, Dawuna performs songs of his opus, amongst others, and showcases his extraordinary musical talents, unflinching songwriting chops, and spirituous stage presence.

Ghosted (Oren Ambarchi / Johan Berthling / Andreas Werliin) A sense of free-spirited collaboration guides the vibes on Ghosted (2022), a transcendent collective work by musicians Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling, and Andreas Werliin. Taking musical cues from 70s ECM jazz, electronic minimalism, African music, krautrock, and many other influences, the trio lays down incredibly groovy pieces of music that are impeccably constructed but sound and feel effortless.

Aussie guitarist Ambarchi is one of the experimental scene’s most recognizable figures, while Swedish bassist Johan Berthling is best known for founding the Häpna imprint and performing in bands such as Fire! and Tape. Drummer Andreas Werliin completes the puzzle, bringing his varied experience playing with Wildbirds & Peacedrums and Fire! Amongst others.

These seasons musicians have been playing together for years, and Ghosted is where everything falls perfectly into place.

Sunday, 9.4. — 85

Grand River

All Above (live A/V)

As Grand River, Berlin-based Dutch-Italian composer and sound designer Aimée Portioli creates experimental electronic music with rich emotional colours. Her work is atmospheric yet rhythmically complex, incorporating a wide range of contemporary compositional and production techniques.

On her third album All Above, Portioli seeks out what guiding forces might be driving, enticing, and affecting us, blurring the boundaries between electronic and acoustic and sculpting from familiar ambient forms personal themes that are painted with rich emotional colours. Written painstakingly over the last two years, All Above is the most ambitious and divergent set of music Portioli has assembled so far, incorporating voices, strings, organs, guitars, and synthesisers, besides the piano.

During Rewire 2023, Grand River presents the intricate instrumentation of her album as a brand new live show, with light design

by Marco Ciceri and Andert Tysma on the acoustic piano.

86 — Sunday, 9.4.

Joe Rainey & String Quartet European premiere

From a young age onwards, Joe Rainey was an astute pupil of Pow Wow music, recording and bootlegging influential Pow Wow groups on tape so he could absorb their rhythmic and melodic qualities. With his debut album Niineta (2022), he now demonstrates his own command of the Pow Wow style, descending from Indigenous singing heard across what is now called Minnesota. His musical project is one of channelling and echoing — orchestrating and recontextualizing the ancient Pow Wow song forms in exciting and new in-between places. Collaborating with producer and artist Andrew Broder, Rainey has crafted a distinct take on this traditional music with bombastic, occasionally dark, and menacing electronics. Rewire has invited Rainey, Broder, and Netherlands-based string players Alistair Sung, Isa Goldschmeding, Jellantsje de Vries, and Thora Sveinsdóttir for a residency in The Hague to translate Niineta into a brand new live show.

Kelela The music of Kelela has always been simultaneously suited for a packed club event and an intimate listening session at home.

By embracing emerging club styles pioneered by visionary producers like Bok Bok, Arca, and Jam City, Kelela has reshaped contemporary R&B in her own vision with brooding instrumentals, soaring vocals, and glistening sound design. Murky textures of bass music and dark club tracks can turn into gorgeous pieces of adventurous pop music thanks to the ever-crystalline presence of this outstanding vocalist.

Kelela keeps nurturing this unique sound, resulting in instant-classic releases like the bouncy mixtape Cut 4 Me (2013), introspective club opus ­ Hallucinogen (2015), and stunning debut album Take Me Apart (2017).

Her most recent, critically-acclaimed studio album Raven, marked Kelela’s return with new music after five years.

Leslee Smucker

Worlds Within — world premiere Leslee Smucker is a performer-composer utilising violin, voice, synthesisers, electronics, film, and poetry. For Rewire 2023’s Sensory Sensitive Concert, Smucker has developed the performance Worlds Within, a concert that evokes and invites discovery of sound within ourselves. Through this performance — suitable for stimulus-sensitive audiences — she invites the audience into sound worlds and resonances that reside within us by creating an environment conducive to listening, accompanied by resonances that invite deep listening and reflection. The concert takes the setting inspiration from a prehistoric cave, and travels through six tableaus composed for solo violin using octave lower strings, mutes, low-rosined bows, and handmade ceramic resonators. The hope of the work is to celebrate what is usually unheard or unnoticed—illuminating resonances with our ancient selves.

Commissioned by Rewire.

Sunday, 9.4. — 87

M. Takara & Carla Boregas Versatile percussionist Mauricio Takara and distinctive sound artist Carla Boregas had long been key players in the experimental and underground music scene in São Paulo before relocating to Berlin. The two musicians have performed with each other so frequently that there’s a depth and fluidity that blurs the lines between their roles. As heard on their most recent album Grande Massa D’Agua (Great Body of Water) (2022), the duo explores themes related to water as they dive into uncharted musical depths.

Evoking spiritual jazz, tinkered vintage dub, kosmische krautrock, and even leftfield punk, Takara’s fluid, nimble percussion bathes in the atmospheric and idiosyncratic synth work and sound manipulation of Boregas. In the music of Takara and Boregas, both water and sound have the ability to awaken in us different memories and emotional or physical states.

Maria Chávez + Mariam Rezaei + Victoria Shen

world premiere

Sound artists, composers, and performers Maria Chávez, Mariam Rezaei, and Victoria Shen share an affinity for the turntable as an instrument for musical experimentation and improvisation. All three of these artists have become internationally renowned for their unique kind of turntablism, giving a new framework for a near-archaic and inherently lo-fi form of music making.

Chávez’s book, Of Technique: Chance ­Procedures on Turntable (2012), further explores the turntable and its capabilities for live improvisation, while Rezaei presents a podcast on contemporary turntablism called These Are The Breaks… For Rewire 2023 Chávez, Rezaei, and Shen have been invited to collaborate on a commission to develop a performance for 12 turntables.

The trio will be using “Needle Nails,” acrylic nails with built-in turntable needles that allow for simultaneous playback of multiple sound sources on the same record, developed by Shen.

Commissioned by Rewire & Counterflows.

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No Plexus

world premiere

No Plexus, an electronic duo comprising of Bec Plexus and No Compliments, create experimental electronic music that is conceptual, through-composed, and genre-defying. They embody art-school misfits, unapologetically executing their own creative vision in everything they do. Projecting out-there club music through an art-pop lens, the music of No Plexus is vibrant, audacious, and bewildering. During Rewire 2021, they presented the visual album Manicurism, a jolting work of intense music and choreographed film, shot entirely with racing drones. No Plexus are Rewire’s Young Artist in Residence for 2023 and 2024, during which they will even further hone in on their craft and develop new music and live performances.

