18 minute read
Sunday 10 April
Nkisi “Invisible Gestures, First Encounter: Zangbeto”
Melika Ngombe Kolongo, known by her alias Nkisi, explores the sonic resonances between traditional rhythms, hard European dance tropes, and synthesizer melodies. Her intricate sound worlds channel African cosmology through a dazzling array of contemporary club styles like gqom, juke, grime and techno. Combining sweeping polyrhythms with a keen ear for distinctive sound design, her animated electronic music reaches ecstatic heights, as witnessed on her LP 7 Directions, released on Lee Gamble’s UIQ label. During Rewire, Nkisi presents a new A/V performance, focussing on the gestural world of spiritual guardians called the Zangbeto. Presented in collaboration with Vlaams Cultuurhuis de Brakke Grond. Scratcha DVA
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Throughout the past decades Scratcha DVA, also known as DJ Scratcha, Scratchclart or DVA, has established himself time and time again as one of the quintessential figureheads of contemporary UK club music. As a figurehead in the British pirate radio scene, he was part of the burgeoning era of 2-step and UK funky, contributed to the rise of UK grime and incorporated a plethora of emerging musical styles in his anything-goes, club-focussed productions. When footwork flew over from Chicago and gqom crystallised in Durban, Scratcha DVA was there to collaborate, experiment and exchange knowledge and experiences. Suffice to say that this prolific producer and deejay defies easy categorizations, but it’s guaranteed that Scratcha DVA shares his rhythmically agile and playful music with the dancefloor in mind. Presented in collaboration with Carhartt WIP
Tarta Relena
Catalan duo Tarta Relena (Helena Ros and Marta Torrella) bring an entrancing immediacy to vocal music. Perhaps jokingly, they self-describe their music as “progressive Gregorian”, yet traverse the depths of traditional vocal music and elevate their historical inspirations to thrilling and timeless new heights. The result could best be described as an exciting blend between the staggering harmonies of Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares and the cinematic textures of Arca. Debut LP Fiat Lux is a testament to the musical talents of this duo that draw inspiration from Mediterranean folk, Georgian laments and the 12th-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen. The sparse, but gripping use of electronic accompaniment on the album underlines the urgency in Tarta Relena’s exquisite harmonising. Ziúr with Kiani del Valle & Sander Houtkruijer
Perfectly embodying the boundless creativity of a new generation of iconoclastic producers, musicians and performers, Ziúr has become one of the most exciting producers to come out of the fringes of Berlin club music. Her albums on iconic electronic music labels like Planet Mu and PAN are exhilarating, envelope-pushing explorations of club music’s potential to alienate the senses, distort reality and liberate its listeners from the dreary status quo. Bringing along Puerto Rican dancer and choreographer Kiani del Valle, along with Dutch video artist Sander Houtkruijer, this immersive live show by Ziúr doubles down on her cinematic approach to music production. The result is an exhilarating and intoxicating performance with cathartic music, hypnotic visuals and ecstatic dancing.
SUN APR 10
Bitchin Bajas
Formed in 2011 by Cave-guitarist/organist Cooper Crain, Bitchin Bajas explores the hypnotic depths of musical loops, either short and concise or long-winding and elastic. The trio’s mantra-like approach to music results in hypnotic pieces that range from moody sound waves — eloping pads, shimmering strings and reverberated sounds — to tantalising synthesizer arpeggios. Short or long, fast or slow; what matters in the music of Bitchin Bajas is finding a groove and allowing yourself to go deeper within it. On their latest album Switched On Ra, the trio consisting of Cooper Crain, Rob Frye and Daniel Quinlivan apply their looping ethos to the musical vision of one of their heroes, Sun Ra. Employing vintage synthesizers, drum computers and vocoders, Bitchin Bajas channels the cosmic jazz and far-out synth experimentation of the Afrofuturist icon and brings it to their own stratospheric levels. Caterina Barbieri
Caterina Barbieri is an Italian composer and musician who explores themes related to machine intelligence and object-oriented perception in sound. Her current sonic research investigates the creative use of computation and complex sequencing techniques to explore the artefacts of human perception and memory, by ultimately inducing a sense of ecstasy and contemplation. During Rewire 2022, Caterina Barbieri presents a site-specific show featuring new music and a rework for four voices by Evelyn Saylor of Ecstatic Computation’s opening track Fantas with light design by Marcel Weber.
