Rewire Festival Programme 2018 by Rewire

FESTIVAL PROGRAMME

CONTENTS Introduction

Laurie Anderson: Artist in Focus

Tristan Perich: Young Artist in Focus

Emily Bick: While the Water Seeps

LluĂs Nacenta: The Man-Machine Collective

Discourse

Regenerative Feedback: Abolishing the Paradigm of the $ELF

Stefan Wharton: Cartographic Experience in the World of Quantum Natives

Josh Hall: Towards A Distributed Culture

Frances Morgan: Cyberfeminist Traces in Histories of Electronic Music and Sound

Gregory Markus: Telegraph Music: A Brief History

Artists Friday April 6

Artist Saturday April 7

Artist Sunday April 8

Special Events

General Festival Info

Venues

100

Credits

102

Partners

103

INTRODUCTION

We are proud to welcome you to Rewire 2018, the eighth edition of our annual celebration of forward-thinking music. Proud because we feel we have succeeded in intensifying our approach in looking for the unheard from all over the world but also for inviting some of the most significant innovators of our times. Stretching across three full days and encompassing 100 individual events, including numerous (inter)national premieres, commissioned performances, live concerts, club nights and an extensive discourse programme, the Rewire 2018 programme embraces the vast landscape of contemporary music and aims to challenge you, our artists and audience, to explore new and unfamiliar sonic worlds. Rewire 2018 marks the introduction of the Artist in Focus and Young Artist in Focus programmes. With these concepts, we aim to showcase early pioneers and rising

talents who have had a profound impact on and continue to shape the worlds of music and art. We are honoured to present Laurie Anderson, a true innovator in the realms of electronic music and performance art, as our inaugural Artist in Focus. Having used technology to transform the way we tell stories since the 1970s, she remains one of the most daring and creative voices around today. We welcome Tristan Perich as our Young Artist in Focus. The New York-based composer and visual artist has transformed traditional forms of composition through groundbreaking works that pair acoustic instruments with hand-made 1-bit electronics and form a distinctive artistic signature. Both artists are invited to present an expansive programme covering their respective oeuvres across the Rewire 2018 festival days, culminating in solo performances on the final day of the festival. Framing music into genres is increasingly something of the past. Yet, as a music festival, we believe itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s more important than ever to explore the context surrounding the performances and to connect music to wider social and cultural phenomena. While music can offer space to escape daily reality, it also provides a window through which we can better understand the world around us. For

this reason we have extended our efforts to make way for the exchange of thoughts and ideas and have framed our enquiry within three key themes. The first of our themes, Sense of Self, traces the acceleration in our understanding of selfhood, identity and representation. The second theme, Network Music, explores the non-linear ways in which we conceptualise, distribute and organise through music, while the last theme, Electronic Music Innovation in Historical Context folds linear time to bring technological innovations throughout the history of sound and music into the present day. Each of these themes is anchored in musical performances across the festival weekend and will be explored through an extensive discourse programme of artist talks, workshops and presentations. Throughout this booklet, you will find seven texts from writers and thinkers that respond to these themes. The Regenerative Feedback collective and Josh Hall were selected through an open call, their contributions are published here alongside pieces by Stefan Wharton, Frances Morgan, Gregory Markus, as well as Artist in Focus explorations by Emily Bick and Lluís Nacenta. Rewire attaches great value to the development of new and innovative works. As such, you will find several commissioned performances at this year’s festival. Visionary New York-based artist Juliana Huxtable presents Triptych, a new work for electronics, voice, harp, drums and video, while in Telegraph Music (co-produced by The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision), electronic composer Antenes uses a one-of-a-kind switchboard modular synth setup to investigate the intertwined histories of electronic music and telecommunications. The globally

dispersed alliance of musicians and artists called Quantum Natives presents Nexus (II), a ‘digital theatre’ in which four performers are transported into a mirrored, virtual stage. Further Rewire 2018 commissions are Ivan Vukosavljević & Il Hoon Son (co-produced by Gaudeamus), Glice & Dieter Vandoren (co-produced by The Grey Space In The Middle). The Rewire 2018 programme also includes a number of special projects that will be making their (inter)national premiere. Swedish composer Ellen Arkbro has been invited to present a special live rendition of her For Organ and Brass compositions with brass trio Zinc & Copper, as well as a new piece for organ and electronics, composed for the organ in Lutherse Kerk. Three of the most powerful and creative voices in the Arabic music world today, Maryam Saleh, Maurice Louca & Tamer Abu Ghazaleh come together to perform their masterpiece, Lekhfa, while fellow Cairo-based composer Nadah El Shazly conjures her mesmerising debut Ahwar to life with a full band. 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 2018 programme, including introductions to each of our festival artists and events, and explorations of our Artist in Focus, Young Artist in Focus and discourse programmes. We invite you to put all preconceptions aside and listen together to the unheard. To explore the overlooked and to celebrate the visceral and the cerebral. We wish you an incredibly inspiring festival weekend. Bronne Keesmaat Founder and Director

Laurie Anderson Artist in Focus

A true pioneer in the realms of electronic music and performance art, Laurie Anderson has been using technology to transform the way we tell stories since the 1970s and continues to be one of the most daring creative voices around today. A writer, composer, director, visual artist, violinist and vocalist, she has created groundbreaking works that span the worlds of art, theater and experimental music, invented countless innovative instruments, and was even NASA’s first-ever Artist in Residence. Her recording career, launched into the mainstream with the release of “O Superman” in 1981, includes critically-acclaimed albums Life on a String and 4

Homeland, soundtracks to her films Home of the Brave and Heart of a Dog, and a recent collaboration with San Francisco’s Kronos Quartet, Landfall, to name but a few. Her performances take the shape of multimedia presentations in which she uses and layers of vocal filters to spin offbeat adventure stories with her characteristic poignancy and wit. As this year’s inaugural Artist in Focus, Laurie Anderson presents a new multimedia performance named All The Things I lost In The Flood, a performative installation named, Sol, performed by Ragazze Quartet, a screening of Heart of a Dog and an artist talk.

All the Things I Lost in the Flood

In Conversation with Laurie Anderson

Laurie Anderson presents a live performance of her new work, All the Things I Lost in the Flood, named after her recently published book, at the Grote Kerk on Sunday. The latest instalment in her ongoing series, The Language of the Future, the new performance uses spoken word, video, live music and electronics to explore the power and perils of language and storytelling.

Laurie Anderson speaks to The Wire’s deputy Editor Emily at Korzo on Saturday. The artist talk sees Laurie Anderson reflect on her decades-long career at the vanguard of electronic music and performance art, as well as her new performance, All the Things I Lost in the Flood, and recent collaboration with San Francisco’s Kronos Quartet, Landfall.

Ragazze Quartet perform Laurie Anderson’s Sol

Please note that you need a reservation to attend this talk.

In a first for a Dutch ensemble, the four members of Ragazze Quartet perform one of Laurie Anderson’s compositions at Korzo. Written in 1977, Sol is a durational performance composed as a tribute to her teacher, the legendary American painter and sculptor Sol Lewitt.

Heart of a Dog Laurie Anderson’s Rewire 2018 programme opens on Friday with a screening of Heart of a Dog. A patchwork of animations, video diaries, 8mm home movies and artwork culled from exhibitions past and present, the film is a stunning exploration of love and loss prompted by the death of her cherished canine companion, Lolabelle. Narrated with her characteristic wit, Heart of a Dog spans musings on reincarnation, the modern surveillance state and the artistic lives of dogs, accompanied by a dreamlike score of Laurie Anderson’s violin compositions and soundscapes.

Tristan Perich Young Artist in Focus

New York-based composer and visual artist Tristan Perich is a pioneer in the realms of contemporary and electronic music. Drawing inspiration from the aesthetic simplicity of mathematics, physics and code, he has transformed traditional forms of composition through a string of groundbreaking works that pair acoustic instruments with hand-made 1-bit electronics. Bursting onto the scene with 6

2004â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 1-Bit Music, the first album to be released as a microchip, he has since released a number of award-winning compositions, including 1-Bit Symphony, Active Field and Surface Image, and installations like Drawing Machines and Microtonal Wall. As the festivalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Young Artist in Focus, Tristan Perich presents an extensive programme at Rewire 2018 that spans the full spectrum of his oeuvre.

In Conversation with Tristan Perich

Surface Image

On the opening night of the festival, Tristan Perich presents an artist talk in which he explores his work in music, sound and visual art. He will examine the interaction between the diverse interests that feed into his work, including physics, computer science and the foundations of mathematics/logic, and how his 1-bit music interacts with the building blocks of digital sound to explore order and randomness.