During Rewire 2023, they’ll perform alongside the celebrated stage and light designer Emmanuel Biard, who also designed the stage and lighting for Evian Christ’s performance at Rewire 2022.

This performance is commissioned by ­Rewire. Co-presented by Carhartt WIP.

Okkyung Lee’s Yeo-Neun Quartet European premiere

For the first time in Europe, Okkyung Lee presents her Yeo-Neun Quartet, which elegantly binds modern classical composition and freely improvised music with the emotive drama of Korean traditional music and popular ballads. A vital force in the contemporary global landscape of experimental music, Okkyung Lee is widely regarded for her solo and collaborative improvisations and compositions. Yeo-Neun (2020), recorded by Yeo-Neun Quartet — an experimental chamber music ensemble founded in 2016 and led by Lee on cello, featuring harpist Maeve Gilchrist, pianist Jacob Sacks, and bassist Eivind Opsvik — represents the culmination of one of longest and most intimate arcs in her remarkable career. Its 10 discrete works are born of the ambient displacement of the musician’s life: from her early days spent away from home studying the cello in Seoul and Boston, to her subsequent move to New York and the nomadism of a near-endless routine of tours.

Sunday, 9.4. — 89

Pak Yan Lau

Pamela Z

Bakunawa

A Secret Code

Born in Belgium, with roots in Hong Kong, and now based in Brussels, Pak Yan Lau is a sound artist, improviser, musician, and composer, who has developed over the years a rich, dense, and captivating sound universe from prepared pianos, toy pianos, synths, electronics, and various sound objects. Skilfully blending electro-acoustic approaches, she explores sound in a bewitching way, merging different sound sources with poetry, magic, and finesse.

During Rewire 2023, alongside her ensemble, consisting of Vera Cavallin, Giovanni Di Domenico, João Lobo, and Theo Lanau, Pak Yan performs a live rendition of her recent album Bakunawa (2021), delving and digging deep into the sound spectrum of detuned toy pianos, second-hand gong rods, prepared harp, metal tubes, and ring modulators.

The driving force of Pamela Z’s luminous musical career has been to unearth sounds unheard and unfelt. Combining voice, live electronics, sampled sound, and video in real time, Z weaves complex and beguiling musical pieces from a plethora of sources.

The renowned composer and performer is a pioneer of live digital looping techniques, processing her live voice to create dense sonic layers. Her solo works combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, digital processing, and wireless MIDI controllers that allow her to manipulate sound through her physical gestures.

Widely celebrated for her compositional work and unique performances, Z is a peer of like-minded innovators of contemporary music such as John Cage and Meredith Monk. During Rewire, her performance includes works from her most recent solo album A Secret Code, which shines brightly with musical playfulness, inventiveness, and virtuosity.

This performance is a co-production of STUK, nona & Cortizona. This project performs during Rewire 2023 with the support of Flemish Arts Centre de Brakke Grond, VierNulVier & STUK. 90 — Sunday, 9.4.

Patrick Belaga, Asma Maroof & Tapiwa Svosve

The Sport of Love

Besides performing in the chamber music ensemble that’s part of 33’s performance, cellist Patrick Belaga also performs Sport of Love, the result of an ongoing collaborative project between Belaga, producer Asma Maroof, and saxophonist Tapiwa Svosve. The group first worked together in 2020 at a theatrical residency for Schauspielhaus Zürich, scoring a performance piece directed by artist and performer Wu Tsang. Since then, they have collaborated on numerous projects scoring for dance, film, theatre, and fashion presentations.

Over the past few years the group has developed a symbiotic musical rapport and a body of work that has been shaped into an album titled Sport of Love that will be released in the spring of 2023 on label PAN. The group will perform a site specific live improvisational interpretation of the album for Rewire 2023.

Pavel Milyakov & Perila

world premiere

Having worked with Rewire alumni like Norwegian sax virtuoso Bendik Giske and Ukrainian singer Yana Pavlova, prolific Berlin-based producer Pavel Milyakov (aka Buttechno) has shown his merits as a collaborative chameleon. For their world premiere at Rewire 2023, Milyakov graces the stage with Perila, the moniker of Berlin-based electronic musician Aleksandra Zakharenko, who has become a mainstay in the city’s experimental and avant-garde scenes. A collaborative album of the pair is slated to be released in 2023. Perila’s sensual and experimental works, sitting comfortably between ambient and musique concrète, are already a fascinating match for Milyakov’s shapeshifting guitar-focussed output. For this collaboration Perila also performs as a vocalist, alternating between dreamy pop and poetic spoken word. Matched together with Milyakov’s hazy mix of electronics and guitar, this joint enterprise results in mesmerising, smokey, and effortlessly cool music.

Sunday, 9.4. — 91

Pierce Warnecke & ­Matthew Biederman

Soundwalk Collective & Patti Smith

Spillover

Correspondences — world premiere

After their live A/V performance of ­Somnifacient Signals during the 2021 online edition, Pierce Warnecke & Matthew Biederman return to Rewire for another collaboration using visual data sets for realtime audio and video mapping. ­Spillover’s focal point is a mountain range in northern Portugal that is scheduled to be destroyed to facilitate a proposed lithium mine. Through the use of aerial and land-based photogrammetry, Warnecke & Biederman have found a way to visualise and sonify the proposed landscaping project, providing an audiovisual metaphor for our fraught relationship with environmental extraction, where the landscape itself becomes the instrument. Spillover addresses and examines issues of the borders and the transitional spaces between man-made and natural landscapes, raising concerns for the Earth’s future, and bringing attention to a point that requires more focus: the inevitable meeting of society and nature.

For its 2023 edition, Rewire is proud to present the world premiere of ­Correspondences, the result of an ongoing collaborative project and conversation between Soundwalk Collective and legendary artist, poet and performer Patti Smith that has spanned over 10 years and across multiple geographies.

Soundwalk Collective’s founder Stephan Crasneanscki has explored and recorded at remote places all over the world to establish a sonic grammar that is underpinned by instrumental experimental compositions. All in the effort to create a musical space for Patti Smith to inhabit with her own poetry and voice. This ongoing resonance between the artists is expanded by ample studio recordings and experiments.

Following their inaugural performance of Perfect Vision in Centre Pompidou, this new and evolved show features visuals by filmmaker Pedro Maia, and will be performed by Soundwalk Collective’s Stephan Crasneanscki and Simone Merli, Patti Smith, Lucy Railton, and Nicolas Becker.

