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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.

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.

Authentically Plastic

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 quasielectronic Northern Ugandan rhythms, to early acid experiments and Afrofuturism.

Co-presented by Carhartt WIP

Dale Cornish

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.

Daniel Blumberg GUT

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.

Deena Abdelwahed world premiere

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.

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.

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

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.

Hatis Noit

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.

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

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.

Julia Reidy

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.

Kakuhan

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/contemporary, physical/metaphysical, and composition/improvisation. Formed by electronic producer Koshiro Hino — a frontman of Goat and a leading figure in the avantgarde 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 territory 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.

Liew Niyomkarn

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.

Lucinda Chua

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.

Malibu

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

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.

Moin

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 posthardcore scene of yore and turns it into a fresh new musical endeavour.

Morita Vargas

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.

Nadah El Shazly & Elvin Brandhi

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.

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

Nwando Ebizie The Swan

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 timewarping 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.

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 Publics (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.

Paul Purgas Tape Music

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.

Rewire × Carhartt WIP instore

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.

Saturday,

Sarahsson

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.

Co-presented by Carhartt WIP

Sélébéyone

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.

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.

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.

The Social Lover

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.

Thomas Ankersmit

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.

TLF Trio

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 CentralEuropean 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.

Tzusing

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.