Surface Image is among Tristan Perich’s most ambitious works and his first large-scale piano composition. Performed by Canadian pianist Vicky Chow, the piece is a stunning marriage of her fiercely virtuosic playing and a sublime flurry of Perich’s dazzling 1-bit sounds. Surface Image can be seen at the Electriciteitsfabriek on Saturday.

Active Field

Tristan Perich takes to the stage himself on the final day of Rewire to showcase two solo compositions. Where 1-Bit Solo adapts the characteristic minimalism of his groundbreaking works 1-Bit Symphony and 1-Bit Music into a hypnotic live performance, Noise Patterns, sees Perich explores how that digital noise can be shaped into the mesmerising thump of a nightclub.

The first of his performances at Rewire 2018, Active Field might well be Tristan Perich’s least 1-bit led electronic work. Composed for ten violins and ten channel 1-bit electronics, the piece sees his signature sound submerged under a wash of avant-garde string arrangements. Active Field is performed by the Royal Conservatoire’s String Ensemble at the Electriciteitsfabriek on opening night.

Noise Patterns/1-Bit Solo

Drawing Machines + Listening Stations On Friday and Saturday, Tristan Perich presents an exhibition of his works, Drawing Machines and Listening Stations. The first is a live installation in which a pen suspended from two motors, whose motion is controlled by a code running on a circuit, produces tremendous paper or wall drawings that explore notions of texture, noise, randomness and order. For the second, he displays a range of his microchip experiments, allowing visitors to engage directly with his 1-bit compositions.

While the Water Seeps Words by Emily Bick

The best explanation of science fiction I ever heard was that it depends on a novum, a new ‘what if’ factor that is applied to an otherwise recognisable world. Part of the fun of the genre is trying to extrapolate the implications of the changes. It’s also how I understand Laurie Anderson’s career: through decades, working in song, sculpture, drawing, performance, opera, installation, film, CD-Rom games and telepresence – and probably quite a few other mediums – her work is a collection of ‘what if’ stories, riffs on maps, dogs, tapes, angels, outer space, memory, family, time. She invokes the work of Pynchon, Fassbinder, Annie Dillard, Walter Benjamin, and countless other writers and artists, picks ideas and runs with them to surprising new conclusions. These are sometimes playful, sometimes chilling, but always offering insights that are just unexpected enough to reveal some unspoken truths.

Even pieces that seem lighthearted at first have an uncanny ability to get to the core of some deep cultural baggage. In one of her 1990 “Public Service Announcement” videos, she explains the US national anthem, the Star Spangled Banner as: “Just a lot of questions-written during a fire,” with “Yankee Doodle” as its dada-dandy flipside. This eerily predicted how the videogame visuals of the first Gulf War, over that and the following year, would appear, as rolling news on screens in American homes: background details, surreal distance, technicolor smoke and explosions. Or how about the title track of 1982’s Big Science, spoken from the point of view of a wanderer who could also be a games designer building a world, a military planner, or even some divine force, speculating: “You know, I think we should put some mountains here/Otherwise, what are the characters going to fall off of?/ And what about stairs?” followed by the plaintive, sung cry, “Every man/Every man for himself.” This particular song is punctuated by walking synth phrases, hand claps, yodels, coo-cooing, trudging and pleading sounds – possibly from the locals about to be displaced? It feels more immediate now, thinking of the handful of Silicon Valley firms mapping the territory of everyone’s online – and mundane – experiences, building algorithm filtered bubbles based on reams of surveillance data, blithe about any consequences of their disruption. None of this is to claim she’s a prophet, but she sure is prescient. In her 1980s television works, she understood the possibilities of green-screen and projection, direct to camera speech, and shonky special effects to break the hypnotic power of the television broadcast. In the 90s, she anticipated the atomising distance and instant faux connection of the internet in her CD-Rom Puppet Motel, as she sang about its virtual

reality prisoners, “Down in their dungeons inside their machines”, “they don’t know what’s really real now/They’re havin’ fourth dimensional dreams.” The dreams of the puppet motel are sinister because they are prefabricated, they take place on someone else’s terms. Closer to home, the very human, unmediated displacement of dreams is a recurring theme in Anderson’s work: their humour, their banality, the fears they expose. The idea of the novum – that disruption from reality – assumes a commonality; we’re all embodied dreamers, plunged into strange worlds on a nightly basis. She tells a story about a dream about ex-boyfriends and their new girlfriends, spinning around a ferris wheel that dunks them into water, the women shrieking “Eek” – that expands into a meditation on the loss of her father. There is the one liner dream, part of United States, about having to “take a test in a Dairy Queen on another planet.” There are the “strange dreams” of the kaleidoscopic pop rush of “Sharkey’s Day”: “And if only I could remember these dreams...I know they’re trying to tell me...something.” She duets with late husband Lou Reed on the track “In Our Sleep”. And there’s the theory about infants who die of crib death that she discusses in Heart Of A Dog: “these dreams are from before the baby was born. Before the baby began to breathe. And the dreams are so real that the baby gets lost in them. And just stops breathing.” In early sculptures, Anderson worked with pillow speakers, originally intended for people to use to learn a language while asleep; she adapted this into a mouth speaker, to ‘speak’ from the voice of her amplified violin. Technology isn’t the point of her work, but it facilitates it, and gives

her more options to create work that merges the human and the electronic. All instruments, all technologies, all capabilities of the body are potential tools for her, or maybe it’s better to describe them as sites of experimentation, more room for what-if: tools suggest a very specific purpose. When Anderson’s experiments don’t work as intended, that may even be more interesting. (She tells a good story about a time in Atlanta when she accidentally superglued her speaker to the roof of her mouth, before a talk – and a pharmacist who had seen it all before came to the rescue. It’s funnier when she tells it.) She formally studied singing in the 1980s, before recording 1989 album Strange Angels, for a more emotional engagement than speaking, but uses a full repertoire of formal and informal vocal techniques, processed or altered where appropriate. Likewise, the physicality of the scraping, squealing gride sounds in the sawtooth waveform of bowed instruments like her violin – looped onto tape and amplified/digitised, played solo or complemented by synthesisers, creates a new, hybridised idiom.

Laurie Anderson’s most urgent and compelling stories are about water, as the reality-altering agent that throws accepted daily life for a loop. The outer-space hallucinogenic aphorisms and ideas emerging from the cutup prose of William S Burroughs have been longstanding influences – in the 1970s, a young Anderson would travel the country, hitchhiking, taking odd jobs, with one of his paperbacks in her pocket. Beyond the obvious appeal of his linguistic play and rejection of narrative, in

an odd way Burroughs is a generous and even humane writer. The morphing bodies and orifices of his junk-hungry characters, however outlandish or repellent, reach the limits of what can be considered human, but like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, are written with a sense of compassion and an understanding of their position. Anderson is always looking to understand other perspectives, through observations from travels around the world, interactions with Nasa scientists, exotic dancers, customers at McDonalds, Buddhist monks, her family, dog, collaborators, and anyone else she encounters in the course of a day. Better – she’s curious; she goes out of her way to imagine the world as they might see it. Who else would, out of love for her late rat terrier Lolabelle, think to write music in low frequencies beyond human hearing, for a concert for dogs? She also transforms herself, becomes characters. For the 1986 video series What You Mean We?, Anderson shares hosting duties with a male, dwarf puppet clone, who sees the world at a lower altitude and addresses it in a lower register, but is taken entirely seriously throughout. This tendency towards commonality and compassion recurs in fierce, critical work about conflict, climate change, threats from overreaching capitalist excess and other huge destructive forces, mostly through the use of the pitch-shifted, male “voice of authority”, who later became known as Fenway Bergamot. He dominates 2010’s Homeland. Bergamot is both menacing and a ridiculous blowhard; he doesn’t evoke sympathy, exactly, but he is human enough to be laughed at, and when he asks, “You know the reason I really love the stars? Because we cannot hurt them,” he realises he is out of his depth, and it’s touching.

Political and technological extrapolations are one thing, but some of Anderson’s most urgent and compelling stories are about water, as the reality-altering agent that throws accepted daily life for a loop. It can be the devouring, overpowering force that floods her Manhattan studio, leaving cables and synthesisers to float, waterlogged and silent, in the aftermath of hurricane Sandy. Or the sea of Moby Dick, cloaking the white whale as it leaves a trail of music and echoes, elusive as language or memory. The flood water of Landfall is also the water of forgetting. As that project progresses through the flow of the storm, there are tales of death, loss, remembered versions of events shifting, a sense of both the river Lethe and the Heraclitean “never the same river twice”. Especially in her more recent work, many of Anderson’s stories are about how malleable memory is, how tales are embellished or sanitised over time. Flood stories are about annihilation, but dissolution is not necessarily the end. In Heart Of A Dog, Anderson describes the 49 days of transformation in the Bardo of the Tibetan Book Of The Dead: “Clocks have stopped. Once you wore that. Once you did that. Everything you knew about time, slipping, repeating...Do not be afraid.” Anderson’s new book, a retrospective look over her career, is called All the Things I Lost in the Flood. But it’s less a tragedy, more a graceful, thoughtful letting go. This is a flood that comes for us all. All these novums, all these experiments, all these what-ifs – are all preparation for the unknown; everything will fall apart at the end, and Laurie is our curious and compassionate guide, telling stories to make the most of the journey. Looking for the stars, the light, while the water seeps in.