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Steve Gunn & David Moore The worlds of guitarist and vocalist Steve Gunn and pianist and composer David Moore collided when Moore, the mastermind behind Bing & Ruth, worked on a remix of Steve Gunn’s Reflection. Gunn’s latest album Other You (2021) is a pleasantly contemplative piece of music, that feels like watching a sunset disappear beneath an urban horizon. In the remix, Moore’s minimalist sensibilities stretch out Gunn’s beautiful melancholy and turn his music into smokey, neon-drenched latenight bar music. It was the starting point for a more in-depth collaboration that resulted in the album Let the Moon Be a Planet. This album is an invitation to relive the intimate moments shared between two artists finding their way along a single path, and into a world where the most subtle of gestures can eternally ripple.

Tatiana Koleva & Zhivko Vasilev

wood skin air — world premiere

Recognized as a virtuoso, versatile and innovative artist in marimba and percussion, Bulgarian-born, Netherlands-based musician Tatiana Koleva has premiered over 100 works created especially for her solo and ensemble projects. For Rewire 2023, Koleva will be joined by renowned Bulgarian kaval player Zhivko Vasilev; integrating elements of Bulgarian folk music, in combination with electronics, contemporary music, jazz and improvisation in their duo compositions. Through the warmth of the rosewood enchanted by the live electronics, additional percussion, and the sound design of the equally important artist Ruben Kieftenbelt in this new formation, the audience will be immersed in a sublime world of sound scapes, intriguing harmonie and a unique mix of genres and styles.

In addition and especially for the occasion, a new remix version with live electronics of one of the most famous percussion solo Rebonds by Xenakis will be presented.

Sunday, 9.4. — 93

Tim Hecker & Vincent de Belleval world premiere

The work of renowned Canadian musician and sound artist Tim Hecker has been described as “structured ambient,” “tectonic colour plates,” and “cathedral electronic music.” More to the point, he has focused on exploring the intersection of noise, dissonance, and melody, fostering an approach to songcraft which is both deeply physical and emotive. For Rewire 2019, Hecker was invited to perform his masterful piece Konoyo alongside the Konoyo Ensemble. Now, Hecker is commissioned by Rewire and co-commissioned by Le Lieu Unique for a unique, collaborative show with installation, stage, and object design by multidisciplinary artist Vincent de Belleval. Utilizing custom-made LED lights that are adjusted to Hecker’s music, this show explores different ways to “break up the grid” and find new interactions between light, sound, colours, contrasts, and textures.

Commissioned by Rewire.

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upsammy & Jonathan Castro

Germ in a Population of Buildings — world premiere Dutch DJ and producer Thessa Torsing, better known as upsammy, makes dreamy, abstract dance tracks that fluidly switch between styles such as electro, techno, and IDM. The Amsterdam-based artist earned acclaim for her adventurous DJ sets, which span a wide range of BPMs, and her gliding, spacious productions inspired by nature and science fiction. Following several sought-after EPs, she released her full-length debut, Zoom, in 2020 to high praise. upsammy’s explorative-based musical practice compliments that of graphic designer and multidisciplinary artist Jonathan Castro Alejos, whose work oscillates between the real and the fictitious, the tactile and the artificial, the recognizable and the uncanny. For Rewire 2023, the duo are joining forces to present the world premiere of Germ in a ­Population of Building, a live A/V show based around upsammy’s upcoming album on PAN.

Wacław Zimpel & Ben Kreukniet

with Johan Berthling & Frank Rosaly

Polish composer, classically-trained clarinettist, and multi-instrumentalist Wacław Zimpel is a beloved alumnus of Rewire.

Risen to prominence due to his spellbinding albums, stunningly melodic free-jazz experiments, and adventurous performances, Zimpel has long been one of the most important figures in Warsaw’s vibrant jazz and improv scene. Zimpel now returns to Rewire 2023 to present a new performance based around the material of his recent album Train Spotter. Incorporating field recordings made in 2021 during his art scholarship with the city of Warsaw, Zimpel explores a more electronic dimension to his music, while retaining his unbridled creativity and multi-instrumentalist sensibilities. The world premiere of this performance at Rewire 2023 includes light and video design by esteemed multimedia artist Ben Kreukniet, whose collaborators include James Blake and Massive Attack, amongst others.

At the age of 22, composer, saxophonist, and flautist Zoh Amba has been heralded as one of the biggest emerging artists to come out of the New York jazz and avant-garde music scene. Originally hailing from Tennessee, the break-out talent rapidly rose to notoriety in New York because of her powerful musical compositions and improvisations, performed with a deep sense of spirituality and emotional power. Her inquisitive and high-spirited music blends elements from avant-garde and noise, alongside devotional hymns and turns them into powerful, improvisational jazz. Highly productive and prolific, 2022 saw the release of two solo albums and two collaborative LPs, all of them tied together by her powerfully unique avant-­ garde sensibilities. For her performance at Rewire 2023, Amba is joined on stage by Dutch percussionist Frank Rosaly — who’s also performing in The Paper Ensemble alongside Ale Hop — and bass player Johan Berthling of Ghosted.

world premiere

Zoh Amba

Sunday, 9.4. — 95

Context Musicking Resistance — Conversation and Listening Session

with: Giada Dalla Bontà, Deena Abdelwahed, Andrius Arutiunian Page Not Found, Sunday 9 April, 13:45–14:45

Zebra Katz Zebra Katz, born Ojay Morgan, is a Jamaican-American multidisciplinary rapper, producer, songwriter and performing artist. His breakthrough hit Ima Read (2012) became a smash-hit due to its stark production, iconic vocals, and oozing, libidinal energy. Genre-defying and self-made, the Zebra Katz character originally surfaced through Morgan’s thesis project at the ­Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at the New School. Making music became an extension of Morgan’s interest in theatre and culture studies, identity obsession, and the lively New York City underground arts scene around him. Debut album LESS IS MOOR (2020) further proved his knack for combining experimental music and club bangers in a performative and eccentric mould. Finding inspiration in artists like James Baldwin, Grace Jones, Nina Simone, and Little Richard, the versatile LESS IS MOOR is a pop juggernaut that packs a heavy discursive punch. On stage, Zebra Katz’s music translates to high energy performances that draw the audience into Morgan’s captivating persona.

96 — Sunday, 9.4.

Music is often celebrated for its edifying nature, able to uplift the listener morally and intellectually: “music can change the world.” Yet, this romanticized approach risks to inhibit the actual agency of sound.

