FRI APR 7

ABADIR feat. HOGIR

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.

Co-presented by Carhartt WIP

Afrorack

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.

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.

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.

‘Occam Delta 20’ is commissioned by Rewire.

Binkbeats OHM

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.

Bitter Babe b2b Manuka Honey

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.

Co-presented by Carhartt WIP

Coby Sey

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.

CS + Kreme

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.

Dienne

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.

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

Dreamcrusher

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

LSDXOXO (live)

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.

Lucy Gooch

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.

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.

Martha Skye Murphy

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.

Mathilde Nobel

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.

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.

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.

Peter Zummo & KAKUHAN

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.

Rainy Miller

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.

Safety Trance

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.

Co-presented by Carhartt WIP

Youniss

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.

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

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