The Man-Machine Collective Words by LluĂs Nacenta

In Tristan Perichâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Active Field and Surface Image, we see man and machine playing together. Human and speaker read the same score, composed with specific parts for each, and at a tempo kept by a chronometer. Sure, the speakers, which do not have eyes, do not look at the score or the chronometer, but they follow, with the same attention and competence as their human colleagues, the direct text and clock, which, much like John Cageâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s orchestral works, act as director. This is stranger than it might seem. We are accustomed to seeing electronic music as a

close collaboration between people and machines, but in reality there is always a person at the controls when the machine plays music. Where the machine appears to act on its own, independent of the designer, it can only be because the person has designed a mechanism within the machine to conceal their position of control. However, in Tristan Perichâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Active Field and Surface Image, as with many of his works, people and machines share the stage and play together, side by side, so to speak, and it is this that makes his work unique.

In contrast to the technophile claim that human and machine are the same thing – that people in today’s society are cyborgs – Tristan Perich’s pieces actually see human and machine do the same thing. The music is not created by a man-machine continuum in which the machine does what man cannot do and vice versa, a reality where man continues in the machine and the machine in man, so that both are integrated into a single organism with a common purpose – the cyborg – but instead quite the opposite. In Tristan Perich’s compositions, man and machine are initially separated and, above all, different, and come together to fulfil a shared goal. In most electronic music, the musician is a person with a mechanical hand, eye or ear, and it is no accident that we find novel and sophisticated interfaces that extend human gestures and perception; whereas in Active Field and Surface Image, the musician is a person who goes hand in hand with a robot, and the interfaces are standard and well-known: the musical stave, the clock, the electronic circuit and the computer code. The interfaces in Tristan Perich’s music are standard because they operate on a human scale. Man and machine establish a close relationship: they share the stage and play music together (they go hand in hand, if we follow my proposed metaphor). This point is decisive in arguing why Perich’s work is so remarkable in musical sense and, additionally, interesting as an artistic production. Tristan Perich is reputed (and deservedly so) for his in-depth knowledge of mathematics, programming and electronics, but, I suspect, he is less well-known for his fine art as a composer. I would like to help correct this biased view, because I believe that the quality and interest of his work lies in the balance between these two skills that we rarely see overlap.

Tristan Perich insists that he thinks and works like a composer. That is to say, as he composes, he considers the piece to be, at all times, music to be listened to. It is interesting and relevant to learn about the programming process and about one-bit electronics that gives his music its characteristic sound, as these are certainly defining aspects of his work, but all of this is already in the music. It is audible in it. So much so, in fact, that you do not have to read up about it in order to appreciate it.

They confront us with one of the key problems of the digital society: the ambivalence between number and word. In positioning himself as a composer – someone who, in the classical sense, independently, slowly and painstakingly creates their own music – Tristan Perich is inevitably linked with the figure of the romantic composer. A piece by Tristan Perich, like a romantic symphony, is an auditory network that must be unravelled. A process that can only be done from by engaging the piece itself, based on what you listen to and how you hear it. The complexity that is being unravelled, which the romantics referred to as the mystery and the indescribable, unfolds in an open-ended sequence – in this case infinite, because it is never resolved – of explanations, comparisons and increasingly detailed and in-depth analysis. What in the romantic symphony was a poetic exegesis combined with a formal analysis, in Tristan Perich’s pieces is a mathematical, algorithmic, electronic and acoustic analysis. The interesting thing here, in my opinion, is that this is only the perspective of the labour

leading up to these pieces, and not in any way the only possible way of listening. What is unravelled as a number, algorithm and circuit can also be unravelled as verbal discourse, be it poetic, philosophical, harmonic, psychoanalytic, historical or a combination of them all. These progressive and never-resolved elucidations run parallel and become, in the end, the same. They conform because they lead to the same scholarly perplexity: once the scale has been reduced to the atom of meaning, whether it is the number, the bit, the perceptual impression or the concept, nothing else is discovered but the same inextricable complexity that the piece revealed when it was heard on a human scale. In the place where the recordings of romantic symphonies contain educational explanations, Tristan Perichâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s albums 1-Bit Symphony and Noise Patterns â&#x20AC;&#x201C; which are not strictly albums, but rather a sort of music box with sounds not recorded in them, but instead performed live when turned on â&#x20AC;&#x201C; contain the computer code of the piece in the booklet that accompanies them. Everything is explained there, and the works must be heard as what they are, music. That is why I state that they are examples of exceptional music, or at least they put themselves in the position of needing to be, of daring to try to be, something rare in sound creation related to the context of contemporary art. They are also interesting artistic productions, among other things, because they confront us with one of the key problems of the digital society: the ambivalence between number and word. The preponderance of the number in technologically advanced society can be established, because every digital file is, ultimately, a combination of zeros and ones; but for the same reason it can be said that all digital processes are algorithms, that is, logi-

cal and grammatical structuring in a specific programming language. The work of Tristan Perich succeeds in showing, with precision and without reducing its complexity, a central aspect of the world in which we live. The importance of what I have called, the human scale in the work of Tristan Perich is not only appreciated in the musical pieces in which people and machines share the stage, it is also a central component of his installations. In this respect, I would also like to refer briefly to Machine Drawings. There is nothing extraordinary about machines drawing; different kinds of generative programmes are able to do it incredibly well. But Tristan Perich is not content with that. He instead seeks to emulate the simple, and at the same time tremendously complex, action of a marker pen on a white surface. (I think the metaphor of the human and the robot holding hands is also supported in this case.) The machine draws as people would, on their scale, emulating the hand gestures. It is when it stands next to the person, doing the same thing as a person, without wanting to be the same as a person, that Perich is able to highlight the difference in their way of thinking and making decisions.

Dis cours o rs Interview Juliana

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Interview Juliana

Discourse

At Rewire 2018, we present our most extensive discourse programme yet. Through a series of artist talks, presentations, panel discussions, essays, screenings and workshops – all accessible for free – we aim to connect music to wider social and cultural conversations and reflect on artistic practice in both historical and current contexts. This combined approach of performances alongside talks and texts enables us to present a multilayered perspective on developments in the contemporary domain of arts and culture.

This year, we present the Rewire discourse programme within a stronger thematic framework that settles around three key themes: Sense of Self, Network Music and Electronic Music Innovation In Historical Context. We have invited a selection of inspiring artists and speakers to engage and reflect on these themes. These include; Anna Xambó, Antenes, Alo Allik, Beatriz Ferreyra, Clifford Sage, E. Jane, Frances Morgan, James Holden, Jan de Heer, Jeremy Gilbert, Jon Davies, Juliana Huxtable, Legacy Russell, Marija Bozinovska Jones, Kees Tazelaar, Laurie Anderson and Tristan Perich.

Discourse

Sense of Self

Legacy Russell: #GLITCHFEMINISM Saturday 7 April – Korzo (club)

With Sense of Self, we trace the acceleration in our understanding of selfhood, identity and representation. It dwells on the possibility of a shared consciousness against the established idea of individuality and the individual self, using art and music as a platform on which we produce, expand, and exchange these ideas. In conversation with E. Jane Saturday 7 April – Korzo (club)

Glitch Feminism embraces the causality of ‘error’, acknowledging that an error in a social system that continues to enact violence on all bodies may not be ‘error’ at all, but rather a much-needed erratum. In this video installment, writer, artist and cultural producer Legacy Russell introduces us to her concept of Glitch Feminism where, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a body.” The digital is a vessel through which our glitch ‘becoming’ realises itself, and through which we can reprogramme binary gender coding. Our ‘glitch’ is a correction to the machine—f**k hegemonic coding! USURP THE BODY—BECOME YOUR AVATAR!

Marija Bozinovska Jones: On Selfhood Saturday 7 April – Korzo (Club)

E. Jane is a prolific artist, performing as one-half of SCRAAATCH, exhibiting solo work and masterminding alter ego MHYSA - “a Queer Black Diva and underground popstar for the cyber resistance.” Through the identity of MHYSA, E. Jane began a process of relearning to express and perform femininity. Within the framework of Sense of Self, this discussion interweaves E. Jane’s various projects to think about self-representation, performance and having the agency to reclaim identities. E. Jane performs as MHYSA and as part of SCRAAATCH on Friday 6 April.