Together with artists performing at Rewire festival — Deena Abdelwahed and Andrius Arutiunian — Giada Dalla Bontà will discuss the ways in which sonic agency operates through affects and sonic fictions as well as physical bodies and matter. How can contemporary forms of resistance be auditory in a world dominated by visual culture? How do these qualities translate in the systems and infrastructures of music-­ making and listening, and what are their challenges? By taking into consideration how different technologies of sounding and spatio-temporal dimensions are interwoven within this constellation, this session will discuss current social and political issues and the role of sound in creating unexpected alliances and forms of collective and intimate resistance.

Sampling Stories — Conversation

with: Hannes Liechti (Norient), ABADIR, and M I M I The Grey Space in The Middle, Sunday 9 April, 15:15—16:15 Together with artists performing at Rewire, researcher and editor Hannes Liechti will discuss the culture and politics of musical

sampling, focusing on the reasons and i­ntentions behind the artists’ sampling processes. Why do artists sample? What are the reasons behind the selection of particular sampling material? What are the intentions behind strategies of sampling?

Discussing these questions will reveal a complex net of contexts, meanings, and often deeply personal choices and creative decisions, while establishing connections across times and territories.

A conversation with Patti Smith and Soundwalk Collective with: Stephan Crasneanscki (Soundwalk Collective) and Patti Smith Nieuwe Kerk, Sunday 9 April, 15:00–16:00

Stephan Crasneanscki (Soundwalk ­Collective) and Patti Smith will enter into a conversation on listening to different times and territories and their long-term collaboration. At Rewire, they will present the world premiere of ­Correspondences, the result of an ongoing collaborative project and conversation between Soundwalk Collective and legendary artist, poet and performer Patti Smith, that has has spanned over 10 years and across multiple geographies, uncovering the sonic steps left by poets, film makers, revolutionaries and extraordinary events that have taken place in specific locations.

Ritual Time

with: Nwando Ebizie The Grey Space in The Middle, Sunday 9 April, 16:30—17:15 An invitation for dreaming. A closing ritual that doesn’t close. A garden of circular paths. Nwando Ebizie invites you for a speculative ritual performance-lecture, a whispered work of sonic fiction inspired by Black Atlantic ritual cultures and mythical time. Take your time, get comfortable, and join Nwando in practicing/experiencing

forms of ancestral listening and dreaming.

To what could have been, and what should have been, and what may possibly be.

Ritual Time is inspired by Nwando’s immersive sensory environment Distorted Constellations and her debut album The Swan, which she will perform at ­Rewire on Saturday April 8 with her band. If you have any access needs or questions, please do speak to the hosts.

TIMEZONES — A Podcast between Anthropology, Audio Collage, and Journalism by Norient — listening station

The Grey Space in The Middle, Sunday 15:15—18:00

The TIMEZONES podcast series plunges into the world of artists and their practices, asking: what does living and working in culture and the arts involve in different countries, cities, and contexts today? The artists’ thoughts on their moods, their social, political, and intellectual realities and their philosophies of life have been worked up into experimental audio collages. The podcasts run the gamut of formats and content, from straight journalism to experimental and documentary approaches, ethnography and fiction, sound art and improvisation.

TIMEZONES is a project by Norient, co-initiated with the Goethe-Institut.

Radio WORM × Rewire Rewire is collaborating with Radio WORM, who will be broadcasting live from The Grey Space, with interviews, live streams and conversations, reflecting and reporting over the course of the festival days.

Sunday, 9.4. — 97

FILM GRA

PRO MME

Expand your festival experience with our film programme, exploring key themes and artists through a cinematic lens.

Against Time

by Ben Russell

A tone-poem in blue and red by US artist and experimental filmmaker Ben Russel, Against Time is a visually staggering kind When There Is No More of cine diary, shot on various locations beMusic To Write, and other tween 2019 and 2022. Trying to find a way Roman Stories through the fog of recent years, the piece plays with dissolving images, non-linear

by Eric Baudelaire montage, modular synthesis, and a variety Eric Baudelaire’s triplet of short experi- of looping techniques to reflect on how we mental films evokes the figure of avant-­ experience time as a fragmented phenomgarde composer Alvin Curran, his relation- enon. It results in hypnotic and beautiful experimental cinema that seems to mirror ship with Rome — where he settled in the life in all of its interpersonal intricacies. mid-1960s — and the music he created 23 min, 2022 there, mainly within the famous Musica Elettronica Viva collective. Instead of filming the renowned composer, Baudelaire draws upon his thoughts and sounds, creating a kaleidoscopic, intertextual approach to this artist’s work and legacy.

Baudelaire also explores Curran’s creative process with collaborators, including his own companions, such as the underground filmmaker Annabella Miscuglio, of whom Baudelaire incorporates several films. Simultaneously, these films reflect on his city and his times, marked by the kidnapping of Aldo Moro and the revolutionary struggle — times which have heav- Anyox ily influenced Curran’s collaborative and

by Jessica Johnson, Ryan Ermacora performative processes.

59 min, 2022 A former mining town in remote northwest British Columbia, Anyox is now marked by mountainous slag piles accumulated as a 100 — Film programme

byproduct of the early twentieth-century copper-smeling process. Anyox tracks the daily work of the town’s two sole residents, who organise and salvage value out of this seemingly endless mass of industrial waste.

Concurrently, the film unfolds a complex labour history and reveals the vestiges of immense environmental degradation produced by the company-town model. Anyox explores a situated moment of labour press dissemination, activism, and the severe reaction from industry and government. This striking debut feature of Canadian directors Jessica Johnson and Ryan Ermacora, composed of 35mm and 65mm large-format cinematography, is imbued with a score by sound artist and composer Lea Bertucci.

87 min, 2022

and human reason can be removed from the centre of evolutionary processes. Passages from Rosny and interviews with Bjørnerud form the film’s science-fictional/science-factual spine, but stones are its anchor. To touch stone is to meet alien duration. We trust stone as archive, but we may as well write on water. In the end, it’s particles that remain.

50 min, 2023

Handsworth Songs

by Black Audio Film Collective

Last Things

by Deborah Stratman Evolution and extinction are approached from the point of view of rocks in this film by artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman — a humid take on minerals, where sci-fi meets sci-fact, with music from, amongst others, Thomas Ankersmit and Okkyung Lee. This project originated from two novellas of J.-H. Rosny, the joint pseudonym of the Belgian brothers Boex who wrote on natural, prehistoric, and speculative subjects — sci-fi before it was a genre. The film also draws upon a wide range of theory, critique, literature, and art to, in one way or another, reflect on how humankind

In October 1985 Britain witnessed a spate of civil disturbances in the Birmingham district of Handsworth and in urban centres of London. These were violent, tragic events, marked by the death of an elderly Black woman, Joy Gardner and a white policeman, Keith Blakelock. Handsworth Songs takes as its point of departure these events and the inability of the British media to go beyond its fixation on demonising or rationalising the rioters and their motives, to break the anxiety-driven loop of morbid responses to the presence of Black people in Britain.