Carl Gari & Abdullah Miniawy
German trio Carl Gari (Jonas Yamer, Till Funke and Jonas Friedlich) and the Egyptian singer and trumpeter Abdullah Miniawy have been working together for the
last few years, melding sobering electronic soundscapes with poetic lyrics reflecting the mood of modern day Egypt. Coming together first on “Darraje”, which was recorded over a few days in Cairo for Will Bankhead’s The Trilogy Tapes, the EP pulsates at the edge of the dancefloor with swollen atmospherics and Miniawy singing plaintively in Arabic. Their current release for AD93 centres around the poem in “B’aj جاعب”, featuring Miniawy as the protagonist who has jumped from the 8th floor of a building in Cairo and describing scenes of Egyptian society as he falls. It’s a powerful conceit and evocative sonic portrait of Egyptians living under the brutal oppression of the Al-Sisi regime.
Dewa Alit & Gamelan Salukat World premiere
Contemporary Balinese composer Dewa Alit is a key figure in contemporary Indonesian music. He is the founder of Gamelan Salukat, a 25 member ensemble that performs on instruments specially built to Alit’s designs, using a unique 10-note scale. Their contemporary take on traditional Balinese Gamelan music has been presented extensively throughout Asia, Europe and North America. Alit has also collaborated with renowned ensembles such as Bang On A Can and Ensemble Modern. Alit presents Gamelan not as something static and from the past, but as a set of concepts and principles that can be used to create something radically new. During Rewire 2022, Dewa Alit will bring his group Gamelan Salukat to The Hague to perform the music of Genetic (released on Oren Ambarchi’s Black Truffle label) among other pieces for the first time outside of Bali.
Debit World premiere
As Debit, the New York-based musician Delia Beatriz brings avant-garde production techniques into the fold of experimental and often club-focussed music. Her previous releases on trailblazing label Naafi saw her investigating her Mexican roots through a unique interaction between complex sound design, pulsating rhythms and weighty basses. With her most recent album, The Long Count, she dives deeper into the origins of Mexican music, sourcing sounds of pre-hispanic Mexican instruments that date back to Mayan civilization. Using machine learning and taking inspiration from musique concrète, Beatriz revitalises whistles, ocarinas, flutes and other wind instruments from the archives of the Mayan Studies Institute at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and instils them with a contemporary sense of urgency, through beatless compositions with captivating electro-acoustic textures.
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In 2009, Japanese sound artist Yosuke Fujita hand built a unique pipe organ with eleven pipes, a blacksmith’s air pump and no keyboard. Instead of being just another musical instrument, Fujita intended his organ to evoke rich landscapes inspired by the Japanese classical form gakagu, or “elegant music”. Now, with an augmented version of the organ that also utilises sound-synthesized tanks to generate water sounds from multiple aquariums, he explores the sonic depths and possibilities of his own musical instrument on acclaimed albums and intimate live performances. Last year, FUJIIIIIIIIIIIITA performed with his uniquely crafted pipe organ during the online edition of Rewire. This year Yosuke Fujita will bring his equally laborious as meditative performance to a live audience. Grouper
As Grouper, the Oregon based musician Liz Harris creates intimate songs that are often covered under a hazy blanket of fuzzy static and crackling reverb. Through this opaque sound design her emotionally piercing melodies and dreamlike vocals still shimmer like bright stars on a cloudy night. Grouper’s 2008 breakthrough album Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill established her as one of the leading musicians of psychedelic dream pop. With the two-part album A I A: Dream Loss and A I A: Alien Observer she doubled down on her ambient esthetic. With her twelfth and most recent album Shade, Grouper’s music seems to be at its most boiled down and intimate: a finely distilled journey through stripped-down studio sessions where you can hear the floor creak and fingers slide over guitar frets. During Rewire, Grouper will perform a hauntingly beautiful sonic tapestry of heart-wrenching ambient folk.