Marija Bozinovska Jones traverses social, computational and neural architectures. She considers the construction of identity within amplified technocapitalism and diverse forms of auto-regulation, such as trends in self improvement and decentralized technologies. At Rewire 2018, she gives a performative lecture entitled, On Selfhood, examining the self as a distributed, datafied identity. She will appear as MBJ Wetware, an intelligent personal assistant, simulating her voice.

Discourse

Network Music

Jeremy Gilbert: Free Your Ass And Your Mind Will Follow: Musical Joy And Radical Hope Saturday 7 April – Korzo (Club)

Essay sense of self

Throughout the history of recorded music, almost all significant sonic innovation has derived outside the social elite and cultural mainstream, and often been associated with moments of profound social change. In his talk, Jeremy Gilbert, Professor of Cultural and Political Theory at University of East London, examines music’s capacity to expand our imaginations and still open us up to new political possibilities. In a contemporary environment – where most music is consumed privately, streamed for free, and forgotten in a moment – can sonic art still raise consciousness and bring us together?

Further reading

Reconstructing and maintaining music technologies of the past can give musicians and engineers a unique insight into the ideas and practices that produced innovative sound-making devices. Drawing on synthesiser reconstruction projects encountered while researching the electronic music stu-

New Emergences: Women in Radio Sunday April 8 - Korzo (Club)

Frances Morgan is also part of Sonic Cyberfeminisms, an ongoing project drawing on intersectional feminist praxis and the legacies of cyberfeminism – focusing on sound, gender and technology. She shares a historical perspective with us on page 38, while RE:VIVE’s Gregory Markus explores the genesis of Telegraph Music on page 42.

Discourse

More Artist talks

RA Exchange: James Holden Saturday April 7 - Korzo (Club)

Essay Network In Conversation with Tristan Perich Friday April 6 - Zaal 3

With each new project James Holden has undergone a remarkable shift in sound and scope. His latest, The Animal Spirits, sees him shed the producer tag to be reborn as a live musician and bandleader. Joining Resident Advisor staff writer Holly Dicker for a live edition of their weekly interview podcast the Exchange, James Holden reflects on his latest transformation, The Animal Spirits and his obsession with jazz greats like Don Cherry and Pharoah Sanders. James Holden & The Animal Spirits perform at Paard on Saturday 8 April.

Learn more about Tristan Perich’s Artist in Focus programme on page 12.

In Conversation with Laurie Anderson Saturday April 7 - Korzo (Hall) On Saturday, Laurie Anderson speaks to The Wire’s deputy Editor Emily at Korzo. The artist talk sees Laurie Anderson reflect on her decades-long career at the vanguard of electronicmusic and performance art, as well as her new performance, All the Things I Lost in the Flood, performed at Rewire 2018 on Sunday, and her recent collaboration with San Francisco’s Kronos Quartet, Landfall. Please note that you need a reservation to attend this talk. Learn more about Laurie Anderson’s Artist in Focus programme on page 8.

Discourse

Abolishing the Paradigm of the $ELF (Without Homogenising the World) And Whether This is Even Possible. Words by Regenerative Feedback

“The required subject – a collective subject – does not exist, yet the crisis, like all the other global crises we’re now facing, demands that it be constructed.” & “To reclaim a real political agency means first of all accepting our insertion at the level of desire in the remorseless meat-grinder of Capital.” - M. Fisher It is not only democracy but politics and our social engagements at large that are, as Plan C put it, “facing an existential crisis of legitimacy”. Worldwide communicative connectivity once promised a politics of freedom, an abolition of the triviality of identity and an increase of free information; and it now signifies intrusive control surveillance, the individual’s regress into self-referential domes of narcissism, and the privatisation of free information environments for capitalist ends. Accompanying this, the echo-chamber of ridicule surrounding global politics inspires a sense of defeatism and contempt, particularly due to our painful social precarity which greatly contrasts with the level of technoscientific advancement we have reached. However, we are far from total loss, enter: the collective musical subject. From music as “the mirror of reality” (Marx) to music as an “expression of truth” (Nietzsche) to music as a “text to be deciphered” (Freud) or music as “the language of matter” (Schaeffer). Whether music can save us or not is almost not even the question, but we can surely be certain we have believed in the emancipatory potential of music for generations. And have continued, for eons, to go back to sit-

uations in which we stand around a stranger and silently consume their innermost expressions (or outermost bareness). Not only that, this is often done side-by-side, with other strangers, sometimes in contexts normally avoided at all costs: sweaty, hormonal, noisy bodies, all up against each other. And it is somehow clear and unspoken, deep down inside, that the experience would not be the same without those sweaty bodies around us. Whether the fanatic inclination towards music rests on its congregational and communicative force; on the affirmative power of its affect; on our experiential curiosity surrounding sonic formalisms; on the evasive nature of sound and our obsession with temporal perception; on a physiological proclivity towards the sonic; whether music gave rise to language or language to music: the bioneuropsychosociopoliticocultural significance of music remains vastly understudied, particularly with regard to its significance as a driving cognitive force.

The amplification of our collective imaginaries echoes into the past and the future. As Reza Negarestani holds for the aesthetic experience (of Florian Hecker) in his following of Kant: “The domain of aesthetic judgment is the domain of pure autonomy inhabited solely by ends without finality, or purposiveness without purpose. These are the ends that are determined by neither material nor final causes. [...] Technologies of form implement a discordant feedback [...] between the sensible and the formal, intuitions and concepts, imagination and understanding.” Not only is the aesthetic experience an almost anti-teleological end in itself, the implications of this experience

as manufactured, constructed and provided have far-reaching consequences on our self-conception, our conception of time, of the world, of relations. Perhaps it’s time we realise that all fiction becomes reality (and, obviously, vice versa). Less abstract and more mundane, illustratively applied to the present cause: the amplification of our collective imaginaries echoes into the past and the future, in a strange feedback loop which renders dystopian and utopian aspirations into the dullness of the present. Much like a musician tuning an instrument: there’s an unstable memory, updated at the same time as it is remembered, projected as well as performed into the future. The telos is a specific, desired sound, the process is a loop in time rarely paused over and analysed. Music’s given phenomenological character invites an interpretation of reality as fleeting, interdependent processes, rather than as atemporal, isolated objects. It is perhaps this very quality which inspires admiration, reverence and a cognitive opportunity for environmental- & self-reflexion. The notion of feedback, allegedly dating back to the eighteenth century, has its more recognised roots in the construction of regenerative audio systems: in the amplification of signals. Feeding energy from a device’s output back into its input creates a self-augmenting loop which results in an exponentially stronger output. It’s not difficult to imagine how the implementation of this logic in complex systems could lead – and has led – to catastrophic results, but it’s also not untrue that the basic tenets of feedback can be observed at play in successful evolutive organic systems, as well as non-organic technological operations, given the right regulatory cues. Feedback, as a process of circular self-action in semi-closed systems, could be considered the most relevant

phenomenon in the embodied, collective experience. From social regulation, to temperature control, to hunger, to hormones, to information transferral, to the evolution of law: these are all intricate, interdependent feedback systems – undergoing constant change and in perpetual motion. But if this is so prevalent why do we fail to acknowledge our fluid nature? Logically, the evolution of cognition had to favour things like object-permanence, self/other perceptions, yes or no dualisms, all for the sake of simplicity: cancelling the bifurcation of endless possibilities in favour of rapid response, and thus survival. What is more: human brains are biased, neuroscience shows, to actually simulate more than they ‘perceive’. What can we learn from the intangible, feedbacked, semi-selfless fact of the musical experience? What does this fact say, in fact, about what is thought to be the nature of aesthetic engagements? One way to consider the experience of aesthetic judgement and art—perhaps, even if ever so abstractly—is by considering aesthetic experiments as seemingly legible footnotes to an undecipherable system. All systems we become indoctrinated into seem to transcur over periods vaster than those we consider our own. We wake up into a premeditated world. Art offers glimpses of—and approaches, footnotes to—those systems, even if ever so briefly. Our symbolic, dualistic being fools us into thinking we need ‘answers’ to ‘questions’, but most of the time the solutions to our problems are openly given. Music transforms prevailing notions of social morality, generates and speaks to different subjectivities, produces ever-innovative informational structures, influences collective and individual behaviour: political movements; aesthetic sentiments; affective biases. It constitutes the historical backbone

of the most basic human rituals. The dream would be that we all become expert cyberneticians, and explore our dreams, intents and efforts, and all their possible impacts, conflicts and resolutions by way of self-regulating orders and systems. Despite the fact that reality may never be so (or it may be that it is already so), is there something to be gained from an investigation into the nature of the feedback loop created by the musical experience (i.e. sound-processing as sound progresses)? Can we aspire to the unspoken balance bespoken by this experience without violently instrumentalising it? Can we harness the capacity for change and evolution in our musical engagements for the sake of a better understanding of our human engagements at large? How does an assembled combination of sounds and— sometimes—words appeal to something as volatile as a feeling, or to something as robust as a political stance? Can we derive coherence and functionality from the aesthetic experience without defeating the ‘purpose’ in the process? The implications of music in culture remain challenging in a field whose intellectual, political and technological grounds have observed so many morphisms. Without assuming that answers are possible or even necessary at all, the aim is to uncover the positive feedback mechanisms in the abstract realm that is human musicking, in an effort to activate a more encompassing, alert, informed, empathetic, challenging and compelling sociopolitical voice against the present. We invite you to reflect on these questions and write back. We don’t have many answers ourselves, only a few intuitions.