Evoking a broad range of voices, tones, and registers, Handsworth Songs approaches the riots and expresses its central idea: that it is not the riots in their dramatic unfolding, nor even in the wake of their violent eruption, which provide us with a route into the drama. Instead, the film contends that the meaning in the malaise is to be found in events outside the Film programme — 101

frame of contemporary reportage, in moments which seemed to have little affective relation to the expressions of discontent which characterised the riots — i.e., in the annals of post-war news reportage around race in Britain, which is transformed in the film into an archive of Black (un)belonging, or in the expression of hopes of belonging that were brutally deferred.

Handsworth Songs is presented as part of a focus programme on the work by sound composer and artist Trevor Mathison, who is part of the Black Audio Film Collective, a pioneering arts initiative founded in 1982 whose ground-breaking experimental works engaged with Black popular and political culture in Britain and Black and Asian diasporas.

59 min, 1986

ther many questions that he couldn’t answer. Gail Lewis grew up around Kilburn and Harrow. She remembers the neighbourhood as derelict. George Shires, another interviewee, talks about the images of London he grew up with at his school in Zimbabwe and how they didn’t align with his impression of London as a 12 year old immigrant: dark, dull, and restrictive, with a disorienting lack of smell. Twilight City is composed of many of these kinds of encounters and anecdotes, mapping out a different representation of life in England’s capital city.

Twilight City is presented as part of a focus programme on the work by sound composer and artist Trevor Mathison, who is part of the Black Audio Film Collective, a pioneering arts initiative founded in 1982 whose ground-breaking experimental works engaged with Black popular and political culture in Britain and lack and Asian diasporas.

52 min, 1989

Twilight City

by Black Audio Film Collective

A young woman, Octavia, receives a letter from her mother, who wants to return to London, after 10 years in Dominica, to live with her daughter again. The old resentments, hurt, and anger that Octavia thought had been buried by the past resurface. Paul Gilroy reminisces about his earliest memory of London. He was walking with his father through the Docklands — before its glossy redevelopment — looking at all of the old buildings, the strange symbols daubed on the walls, and wondered what the great fire of London did to the city. He asked his fa102 — Film programme

Who Needs a Heart

by Black Audio Film Collective

Who Needs A Heart is a parable of political becoming and subjective transformation and remains BAFC’s most controversial film.

Akin to a sophisticated home-movie history, a record of life on the fringes in London between 1965 and 1975, the film explores the forgotten history of British Black Power through the fictional lives of a group of

friends caught up in the metamorphoses of the movement’s central figure: the counter-­ cultural anti-hero, activist, and charismatic social bandit Michael Abdul Malik.

Dialogue is strictly a subsidiary element in Trevor Mathison’s allusive, inventive sound design; narrative emerges in snatches. Who Needs a Heart is a largely silent film whose soundtrack of Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Albert Ayler, Anthony Braxton, John Coltrane, and the ritual music of the Llamas and Tibetan Monks of the Four Great Orders investigates the expressionist potential of music to create the conditions for the movement of images.

Who Needs a Heart is presented as part of a focus programme on the work by sound composer and artist Trevor Mathison, who is part of the Black Audio Film Collective, a pioneering arts initiative founded in 1982 whose ground-breaking experimental works engaged with Black popular and political culture in Britain and Black and Asian diasporas.

78 min, 1991

the future that creates connections between Black non-popular culture, outer space, and the limits of the human condition. This cinematic essay posits science fiction — with tropes such as alien abduction, estrangement, and genetic engineering — as a metaphor for the Pan-African experience of forced displacement, cultural alienation, and otherness. Included are interviews with Black cultural figures, from musicians DJ Spooky, Goldie, and Derek May, who discuss the importance of George Clinton to their own music, to George Clinton himself. In keeping with the futuristic tenor of the film, the interviews are intercut with images of Pan-African life from different periods of history, jumping between time and space from the past to the future to the present, not unlike the visual mode of many rock videos of the film’s time.

The Last Angel of History is presented as part of a focus programme on the work by sound composer and artist Trevor Mathison, who is part of the Black Audio Film Collective, a pioneering arts initiative founded in 1982 whose ground-breaking experimental works engaged with Black popular and political culture in Britain and the Black and Asian diasporas.

46 min, 1995

The Last Angel of History

by John Akomfrah

The Last Angel of History is one of the most influential video-essays of the 1990s, influencing filmmakers and inspiring conferences, novels, and exhibitions. BAFC’s exploration of the chromatic possibilities of digital video is embedded within a mythology of

Atlantic Ragagar

by Gilles Aubry

The Sidi Bouzid beach near the Moroccan port city of El Jadida is famed for its crystal-­ Film programme — 103

clear sea and extraordinary biodiversity — there are dozens of species of algae. ­However, some of them are used by phar­ maceutical and food companies to produce agar powder. The nearby factories producing canned fish and phosphate fertilisers pollute the water and air. This documentary by Swiss sound artist, musician, and researcher Gilles Aubry uses performative interventions which erase the distinction between the human and the natural to explore the multilayered relationship of the locals to the ecosystem which is a source of both awe and their livelihood.

32 min, 2022

O Gemer

by Xabier Erkizia

O Gemer is an experimental film on the geographic and historical voyage of the peculiar sound of the so-called “Basque ox carts.” This sound, which could be heard in part of the Bay of Biscay until the 1960s, has now practically disappeared from the Iberian peninsula. This film by Spanish musician, sound artist, producer, and journalist Xabier Erkizia travels from the silence of the sound in our territory today, until its reappearance, following years of research, in the central area of Brazil. This particular screeching sound — albeit in tune — made by the cart when moving forward, questions our senses and our experience of what the world that we see sounds like. On the soundtrack, Julia Eckhardt’s interpretation 104 — Film programme

of Eliane Radigue’s compositions are a recurring motif, alongside music composed

by Erkizia himself.

63 min, 2021

SPE CIAL

EVE NTS In addition to the music, context and film­ program­mes, Rewire offers several special events throughout the festival weekend, ranging from (sound)artworks to in-­store concerts.

All special events are open to the public.