Gagi Petrovic “Vox Populi & Choosing Freedom” World premiere
Rewire 2022 will share two works performed by Gagi Petrovic with his GEST instrument, to showcase the range of his sonic expression and innovation. “Choosing Freedom” allows him to explore the outer edges of music, subverting categorical notions of what music should sound like. “Vox Populi” sees Petrovic embracing the more conventional role of the singersongwriter. The song cycle consists of three world premieres for voice and live electronics that express how social constructs can suppress a person’s horizon.
The combination of modular synthesizer and viola is an uncommon one, but musicians Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer manage to create a distinctive dyad that comes together with grace and truth. Travelling in 2017 together to the Åland Islands (an archipelago that is host to around 6,500 islands) in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland, they decided to capture the serene and strange quality of their surroundings through a collaborative musical project, to be released in March on International Anthem as Recordings from the Åland Islands. Reflecting on the dynamic landscape, perpetually lit under the summer sun, their debut album offers plaintive, meditative and melodic pieces that gently sublimate the splendour of the Åland Islands. The result, sparkling with Chiu’s soothing arpeggio’s and Honer’s scintillating string instrument, could be compared to acoustic-ambient classics like Jon Hassell’s Vernal Equinox or Brian Eno’s Another Green World, however without any trace of retro-tinged nostalgia.
JJJJJerome Ellis European premiere
On his powerful, new album The Clearing, composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist, and writer JJJJJerome Ellis masterfully weaves together the looping techniques of electronic music with acoustic and analogue elements to create an intimate and essayistic epic that reflects on time, blackness and identity. Ellis, who has a block
stutter, allows the unintentional gaps in his vocals as another analogue permutation of his narrative-heavy music. On stage, JJJJJerome Ellis also embraces these stutters — or as he calls them “clearings” — as spontaneous occurrences that challenge notions of temporality, identity and performativity.
Jerusalem in my Heart
As Jerusalem In My Heart, Lebanese-Canadian producer/musician Radwan Ghazi Moumneh and filmmaker Erin Weisgerber have been at the forefront of contemporary experimental music, shaping intricate and urgent audiovisual worlds. Jerusalem In My Heart is guided by Moumneh’s melding of “traditional” melismatic singing (in Arabic) and buzuk playing with modern deployments of modular synthesis, sound design and field recordings. Their agitated, yet unwavering work warps traditional Middle Eastern music and culture through a prism of restless avant-garde modernism, reflecting on destabilising effects of globalism on the Arab world. During Rewire, Jerusalem In My Heart will translate their urgent material to a site-specific performance that combines their dystopian, brooding music with acute, analogue visuals projected by 16mm film projectors.
Lamin Fofana “Shafts of Sunlight” World premiere
New York-based artist and musician Lamin Fofana explores questions of movement, migration, alienation and belonging in his prolific artistic practices that range from experimental albums and deejay-sets to installation work. Often working in trilogies and triptychs, the art of Lamin Fofana is of a dense and intertextual nature, in which original music compositions, field recordings and archival material manifests themselves as a multisensory experience. For Rewire 2022, Lamin Fofana presents “Shafts of Sunlight”, an open-ended improvisatory performance-installation with fragments and debris from stretched out studio sessions. It is a disruption of the linearity of historical time, what historian Robin D. G. Kelley alluded to as “blues time — it is simultaneously in the moment, the past, the future, and the timeless space of the imagination.”
LEYA
Harpist Marilu Donovan and violinist/vocalist Adam Markiewicz are NYC-based duo LEYA. LEYA works with and against the grain of tradition, mining intensity though alternate tunings, strange harmonies, and dreamstate operatic vocals. The resulting experience is one of beauty, but spans many imperfect worlds. LEYA has released a steady volume of work in several years. Their two albums via NNA Tapes, The Fool (2018) and its critically acclaimed follow-up Flood Dream (2020), exist alongside a wide range of collaborations. In 2018, the group wrote and performed a full-length soundtrack to I Love You, an erotic film directed by Brooke Candy and produced by PornHub that also features the duo as actors. 2019’s Angel Lust, a collaborative EP with Eartheater, followed courtesy of experimental label PAN. Most recently, LEYA released the Eyelines, an eleven track collaborative mixtape featuring contributions from claire rousay and EARTHEATER. Lisa and the F.I.X.