Cartographic Experience in the World of Quantum Natives Words by Stefan Wharton

Citizenship and nationality are treacherous notions. Contrary to ‘the right of the soil’, which gives anyone born in a particular state territory the right to nationality or citizenship, new technologies and new models and modes of design have introduced new states of relations between individuals, communities and sovereignties. The status of persons recognised under national laws and customs is increasingly cockeyed; indeed, as the sociologist and design theorist Benjamin Brat30

ton notes, “Google Maps does not care, as of now, whether its user is an “illegal alien” or not. It provides the City to him just as quickly.” As a result, global relations are negotiated with increasing fluidity, and a new form of nativeness has emerged. ‘In the grim darkness of the far future’, battles are being contested over who or what is afforded jurisdiction, and a propagation of digital natives are finding new ways to map the geographies that are arising through the architectures of globalisation.

While plate tectonics describe motions of the Earth’s geosphere, we can also look at models such as cloud computing, with its shared processing resources, as new means by which places are being shifted, and alternative boundaries between spaces are being determined – through the convergence, divergence and transformation of existing lines. Much as ‘geonomy’ denotes the study of ocean currents and their agency in the formation of continents, the term could also be applied more broadly to the study of planetary-scale geodynamic phenomena, such as to the dynamics of cloud currents and their agency in the formation of social tracts. Derived from the Greek concept of ‘nomos’ – habits or customs of social behaviour – geonomy implies social construct, and its tracts, which similarly serve as containers or boundaries, are delineated by ethos and human mediation. Depicting these complex arrangements, however, is a rigorous challenge, weighed down by the limitations of terminology and written symbols. Interestingly, in early Greek culture, ‘nomos’ also referred to sets of melodic formulas, figures and patterns in music – particularly those used in musical contests. For all that, the figures and patterns of music arguably lend themselves even better to interpreting new geopolitical conditions, providing new imaginings and alternative scenarios that can help us define new concepts in global tectonics. Just as the system of connections and interrelations among our networks cannot be adequately represented by a diagram, music can impart a knowledge not inferred by the representations of a linear graph, and offers a channel for locating ‘imagined communities’. One collective who are seizing this supernatural capacity of music and art amid the

peculiar cosmopolitanism that derives from global urban networks is Quantum Natives – a geographically-scattered group of media artists, including Yearning Kru, Brood Ma, recsund, Dane Law, yeongrak, rosen, Oxhy and Terribilis, among others. Established in 2013 as an online world-building platform, Quantum Natives’ collective work explores the relationship between the fictional landscapes of science fiction and role playing games, IRL experience and the contested spaces of the (social) mediascape – all manifesting as ever-changing artwork represented as an online map. In this way, Quantum Natives offer a cartographic experience, embracing the power of digital music and visual art to not only articulate the essence of the present, but also carry visions of the future.

The figures and patterns of music lend themselves even better to interpreting new geopolitical conditions. In mobile networked communities like Quantum Natives we find a different form of nativeness, delineated by non-linear links and gateways. Quantum Natives’ Portals project, a collaboration with artist Rachael Melanson, a.k.a. rosen, highlights the nonlinearity of such networks by way of a transmedia narrative with a format loosely based on text adventures – a form of interactive fiction whereby participants make commands based on given information. Falling somewhere between game and literature, Portals testifies to art’s readiness to contribute to the creation of fictional worlds. With fake news increasingly infiltrating our perception of the world, Quantum Natives’ work lays

down its own re-imaginings and alternative narratives. At the axis of Quantum Natives is Yearning Kru, an artist originally from Croydon, London, and now based in Taipei. Yearning Kru’s music paints imagined landscapes, where the central figure is the very systems with which worlds are built – factories of engines and dynamos toiling and churning, mirroring our own labour and trade, while invariably offering a glimmer of hope in the seemingly grim darkness of industrialisation. Yearning Kru’s music imparts a sense of geography, history, society, culture and morality that transforms as we too set it in new contexts – through listening to it, reflecting on it, reviewing and rethinking it – in turn contributing to the proliferation of new imagined domains. Another central artist in the collective is Brood Ma, a.k.a. James B Stringer. Also a member of Werkflow – an experimental digital arts studio that focuses on using game engine technology to create computer generated imagery, virtual reality pieces, interactive installations and online projects – Brood Ma produces technological creations that similarly present a fabricated world, where meaning is assumed by nostalgia and a nuclear proliferation of fictitious truths. However, these fictional landscapes are arguably more real than the natural world; as the philosopher and semiotician Umberto Eco observed, “Disneyland tells us that technology can give us more reality than nature can.” Brood Ma’s 2016 release DAZE explored developments at the intersection of military operations and virtual reality, investigating automated processes of military struggle,

where representation outweighs actual circumstance. Quantum Natives, too, by their own account, symbolise ‘a survival game in the nightmare undercity’, yet there’s an important parallel battle in relation to the leverage and defence of the networks that Quantum Natives represent. Set against issues such as platform capitalism and the prospect of cybernetic management as an extension of colonial order, a recent compilation from Quantum Natives with online collective Xquisite Nihil hints at strategies and tactics that might be used to safeguard the emancipatory potential of the new social geographies afforded by online communities. Entitled seize the means of production, the compilation nods toward the communist prescription to social revolutionaries to take back ownership of their infrastructures. One tactic that has been advanced by Xquistie Nihil’s Oxhy is ‘security through obscurity’ – a tactic often used in computing as a type of encryption, involving hiding source code in plain sight, or an account password in binary files or script. Here, the principal means of providing security for a system is a dependence on the secrecy of its design. “Maybe if we overshare enough the boundaries of public and private become arbitrary and you gain some new opaqueness”, says Oxhy in a recent interview with editorial platform AQNB, by “releasing too much information or content to hide the meaning that’s embedded in it.” At a time when cryptographic mechanisms and Blockchain databases are being utilised as means of decentralising the internet as a social space, the imaginative realm of the ‘quantum native’ also allows us to speculate on how we might configure, mine and protect a new alternative form of community

â&#x20AC;&#x201C; one constituted through a mode of shared production. (in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war)

Towards A Distributed Culture Words by Josh Hall

In May 2014, it was reported that Twitter was gearing up to buy SoundCloud. Despite the streaming platform’s ongoing legal disputes and its inability to secure licensing deals with the major labels, the press put the reported price tag at $2 billion. That deal fell through, Twitter having seemingly realised that they couldn’t make the numbers work. Then, in 2016, it appeared that SoundCloud was to be bought by Spotify, the latter then valued at $8.5 billion despite never turning a profit. That deal fell through too. At the beginning of 2017, more rumours: this time that SoundCloud was to be sold to Google, but this time for around $500 million – a quarter of what the company was apparently demanding just three years previously. Even at that knockdown price, Google quickly backed out. Shortly after that, SoundCloud nearly died. It was reported that it had less than three months’ worth of cash available. It had enormous outgoings, not least on its lavish Berlin, London, New York, and San Francisco offices. Its SoundCloud Go product, designed to compete with Spotify, had achieved virtually no traction. It was hemorrhaging money and had no viable revenue model. Investors were so spooked that the company was forced to take an emergency loan just to keep the