Proximity Music: Visceral Acts Proximity Music: Visceral Acts is an exhibition inviting 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. Through the lens of personal, creative if not unorthodox approaches, artists help us trace paths backwards and forwards in time, connecting with different forms of knowledge. When old habits become inadequate to deal with an era of instability, what can we learn from the creative practices of artists, which can aid us in the search for a new equilibrium?

In Proximity Music: Visceral Acts, artists play with materials, technologies and rituals associated with health and healing.

The therapeutic use of art and music goes back millennia, with many practices still lively as alternative medicine. Rather than having the ambition to cure, this exhibition reflects on our relation to health and the power of art, music and ritual to transform our consciousness.

108 — Special events

Aernoudt Jacobs Glass Vibration Gaze The site-specific work Glass Vibration Gaze (2023), by Belgian artist Aernoudt Jacobs transforms window panes into an installation that merges architecture and music. Electronically generated musical patterns are induced into the windows using audio transducers. Stethoscopes attached to the windows function as microscopic listening devices which allow visitors to eavesdrop on the sonic world inside the glass while observing the flow of city life outside.

Glass Vibration Gaze is commissioned by Rewire in collaboration with iii, The Hague and Amare.

Alexis Bellavance The Raft

Amos Peled Phantom Limb

The Raft is an optical journey on the canals of The Hague’s neighbourhood of Moerwijk, which captures the regenerative effect of bodies of water on the onlooker. Alexis Bellavance’s video camera guides the viewer’s eye in an exploration of the interface between oscillatory wave phenomena and the cityscape of the periphery. The result is a canvas in which the constructed landscape becomes fluid as sound, a material that Bellavance edits compositionally into a form of visual music. The work takes inspiration from Homer’s Odyssey, referring to the vision of Ulysses on his arrival in the archipelago of the Phaeacians: Scheria, a mysterious land, a parallel and unknown world, which could only be reached in dreams. It connects this myth to the artist’s own visual impairment, which requires Bellavance to wear special lenses in his daily life. In The Raft the water surface becomes an alternative lens to connect to reality.

Phantom Limb (2023) is a project by multidisciplinary artist Amos Peled, exploring the enigmatic and poetic relationship between a human being and the black box that is their interior through the use of a medical ultrasound machine. Amos Peled has been developing methods to perform audio-visual manipulations which transform the ultrasound machine into an instrument that illuminates the inside of the body and expands the space of the artistic act into the organs, under the skin. The work investigates conceptions such as the distance of the human body from the self, the hierarchical relationship between the inside and the outside, pain as a poetic message, and the lack of internal symmetry.

Phantom Limb is commissioned by iii in collaboration with Rewire, Amare and ­Tetem.

The Raft was produced during a residency at iii as part of an exchange program with perte de signal in Montreal.

Special events — 109

Diane Mahín GUT GUT is the title of Diane Mahín’s ongoing practice-based artistic research project.

Through this theatrical thought experiment, the Dutch-Iranian performance maker and sociologist questions how humans behave when their bodies are turned inside out.

Mahín approaches this question by presenting different performative worlds in which the sounds of the guts of the performers are amplified. The gut-human’s thoughts, actions, communications, movements, and feelings, are all determined by their gut sounds. During Proximity Music: Visceral Acts one gut-human, Manuel ­Groothuysen, will inhabit the artist-run gallery Trixie. Visitors are invited to walk in and out of the durational performance and experience the work both from outside via the street windows and inside the gallery.

GUT is presented by iii and Rewire in collaboration with Trixie.

110 — Special events

Dominik ’t Jolle & Maria Komarova Tinnere. Behind the Tune Dominik ‘t Jolle has been suffering from ringing in her ears and sound hallucinations for much of her life. Already as a child she observed vibrations and flashes of light with realistic resonances in the room where she was. She woke up one morning with a deafening, high sine tone that never stopped. Tinnere. Behind the Tune (2020), originates from her wish to translate into an audiovisual artwork and share with others these auditory hallucinations, a process in which she has collaborated with artist Maria Komarova and Jan Ost from BRAI3N, Ghent, a multidisciplinary centre for brain research.

Tinnere. Behind the Tune was co-produced by Overtoon, BRAI3N, and STUK.

Frederique Pisuisse I’m Just Lying There

Jeroen Alexander Meijer Ouroboros

I’m Just Lying There is a ficto-memoir about Frederique Pisuisse’s teenage relationship with her first boyfriend who was a 36-yearold man. Through poems and pop songs, the film brings back memories of their grown-up dates: having dinner at a restaurant for the first time without parents, and being picked up from her birthday in his Mercedes. The coming-of-age film looks at the shaping experiences in which the female body is subjected to the male gaze and becomes an object of desire for the first time. The protagonist, who is 14 years old at the time of their affair, is pulled towards the sensual experiences of being with this man, and simultaneously feels the danger in them. Through film, writing, music, and performance, Pisuisse explores the topics of memory and trauma and outof-body experiences.

Ouroboros is an immersive, 360 degrees audiovisual instrument by multi-sensory artist Jeroen Alexander Meijer with the ability to envelop without overwhelming. It strikes a balance between obtaining our attention with the attraction of a spectacle while also leaving us enough freedom to explore the sensory space that it creates.

With his instrument Meijer guides us through a spatial composition of light and sound, intended to help us gain awareness of the movement of our attention and to aid us in recovering from overstimulation.

Jeroen Alexander Meijer received the iii residency award for 2022 for his graduation work at the Royal Art Academy of The Hague.

I’m Just Lying There is distributed by LI-MA.

Special events — 111

Karel van Laere Reach A recurring theme in Karel van Laere’s work is the antagonism between the human body and technological systems. Between 2021 and 2022 he shifted his gaze to the inside of the body using surgical tools. The vulnerability of the internal body usually shows its beauty in sterile operating rooms where surgeons deftly perform meticulous operations with laparoscopic instruments.

Fascinated by its fragility, van Laere explored the inside of the body and the artistic possibilities of laparoscopic instruments in a series of new works which the performance Reach (2023) comes from.

Production: The Grey Space in the Middle and Stichting Largo.

Made possible by: Mathijs van Til, ­Rijksakademie Amsterdam, the Municipality of The Hague, Stroom Den Haag, Mondriaan Fonds, Amarte Fonds, the In Art We Trust Fund (by We Are Public), Laparoscopyboxx, and FlexDex Surgical.