Lisa and the F.I.X. is a bard, pop star, and musician who weaves raw stories together with delicate songs. She’s the alter ego of the hyper-productive composer Luke Deane (UK 1990), now based in the Netherlands together with Andreas Kühne (Drums) and Uldīs Vitols (Bass). At Rewire 2022, Lisa presents her debut album, Footsteps On The Wall produced by and featuring leading musicians from Asko| Schönberg and Slagwerk Den Haag. Together they combine the sensuality and vulnerability of pop with brooding textures from contemporary club music. These ensemble-musicians enrich Lisa’s bass-infused harmony with analogue flourishes from instruments such as the duduk, cimbalom, pan-flute, and cello. Footsteps on the Wall is an intimate, yet epic work, offering shimmers of light and brightness on a murky, hazardous sonic journey.
Mabe Fratti
Originally from Guatemala and now based in Mexico City, the experimental cellist and composer Mabe Fratti has become a fixture in Mexico’s flourishing improvisational music scene. Through hypnotic and captivating pieces, she sews contemporary elements like shoegaze and dream pop with ancestral influences that go from Gregorian chants to Sephardi music, transforming them into ingredients of a potent sonic ritual that causes a profound emotional impact. Created during a lockdown in Veracruz, Fratti’s second album Será que ahora podremos entendernos leans heavily on improvisation and collaboration, while remaining playful, musing and forthright. Bringing along synthesizers, guitars and samplers, Fratti will perform her equally ecstatic and pensive album live together with a group of guest musicians. Naaljos Ljom
Diving into the seams of Norwegian folk music, Anders Hana and Morten Joh as Naaljos Ljom unlock the microtonal potential hidden in their source material. The duo, known from bands like MoHa!, Ultralyd, N.M.O., and Brutal Blues, have joined forces yet again now focussing on mixing just intonation and microtonal Norwegian folk music with aspects of electronic music, resulting in spirited pieces that subvert our expectation of what the distinction between analogue and electronic should sound like. Adapting the album to the stage, Naaljos Ljom’s performance becomes a fascinating update of traditional music: a norwegian folk concert to dance to.
Oceanic & Ensemble Klang “A Sonically Open City”
Job Oberman, the Dutch producer better known as Oceanic, navigates between house, techno and ambient to create evocative music that sits comfortably between intimate sonic expressions and trailblazing club jams. “A Sonically Open City” is his first collaboration with The Hague-based Ensemble Klang, a collection of iconoclastic musicians that playfully subvert expectations of a classical ensemble. Oceanic and Ensemble Klang have spent 2021 moving around the city of The Hague, filming and recording their interactions with its sound world: forests, beaches, highways, factories and many other sonic sources have been brought into the fold, resulting in “A Sonically Open City”, a brand new, 50-minute work that spans multiple genres, embracing various forms of music-making and a multitude of influences. Taken as a whole, the work forms a profile of The Hague, celebrating the diversity of its landscapes and natures, and charting the breadth of activity that continues to take place within it. Silvia Tarozzi
Silvia Tarozzi translates her poetic album Mi specchio e rifletto to the stage with a dense sonic cloud of violins, voices, guitars, synth, sax and theremin. Known for her performances of forward-thinking compositions and nuanced improvisations, Tarozzi is a renowned Italian violinist, vocalist and composer who once studied under the tutelage of influential American composer Garrett List. Earlier works like the Pauline Oliveros collaboration for the album Virgin Violin or her contemporary re-interpretations of female folksongs of northern Italy with Deborah Walker offered more stark, textural explorations of the violin as an instrument for polyphony, cacophony and noise. The collaboration with Éliane Radigue saw her dive into the minimalism of pure acoustic drones. With her most recent album Mi specchio e rifletto, Tarozzi explores a brighter side of her craft, allowing the violin amongst other instruments to create lush tapestries over which her vocals can soar. Heavily inspired by the poetry of Alda Merini, Tarozzi’s own lyrics reflect on love, motherhood and the indelible state of being.