lights on. It laid off almost half its staff, and closed two of its four offices. Eventually SoundCloud was ‘rescued’, at least for the short term. Its saviour? The Raine Group, an American investment bank, and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund. SoundCloud’s rescue was met with a sigh of relief in music, and reasonably so – it has become the distribution channel of choice for a whole generation of artists. And yet during those few weeks in which SoundCloud’s immediate future was uncertain, we had a glimpse of the risks inherent in giving ourselves over to investor-owned platforms: the risk that, as soon as they can no longer monetise our artistic labour, the products of that labour will vanish. So why do we keep trusting investor-owned platforms? Without thinking, we have passed vast swathes of music culture to the whims of capital, and distributed it through channels with a single point of failure. Had SoundCloud collapsed in 2017, it would have taken with it a decade’s worth of art. But eventually, it will collapse – the platform does not have a revenue model, and its biggest asset, its community of creators, are not easy to monetise. When that happens, that huge cultural loss will finally occur. It’s a trite thing to say, but it’s true: investors don’t care about culture. The Raine Group doesn’t care about art. What they care about is data – how to collect and distribute it, and how to monetise it. For the Raine Group, it wouldn’t matter what sort of data SoundCloud were dealing with. And that’s a risk, because as soon as it’s no longer profitable, they will turn their back on the communities that have made SoundCloud what it is. We have entrusted our culture to systems with single points of failure, and

the people involved in making the decision about whether or not it survives are not embedded or invested in it in any way. We’ve lost control of the means of distribution of culture. The internet promised a networked future, an egalitarian system of sharing and cooperation. Instead, we’re replicating exactly the structures that we had the opportunity to end. Power over the future of culture is being consolidated in ever fewer hands, and the parties that have that power have no interest in furthering the culture beyond its monetisation. So it’s time to look for solutions.

We cannot have control over the distribution of our work unless we own the distributors themselves. In July 2017, media theorist Mat Dryhurst proposed a ‘tokenised SoundCloud’. He imagined a future in which a system of cryptocurrency tokens could be used to secure the platform’s future. Either SoundCloud would issue tokens to artists, fans, and investors, rewarding their participation; or artists, fans, and other concerned parties would organise a collective buy-out of the platform. Once tokens have been bought or allocated, they could be traded as their value increased; they would also be used to participate in decisions regarding the platform’s future. As Dryhurst says, the idea of a SoundCloud buy-out might sound outlandish, but we’re now in a world in which companies at their very earliest stages are raising many millions of dollars through crypto Initial Coin Offerings, or ICOs. ICOs have got a bad rep recently thanks to a spate of frauds, and

there are big questions about how they will be treated for tax purposes. But the fundamentals are sound: in situations like SoundCloud’s, ICOs present the opportunity for co-operative ownership, and for the real involvement and compensation of the people who actually make those platforms valuable. Co-operative models are the future of a truly equitable internet. We cannot have control over the distribution of our work unless we own the distributors themselves. The so-called ‘platform co-op’ model has grown in response to the overwhelming control exerted by platform companies such as Uber and Deliveroo. These companies are at the bleeding edge of worker exploitation; their models only work if the people doing the riding or driving are vastly underpaid, refused proper contracts, and starved of basic employment rights. The streaming platforms are similar, in that the people doing the actual productive work – the artists and fans – are the ones who must be least well compensated in order for the model to survive.

We need to continue to make links between the labour of artists and the labour of gig economy workers. The struggle for sustainable, equitable distribution of culture, and the movement for real employment rights for Deliveroo riders are one and the same. Both are based on the exploitation of one party’s labour by platform capitalists, who have taken the liberatory power of the network and turned it against us. As artists and fans, we must rally around new co-operative models to build a sustainable future away from the oligopoly of the existing platforms.

This is extremely worrying news for the future of culture. We’ve become completely comfortable quantifying culture in terms of its financial impact. Decisions about government funding of the arts, for example, are always dictated in part by their revenue-generating potential. But art that isn’t monetisable is still valuable, and we have a duty to protect it. Similarly, we shouldn’t be tricked into thinking that our culture is only worth sustaining if it can turn a profit for investors.

Cyberfeminist Traces in Histories of Electronic Music and Sound Words by Frances Morgan This is an edited version of a talk given at Sonic Cyberfeminisms conference at Lincoln University, UK, in 2017

In 1977, the album New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media was released on Arch Records. A compilation of pieces by seven composers, it is a snapshot of a small network of female experimental composers working in the United States, including 38

Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Spiegel, Annea Lockwood, and Laurie Anderson, as well as the German-American composer Johanna Magdalena Beyer (1888-1944), who composed proto-electronic music in the 1930s.

The album predates cyberfeminism – an informal movement of theorists, activists and artists exploring networked computer technology as a space for feminist practice and discourse – by decades. Indeed, it predates cyberspace as it is usually understood, in that it predates the internet as the primary location in which cyber-feminism has been articulated. Yet the album can be read as a cyberfeminist document, with compositions such as Ruth Anderson’s Points, inspired by the concept of biofeedback; and Laurie Spiegel’s Appalachian Grove, which brings together information theory and traditional musical forms, seeing both as equally generative. In the sleeve notes, the album’s compiler, composer Charles Amirkhanian, proposes that electronic music is a uniquely connective practice integrating technology, politics and affect. He writes that women artists and composers have been instrumental in developing, “a new consciousness of the relationship of art to human life and the important and positive interaction that can be the role of a more personalised art in our day-to-day experience.” Here, tropes of 1970s feminist art-making make an incursion into the rarefied, profoundly hierarchical field of academic electronic music as epitomised in the 1960s by composers such as Milton Babbitt and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The album opens up a feminist cyberspace that welcomes amplified, sampled and synthesised voices. It is a utopian space in which music made from algorithms, such as Spiegel’s, Lockwood’s processed recordings of volcanoes and earthquakes (World Rhythms) and Megan Roberts’s vocal-driven performance art can connect and co-exist. As a feminist and researcher of histories of electronic music and sound of the 1960s and

70s, I am interested in how this pre-internet cyberspace was sounded out, by the women and gender non-conforming people who explored it. Is it possible to hear traces of cyberfeminism in histories of electronic music and sound, or can examining histories of electronic music and sound can help us broaden the definition of sonic cyberfeminism to include this deeper history? And can we only hear it in music, or can it be heard in texts, films, paintings, and technological objects? As a writer, I am attached to an idea of the ‘sonic’ that refers not only to the actions and technologies of listening, but also to the sonic aspects of reading, writing and thinking about sound. This is why, in this extract, I have focused on the writing, rather than primarily the music, of Pauline Oliveros. * The growth of electronic music in the postwar period of the twentieth century was paralleled by the development of cybernetics, the scientific study of systems and adaptive mechanisms. However, while it is acknowledged that some influential figures in cybernetics also were involved in music and sound, such as Heinz von Foerster and Gordon Pask, or that some musicians were influenced by cybernetics, these histories are rarely explored in connection, compared with studies of cybernetics and the visual arts. The space in which electronic music and cybernetics overlap with feminist politics and artistic practice is even less charted, partly because cybernetics is often thought of as a technocratic discipline concerned with maintaining a liberal humanist status quo that is antagonistic to feminism’s more radical aims, as well as being inextricably linked to patriarchal edifices such as the military and government. An explicitly feminist cybernetics is advanced in Shulamith

Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970), in which she argues for a cybernetic communism in which human reproduction is automated, freeing women from sex and childbirth; but this is notable in part because it is so rare. Sadie Plant’s key cyberfeminist text Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + The New Technoculture (1997) celebrates technological histories that consist of “ongoing processes, the shifting differences that count… often in disguise as mere and minor details.” Examining current research into histories of women’s and other marginalised people’s involvement in electronic music, much of which emphasises process and collaboration rather than individual authorship, I am reminded of Plant’s histories of engineers, mathematicians, weavers and wartime computers, as well as Katherine Hayles’ writing on the role of the female stenographer at the Macy Conferences in her book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (1999), which advances a cyberfeminist reading of cybernetics and science fiction. Music and sound are mostly absent from Plant and Hayles’ accounts. Yet their texts have much to offer feminist readings of electronic music history.