112 — Special events

Matteo Marangoni & Dieter Vandoren Komorebi Komorebi (2022) is a swarm of artificial creatures that make music in response to the sun, the clouds, and the shadows of trees moving in the wind. Komorebi is a Japanese word meaning “sunlight shining through trees.” We are invited to experience the shadow play produced by the tree canopy on the forest floor as music.

The work suggests that “life” is not an exceptional property of organic life forms, but also a property of complex systems reaching beyond biological life as we understand it.

Komorebi was commissioned by Into the Great Wide Open and produced in partnership with Crossing Parallels and Highlight Festival (TU Delft) with the financial support of the Creative Industries Fund NL and Stichting Stokroos.

Naama Tsabar Untitled (Without) ­variation 1 & Ruptures (Opus 1) From a distance, Naama Tsabar’s flag ­Untitled (Without) is a long piece of fabric with a rectangular cut-out. Where we expect to see a flag, we instead see empty space. With closer inspection, the flag is made of white strips of fabric that are sewn together with coloured stitches. The colours derive from the LGBTQIA+ Progress Pride Flag, an updated version of the iconic LGBT Rainbow Flag. Untitled (Without) suggests that perhaps identity is far more subtle than the bold symbols and objects that attempt to represent us. ­Tsabar’s installation includes a sonic work titled Ruptures (Opus 1), a live recording of Fielded, Rose Blanshei, and Wolf Weston singing, sighing, groaning, and breathing.

Ruptures (Opus 1) explores the female musical voice as a “historically expressive anomaly, a place where a disruption of the patriarchal order happens under the cover of beauty and melody.”

Naomi Rincón Gallardo Sonnet of Vermin & The Vermin’s Radio In Sonnet of Vermin (2022), a legion of unwanted creatures related to the Mesoamerican underworld attempt to syntonise with each other and the dead in the midst of a planetary cataclysm. They seek for a subaltern solidarity and queer relationality as a form of re-existence within the ruins.

Sonnet of Vermin was presented at the Mexican pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2022. In The Vermin’s Radio (2023) created during her residency at iii, The Hague in 2023 the characters of Sonnet of Vermin are further explored as interactive wearable sculptures populating the exhibition space.

Both works were presented in combination at Ballroom Marfa, Texas, in 2020.

Special events — 113

Vica Pacheco Mitote & Ollin Vica Pacheco seeks to create a dialogue between animism, ritual, and technology in her series of works Animacy. Revolving around the whistling vessel, a hydraulic sound instrument that existed in pre-Columbian times throughout Mesoamerica, the series presents a symbiosis between two types of technology: one contemporary, electronic and digital; and the other pre-Columbian, made of mud, fire, air, and water. A collection of ceramic instruments which the artist produced at EKWC form the basis for two new works: the kinetic installation Mitote (2023) and the dance performance Ollin (2023) created with Siet Raeymaekers, Francesca Mariano, and Fernanda Soberón.

Mitote and Ollin are commissioned by iii in collaboration with Rewire, Amare, Overtoon, STUK, and iMal.

114 — Special events

Vivian Caccuri & Thiago Lanis Fantasma Boca (Mouth Ghost) Fantasma Boca (Mouth Ghost) (2023) is a sound performance where Brazilian artists Vivian Caccuri and Thiago Lanis recreate the soundscape of a tropical forest. Sounds are recreated one by one and birds, insects, water, air, and other beings are simulated by the performers using their lips and mouths only.

Mouth Ghost (Fantasma Boca) is commissioned by iii, The Hague in collaboration with Rewire and Novas Frequências.

The visit of Vivian Caccuri and Thiago Lanis is made possible by the International Visitors Programme of Nieuwe Instituut with support from the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

carhartt-wip.com

@carharttwip

EVERY FRIDAY & SATURDAY

AceMoMa ascendant vierge DJ Heartstring JAEL

Latanya Alberto Speedy & Steve Two Shell & MANY MORE INFO & TICKETS PARALLEL.AM BUIKSLOTERWEG 5C AMSTERDAM

April 20 – 23

Tilburg, The Netherlands

ALISON COTTON • BACKXWASH PERFORMING MA NYIMBO YA GEHANA & NINE HELLS • BOY HARSHER LIVE PERFORMANCE & DJ SET • CIRCUIT DES YEUX • DAVID EUGENE EDWARDS • DEAFHEAVEN PERFORMING SUNBATHER & INFINITE GRANITE • COMMISSIONED: DUMA & DEAFKIDS • ELIZABETH COLOUR WHEEL • GILES COREY • HOLY SCUM • J. ZUNZ • JERUSALEM IN MY HEART • JULIE CHRISTMAS • KATHRYN JOSEPH • MAMALEEK • NICOLE DOLLANGANGER • ARTIST IN RESIDENCE: OISEAUX TEMPÊTE • SHOW ME THE BODY • SIERRA • STOREFRONT CHURCH • THE SOFT MOON PERFORMING EXISTER • WHITE BOY SCREAM • ZOLA JESUS

Tickets on sale www.roadburn.com

ELEKT

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H IN C S I N RO

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AMPFEMININE OTTO VON SCHIRACH PANGAEA TANGERINE DREAM MODERAT

INFO & TICKETS

WWW.013.NL

LOCATIE VEEMARKTSTRAAT 44, TILBURG

Kan niet bestaat niet Een podcast over niet-gemaakte kunst door de Brakke Grond en Mister Motley Met o.a. Tom Hallet, Bertien van Manen, Lisa Ijeoma, Feiko Beckers, Johannes Bellinkx

Luister iedere week naar een nieuwe aflevering

Celebrate new music at the Royal Conservatoire Composing Spaces 2 12 – 14 April koncon.nl/ composingspaces2

Spring Festival 2023 17 – 21 April koncon.nl/ springfestival

RIBINGURUMU NO METAMORUFUOSHISU

LET X=X

Toshiki Okada, Dai Fujikura, Klangforum Wien, chelfitsch

Laurie Anderson voert met de New Yorkse band Sexmob oude en nieuwe nummers uit.

8 juni, Carré

Surrealistisch spel met taal en muziek.

7-8 juni, Muziekgebouw

Laurie Anderson, Sexmob

THE DISINTEGRATION LOOPS (FOR EUTERPESTRAAT)

CALL FOR THE COMPANY

William Basinski, Radio Filharmonisch Orkest, presented by ANOHNI

Programma vol ongebruikelijke instrumenten, van geweren tot hondenfluitjes, van componist en noisemuzikant Chacon.

20 juni, Muziekgebouw

Meditatie op de weerklank van genocide.