SKY H1 & Mika Oki
The evocative, rave-crushed songs of SKY H1 capture the blurring lines between the flourishing contemporary club sounds of drum and bass, grime, dubstep and techno. Injecting this exciting hybrid of rave music with ambient-leaning sound design and schematic bursts of pop-oriented songwriting, SKY H1 has found a unique approach to contemporary electronic music that brings a heady excitement to the bodily thrills of the club. Her debut album Azure, released on AD 93, builds on this foundation and elaborates on a delicate medley of experiences and forms which translates into an imaginative and quietly ambitious sonic journey. Collaborating with visual artist Mika Oki, SKY H1 presents a new audiovisual show to celebrate the release of Azure. Their audiovisual show takes the meditative content of the album and deciphers its poetics into an alluring live performance. Mika Oki’s visual installation, called Parhélion, is inspired by the optical phenomenon called soleil double, and offers a subtle scenography of light, projections, smoke and shadows that meet the visual inspiration behind SKY H1’s latest work. Presented in collaboration with Vlaams Cultuurhuis de Brakke Grond. SOON
SOON is an Amsterdam-Berlin duo comprising Liú Mottes, a guitarist whose work has brought stardust to the likes of Dutch alternative pop acts like Blue Crime and New YX, and musical polymath Jochem van Tol, who plays drums and keys, often all at once. The pair have been playing on and off for two years or so, working up enough material to make an expansive and sometimes dreamy self-titled debut album that nods to the avant-garde and experimental rock and film music.
Slumberland feat. Sainkho Namtchylak
As Slumberland, the Belgian musician, composer and instrument-maker Jochem Baelus tinkers on his hypnotic krautrock, embellished with distorted exotica. After creating his signature battery of sewing
machines, projectors and dismantled mechanical objects, Baelus immersed himself into the world of 64 year old voice-artist Sainkho Namtchylak and assembled a new sound sculpture inspired by her sonic presence. Namtchylak grew up in Tuva, an autonomous Russian republic north of Mongolia. Known as a rebel pur sang, she became the first female overtone artist and started combining these traditional chants with influences from avant-garde music. Her indomitable demons and Russian beat-poetry are now accompanied by Bealus’ compellingly minimal, yet vigorous compositions. Presented in collaboration with Vlaams Cultuurhuis de Brakke Grond and STUK.
The Caretaker & Weirdcore
The Caretaker is British multidisciplinary musician Leyland James Kirby’s longestrunning project, launched in 1999 with a record paying tribute to the Haunted Ballroom scene from Stanley Kubrick’s cult film The Shining. As The Caretaker, Kirby explores themes of memory and loss through manipulating and degrading recordings of 1920s and 1930s ballroom music. At Rewire 2022 Kirby will present a new live show combining visuals and music from his final opus under the moniker, Everywhere at the End of Time, charting the advancement of Alzheimer’s disease from “beautiful daydream” into an “abyss” of confusion, horror and isolation. Aphex Twin collaborator Weirdcore provides the visuals, inspired by The Caretaker’s iconic cover artwork by painter Ivan Seal.
Yamila “Visions” World Premiere
Looking over the precipice of pure emotion, Yamila dances between electronic and analog music, tradition and experimentation. Following in the wake of her first work, Iras Fajro (Forbidden Colours), supported by Clark (Warp), this year the Spanish composer, cellist, singer and producer will reveal her most intimate catharsis in her second album Visions (Umor-Rex). A celebration of hallucinatory powers of music, it offers a journey that prodigiously unites baroque accents, Spanish folklore and contemporary electronic music, and includes a collaboration with the New York based musician Rafael Anton Irisarri.