I am interested in how this pre-internet cyberspace was sounded out, by the women and gender non-conforming people who explored it. Because relatively few women figure in histories of postwar electronic music, although more of them are being recognised, it is easy for them to become decontextualised

and seen as exceptional figures rather than members of networks such as studios and universities, participants in current debates, and beneficiaries of dominant structures as well as anomalies within them, even if their relationships with those structures was complex or conflictual. Likewise a relationship with a set of ideas, which is also a kind of structure, can be complicated; for example, while drawing heavily from the vocabulary of cybernetics, Pauline Oliveros’ work also could show an ironic resistance to it, a kind of queering of the discipline, as well as demonstrating how cybernetics’ tenets of connectivity and communication could be channeled into spaces where technology is not the answer but the question. * In 1977, Pauline Oliveros gave a speech at the International Computer Music Conference, at the University of California San Diego, in which she addressed the role of technology in music and sound. By this point in her career, Oliveros, who had experimented extensively with electronic music, was becoming critical of it, choosing instead to work in groups using limited or even no instrumentation. This was not a permanent rejection – up until her death in 2016, Oliveros was working with mixed media, designing electronic sound environments for live musicians to interact with; and she was an early explorer of virtual collaboration across online networks. But during the 1970s she took a step back in order to ask, in a number of speeches and texts, what it meant for music to be technologically mediated. In her 1977 speech, Oliveros queried those composers who stated that artists, rather than business and military organisations, should control technology. Asking what

effect such power would have upon art and artists, she also reminded the audience that they should not assume that an artist’s interests were automatically different from the military’s. Like her contemporaries Laurie Spiegel and Catherine Christer Hennix, she advocated for better, deeper communication between music, science and technology, with the goal not technological mastery but a more profound understanding of human consciousness and musical cognition. The following year Oliveros gave another talk, ‘Software for People’, which later became the title of a book of her writings. Here, Oliveros speaks about the accelerated changes to music that recording technology has caused and the ways in which one can respond to this – by sticking with tradition or by being adaptive. In her view, both these approaches must collaborate somehow to create a balance. How, she asks, will we deal with all this new musical information? Her answer is that we cannot think only of the music now: “the perceiver must be included”. The role of the ‘observer’ in the cybernetic system becomes analogous with that of the listener. Reflexivity and feedback – key concepts of first and second order cybernetics – were fundamental to Oliveros’s musical methodology, whether undertaking a group improvisation, a solo ‘sonic meditation’ or the manipulation of electronic sound. They were also central to her development of a feminist practice of listening that by extension is non-hierarchical, embodied and empathetic.

the opposite. She writes, “It is in spite of technology’s tendency to reduce, objectify and regulate everything that moves, that computers and the networks they compose run on lines quite alien to those that once kept women in the home.” Likewise, it is not merely the fact that composers such as Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Spiegel, and their contemporaries and friends featured on New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media, had access to various kinds of music technology that leads me to explore their work through a cyberfeminist lens. It is because they have worked critically and empathetically with technology, leaping ahead of its regulations, transposing its rules into different registers and performing subversive operations on its reductive tendencies. As more feminist histories of music and sound are written, becomes clear that women composers, technologists and artists have been at the forefront of these actions, by inventing new machines and interfaces, in the cases of Daphne Oram and Laurie Spiegel; imagining – as Katalina Ladik does in her artworks – domestic technology’s sonic inner life; envisaging the computer as a score, a painting, a collaborator; applying machine logic to esoteric belief systems; constructing alternative archives of electronic music; and, in Oliveros’ most important legacy, empowering the human listener of every gender to understand itself as a unique recording and transmitting technology.

* In Zeroes + Ones, Sadie Plant notes that computer technology does not – cannot – in itself necessarily generate radical artistic or political practices. In fact, it is often

Telegraph Music: A Brief History Words by Gregory Markus

Has anyone ever had a cell phone ringtone that was just a MIDI version of your favourite song? I didn’t, because I couldn’t afford the luxury and at a certain point society (rightfully) decided that ringtones are annoying and vibrate is the only polite notification sound for phones. Not long after, it became possible to just listen to normal music on your phone and then we wound up where we are now. At Rewire 2018 artist and engineer Antenes, real name Lori

Napoleon will debut a new performance entitled, Telegraph Music. Commissioned by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision’s RE:VIVE initiative, Telegraph Music explores how electrical telegraphy – i.e. the transmission of textual or symbolic messages without the physical exchange of an object bearing the message – can be integrated into electronic music composition, exploring new possibilities for the transmission of thoughts and ideas while reuniting electronic music with its telecommunications heritage.

The intersection of communication devices and music, more specifically, electronic music, goes back longer than we might think. In 1823 English electrical engineer Francis Ronalds published Descriptions of an Electrical Telegraph and of some other Electrical Apparatus, setting into motion the technological revolution for information transmission and receival. Ronalds wasn’t alone in his breakthrough. Volta, Ohm, Franklin, Ampere, Faraday, Bell, Edison, Hertz, and Tesla, all added the necessary building blocks to get electronic music where it is today. Inspect any schematics for synths, amps, computers, mixers, LPs or look at a switchboard and Buchla side-by-side; it all stemmed from these landmark discoveries from thinkers who wanted to see how this invisible power of electromagnetism could change the world.

If modern electronic music is born out of archaic telecommunications, how can we bring them back together and celebrate this shared heritage? For Lori Napoleon, this connection became very apparent several years ago. “While traveling Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula, a small town called Escanaba’s Historical Museum drew me in,” she begins. “Within its quiet walls stood the town’s telephone exchange. There, alone and in awe, I found that the elaborate banks of switches, rows of patch bays, and cloth cables bore a striking resemblance to the some of the first synthesisers which I had been recently experimenting with, such as the Buchla 100. This moment sparked the desire to breathe

new life into this long-silenced apparatus and explore where switchboard operation and musical synthesis overlap.” The result from this eye opening trip resulted in Lori’s project, The Exchange, in which she saved and revived old telephone equipment into her very own modular synthesisers and analog sequencers. Last year at Rewire, RE:VIVE ran a workshop on re-sampling the sounds of The Hague. The sample pack provided to participants was composed of archival sounds and films from the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. Within that sample pack was the seed that led to Antenes’ Telegraph Music commission. The Hague is the pivotal radio and telecommunications hub in The Netherlands. Not only is the headquarters of Dutch telecomms behemoth KPN in The Hague, but so was the ever important Scheveningen Radio, an outpost on the coast that connected ships in the rough North Sea with the mainland. As well, Hanso Idzerda broadcast the first Dutch public radio broadcast from The Hague on 6 November, 1919 at 20:00, using his homemade radio sender making history as the first commercial radio broadcast ever. So it was inevitable that telecomm sounds would wind up in The Hague sample pack and the pivotal sound was a simple morse message beeping along a clean, clear sine wave. “There’s words in there,” we thought; that’s a message. But at the workshop, with complete disregard for subtext, we started experimenting with this simple sample, pitching it around and creating haunting melodies. The idea stuck, “if modern electronic music is born out of archaic telecom-

munications, how can we devise a way to bring them back together and celebrate this shared heritage?” At RE:VIVE, we wanted to explore how telegraphs and morse can be integrated into modular rigs as a completely new(ish) way to integrate words and ideas into electronic music. Barring our initial disregard for morse messages as more than cool sounds to work with, it’s worth understanding that telegraphs and morse and the ladies and gentlemen that lived on these wires actually lived on these wires no different than we live online today. In his 1994 book, The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage writes, “collectively, the world’s telegraphers represented an online community encompassing thousands of people, very few of whom ever met face-toface.” Operator’s morse transmissions were, to trained ears, as distinct as human voices. Bored operators would gossip and chat just like anyone would today with their cell phone. They even played checkers against one another over the wires. Romances were born online and instances of this are well documented (see Ella Cheever Thayer’s Wired Love). It’s with this knowledge, that telegraphs and morse weren’t strictly just for business and meteorological reports that the idea behind Telegraph Music began to unfold.

On 9 April 1877, American inventor Elisha Gray presented, Music by Telegraph, at Lincoln Hall in Washington D.C.. For the first time, music played hundreds of miles away on Gray’s musical telegraph was broadcasted to a room full of curious audience members. The review from the National Republican read, “At the conclusion of the exhibition the judgment of all present was highly flattering to what may yet be numbered among the greatest inventions of modern times.” Translated to modern language: it killed. Almost 141 years later, Antenes promises to do the same.

On 8 April, Antenes will position herself and her one-of-a-kind modular rig on the receiving end of a newly re-engineered telegraph key of her making. Manning the key will be a trained and experienced radio operator. Together they will turn words into music and fill Korzo Theater with swirling ideas and emotions.

Fri April S

AMMAR 808

Ben Vince

Boi Mesa

AMMAR 808 is Sofyann Ben Youssef, a Tunisian producer and self-proclaimed ‘North-African futurist’ who reworks traditional raï and chaabi arrangements using his Roland TR-808. Brimming with dense beats, twangy keys and compressed darbukas, his latest project sees him joined by Tunisian vocalist Cheb Hassen Tej, Gnawa musician Mehdi Nassouli and celebrated Algerian singer Sofian Saidi on an invigorating journey through the freshly united and proud Maghreb. A relative newcomer to London’s experimental music scene, Ben Vince has made waves with his improvised saxophone looping routine. Embracing the contours of dynamic, emotive landscapes, where rich motifs coalesce and feel their way around each other, he explores progressive minimalist structures that shift in and out of phase whilst not being afraid to suddenly warp or elevate unexpectedly. The result is a soothing journey into glacial melodies, drones and velvet-like pitched bass tones. The alias of The Hague-based multi-instrumentalist and producer Kobie Berkhout, Boi Mesa takes a maximalist approach to composition. Boldly traversing genre boundaries, his latest EP SA-i fuses elements of hip-hop, psychedelia and jazz into playful and infectious songs and a refreshing new sound.