18 juni, Gerrit van der Veenstraat

Raven Chacon,The Monochrome Project

international performing arts amsterdam

info & tickets: hollandfestival.nl

EROICA I

DARK SKIES

Sofia Jernberg, Kit Downes, Petter Eldh, Kjetil Møster

Jamie Man, Blixa Bargeld, Slagwerk Den Haag, Asko|Schönberg

Lyrische muziek met ritmische, complexe ingrediënten, geïnspireerd door Beethoven en kunstenaar Basquiat.

11 juni, BIMHUIS

De succesvolle jonge componist Jamie Man en rockheld Blixa Bargeld vinden elkaar in een gezamenlijke afdaling in de duisternis.

15 juni, Muziekgebouw

INDRA’S NET

WHAT’S YOUR HEAVEN

Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble, Ensemble Academy

CocoRosie

Performance van levende legende, geïnspireerd op een boeddhistische vertelling die de onderlinge verbondenheid van al het leven toont.

23-24 juni, Gashouder

Suggestieve popsongs die raken aan hiphop, folk en opera, waarin vragen worden gesteld over de moderne werkelijkheid.

24-25 juni, Muziekgebouw

Discover the classics of tomorrow, today

USE CODE REWIREXNXT FOR 20% OFF YOUR VISIT

OPEN DAILY

Artwork: Birds in Paradise by Jacolby Satterwhite

Immerse yourself in large scale digital art by pioneering tech artists at Nxt Museum, in Amsterdam.

18 MEI

Don Kapot & MDC III 18 MEI

JEF NEVE

EYDÍS EVENSEN

8 juni

STIPPENLIFT

24 juni

20 MEI

Otoboke Beaver

Wiegedood & Terzij de Horde

24 MEI

27 juni

Vieux Farka Touré 26 & 27 MEI

paard.nl

5 juni

sniesTER 4 juni

R.O. met Roos Meijer

OS MUTANTES

29 juni

Yemi Alade

9 OKTOBER

ALFA MIST

SOUND PROGRAMME — SPRING 2023 Studio STUK at former night club Manhattan April → May Steve Gunn, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Voice Actor, Maxime Denuc, Els Viaene, Mihalis Shammas, Jérôme Noetinger, Elisabeth Klinck & more Artefact Sound 8 → 25 June Klein, Crystallmess, Bendik Giske, Charlemagne Palestine & Seppe Gebruers, Ensemble Nist-Nah, MC Yallah & Debmaster, Avalanche Kaito, Vincent Moon & Mohammad Reza Mortazavi & more STUK LEUVEN HOUSE FOR DANCE, IMAGE & SOUND

Become a Subbacultcha member for €10 a month & get free acces to all our events

14 apr - Subbacultcha x MMF w/ Carmen Villain + Aho Ssan

3 may - meat computer + Brother May

at Muziekgebouw

at OT301

21 apr - Bianca Scout + a fungus + DJ JP

20 may - bar italia + Global Charming

at De Nieuwe Anita

at Cinetol

29 apr - Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith

13 jun - LEYA

at Melkweg

at Dokzaal

128 — Special events

Have a look at (y)our agenda here.

www.subbacultcha.nl @subbacultchaaa

General Festival Info Ticket & information centre

Scan the QR code and download the­official Rewire 2023 Festival App for free.

The ticket and information desk for Rewire 2023 is located at The Grey Space In The Middle.

The Grey Space In The Middle Address: Paviljoensgracht 20, 2512 BP, Den Haag Opening Hours: Thursday 6 April Friday 7 April Saturday 8 April Sunday 9 April

16:00—22:00 10:00—01:00 10:00—01:00 10:00—22:30

Night trains If you’re travelling to The Hague from surrounding areas in the Netherlands, you will have no trouble getting home at night.

Throughout the Rewire weekend, trains departing from The Hague’s two main train stations — Central Station and Hollands Spoor — run approximately every 30 minutes until just after midnight.

From midnight on, trains run every hour from Hollands Spoor. This train passes through Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam, Leiden and Schiphol.

General info — 129

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Credits Supervisory Board

Berith Danse, Janke Brands, Jo Houben, Marleen van Uchelen

Director

International Visitors Programme

Stacie Sueko Lyons

Editorial

Bronne Keesmaat

Hugo Emmerzael, Katía Truijen

Deputy Director

Copyediting and Proofreading

Ingrid Beer

Programme

Bronne Keesmaat (Head of Programme, Curator Music), Gerben de Louw ­(Programme Assistant, Curator Film), Katía Truijen (Curator Context), Henk ­Koolen (Adviser Music), ­Matteo ­Marangoni (Curator Proximity Music)

Marketing & Communications

Aidan Wall

Design

Anja Kaiser & Jim Kühnel (Campaign Identity and Graphic Design) Ginto Typeface by Dinamo Oxymore Typeface by Minjong Kim

Web Development

Basten Stokhuyzen

Thanks

Nick van der Vaart (Head of Marketing & Communications), Gerben de Louw (Partnerships), Floyd Verbruggen (Marketing & Communications intern), Pieter Volckaert (Marketing & ­Communications intern), Hugo Emmerzael (Content)

We would like to thank all of our partners and sponsors for their continuous support.

A big shout out to our amazing festival crew, Nico de Rooij, Barny Pronk, all our volunteers and ambassadors, and of course a big thank YOU for visiting our festival!

Zoe Reddy

Education & Outreach

Rewire Festival 2023 is organised and presented by Stichting Rewire

Production

© 2023 Rewire Festival / Stichting Rewire

Emma Wijbenga (General Production), Rik ‘t Jong (Technical Production), Doris Veldman (Technical Production), Joya de Bock (Artist Production + Volunteers), Isa Sánchez (Volunteer Coordinator), Walter Thomson (Context Programme), Gijs Haenen (Production Intern), Githa Biekman (Artist Hospitality), Evy van Schelt & Sannah Lasqad (Ticket & Info Centre) 132 — Credits

Disclaimer

Although we strive to ensure editorial completeness, we may have missed certain copyright issues. If you spot something of yours that we used, drop us an email and we will credit you.

E-mail: hello@rewirefestival.nl Mail: P.O. Box 243, 2501 CE Den Haag

Partners — 133

Funding & Institutional Partners

Sponsors

Creative Partners

134 — Partners

Social Partners

Media Partners

Partners — 135

Rewire Vinyl Release

BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR REWIRE’S FIRST VINYL RELEASE

Rewire Festival 2024

EARLY BIRD TICKETS NOW AVAILABLE UNTIL 1 MAY

FOR MORE INFO AND TICKETS: REWIREFESTIVAL.NL

2023