Artists

Deena Abdelwahed

A trained jazz singer and performer, Deena Abdelwahed now works to inject a heavy dose of innovation into the realms of electronic and club music. With her unique synthesis of footwork rhythms and traditional Arabic sounds, the Tunisian-born DJ and producer crafts a futuristic sonic world that is defiantly experimental. Having caught the ear of New York’s Discwoman following the release of Klabb last year, she presents her live debut at Rewire 2018 alongside fellow Discwoman affiliates Umfang, Volvox and Ziúr.

Fatima Al Qadiri presents Ja7eem

Drawing from a myriad of club music movements – including juke, grime, trance and gqom – Fatima Al Qadiri wields a uniquely conceptual approach to electronic music that explores notions of identity and the self. At Rewire 2018, the Kuwaiti-raised artist and producer presents a mesmerising new audiovisual collaboration with lighting designer and visual artist Emmanuel Biard. Titled Sha7eem, the performance explores the theme of hellfire through a mixture of (un) released music and archive footage of burning oil fires during the First Gulf War.

Floating Points (solo live)

Renowned for his ambitious and forward-thinking DJ-sets, it’s his own recordings that have garnered British DJ and producer Sam Shepherd aka Floating Points most acclaim. Drawing inspiration from disparate sonic realms, including everything from meditative jazz and soul to Brazilian psych and eclectic electronic sounds, his debut full-length Elaina is the epitome of his bold new vision. At Rewire 2018, he treats us to a rare solo live show. Built around his new EP Ratio, Floating Points extends the cosmic arrangements of Elaenia while harkening back to the driving electronica and dance floor bliss of his recent past. Friday April 6

Gagi Petrovic

Identified Patient

Combining electronic and acoustic elements to explore the interdependencies of sound and movement, Haarlem-based composer Gagi Petrovic crafts intense and intimate compositions that strike a delicate balance between contemporary music, electronics and alternative pop. At this year’s festival, he presents GEST x DPB, a new performance in which he employs a self-made instrument that turns hand gestures and simple light sensors into an interface for musical expression to re-interpret his newly-released debut album dp[a] + hsh. As Identified Patient, Amsterdam-based producer Job Veerman has been churning out a steady stream of dark electro, acid, EBM and haunted techno since his stunning debut back in 2016. Meticulously mixed, his productions embrace the Bunker and Clone sound, moulding raw synthesizer riffs, mind-altering arpeggio lines and crunchy drum machine hits into feverish dance-floor workouts.

JASSS Since moving to Berlin, Spanish-born DJ and producer Silvia Jiménez Alvarez aka JASSS has become one of the city’s most adventurous new talents. A regular at Mannequin’s label nights, where she spins an electrifying mix of techno, electro, EBM and drone, its her own productions that have garnered the most acclaim. Released last year, her debut album Weightless unfolds as an abstracted and experimental electronic excursion that blends industrial dub with African and dark jazz inspirations.

Artists

Joshua Abrams and Natural Information Society Juju & Jordash (dj-set) Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith

A mainstay of Chicagoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s revered jazz, experimental and rock scenes, Joshua Abrams now performs with an ever-evolving lineup of musicians called the Natural Information Society. Formed in 2010, the group uses traditional and electric instrumentation to build intricately psychedelic environments, whether composed or improvised. At Rewire 2018, Joshua Abrams and Natural Information Society present their latest album Simultonality, an expressive work in which traditional musics, American minimalism and improvised jazz converge around a three-stringed Moroccan lute called the guimbri. The union of analogue masters Gal Aner and and Jordan Czamanski, Juju & Jordash use house and techno as a starting point to launch off into the unknown. Renowned for their spontaneous live sets, where they cook up drum beats, jam out chords and melodies and take their sound wherever they see fit, the prolific pairing are versed in a myriad of musical languages and their dj-sets weave everything from be-bop to acid and dub to disco into dizzying dance-floor conversations. Drawing out the organic qualities of her trusty Buchla synth, L.A.-based composer and producer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith crafts radiant and harmonic works that call to mind early electronic music pioneers like Suzanne Ciani, Laurie Spiegel and Terry Riley. Following up her Dutch debut at Rewire 2016, the synth wizard showcases her new album The Kid at this yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s festival. Released to widespread acclaim last October, the record serves up a vibrant maze of warm synthetic sounds, soothing rhythmic patterns and playful multi-tracked vocals that reveal a deep reverence for the natural world.

Friday April 6

Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein perform the music of Stranger Things LYZZA (live)

Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein are one half of Austin synth outfit S U R V I V E and entirely responsible for the dreamy, throwback score of Netflix’s hit series Stranger Things. Inspired by the likes of John Carpenter, Vangelis and Tangerine Dream, the two composers travelled back in musical time with a toolbox of vintage synths to craft one of the most iconic soundtracks. A masterclass in tension and synth soundscapes, their Stranger Things score sets the tone for the show’s world of VHS-era science fiction and cult classic horror flicks. Accompanied by the mesmerizing visual effects of MFO’s Marcel Weber, Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein present the Dutch premiere of The Music of Stranger Things at The Hague’s iconic De Electriciteitsfabriek, ushering you from their pulsating theme song right through to the spine-chilling electronics of the Upside Down. Brazilian-born DJ and producer LYZZA has taken the Amsterdam scene by storm with her high-octane sets of bass-heavy club music, underground hip hop, grime and baile funk. The next step in a burgeoning career, her newly-released EP Powerplay showcases her production chops, weaving cracking drums, hardstyle kicks and trance melodies into an energetic debut that also features her own, powerful voice. At Rewire 2018, she brings Powerplay to life with an electrifying live show.

Artists

MHYSA MHYSA is the underground popstar alter ego of prolific, Philadelphia-based multimedia artist E. Jane. Constructing expansive utopian worlds where black femmes exist in all of their complexities, MHYSA takes her audience on a journey through her hopes, dreams, and inspirations, pulling the various elements of her artistic practice – experimental club rhythms, diva worship and Afrofuturist potential – into an elaborate alternate universe. At Rewire 2018, MHYSA presents her new performance, a live audiovisual experience based on last summer’s acclaimed Halcyon Veil-released debut, fantasii.

Mia Zabelka, James Plotkin and Benjamin Finger Ninos Du Brasil

Using live electronic devices and innovative performance techniques to extend the sonic realms of their acoustic instruments, Austrian violinist Mia Zabelka, Norwegian guitarist John Hegre and multi-instrumentalist Benjamin Finger create a freeform sound that invokes the spirit of both concrète and electronic music. Embellishing Benjamin Finger’s signature, heavily-processed collages of sound with Mia Zabelka and John Hegre’s organic strings, the trio craft a mesmerising sonic world that buzzes and drones, glitches and slithers, eventually careening into unexplored musical territories. Ninos Du Brasil is the Italian duo of Nicolò Fortuni and Nico Vascellari. Channeling the physical intensity of their hardcore shows into a fervent mixture of old school techno, noisy electronics and breakneck batucada – a samba subgenre that mixes Brazilian music with strong African influences – the double-drumming duo wield an expressive and electrifying live performance that marries Carnival style parade celebrations to contemporary club culture. Released last September, their latest album, Vida Eterna, is rooted to the dancefloor and seamlessly captures the duo’s infectious live energy.

Friday April 6

Raphael Vanoli Raphael Vanoli is an Amsterdam-based artist, composer and improviser who conjures distant sonic worlds with little more than a guitar, effects and his own breath. With his unique blowing techniques on electric guitar, he transcends the aesthetics of conventional guitar music, instead crafting minimalistic, cinematic compositions characterised by densely-layered emotions. In a solo live setting, the resulting sounds range from tropical rainforest floor soundscapes and lush, choir-like textures to apocalyptic earthquake rumbles.

Royal Conservatoire String Ensemble performs Tristan Perich’s Active Field SCRAAATCH

Shifting between organic and abstract electronic phases, Active Field is Tristan Perich’s landmark composition for ten violins and ten channel 1-bit electronics. Floating through orchestral, dramatic, lyrical and austere atmospheres, the piece covers his characteristic electronics in a blanket of avant-garde string arrangements that calls to mind classical folk compositions as well as the finest Morricone soundtrack ambience. As part of Tristan Perich’s Rewire 2018 Young Artist in Focus programme, Active Field will be performed by ten violinists of the Royal Conservatoire String Ensemble. Learn more about Tristan Perich’s Young Artist in Focus programme on page 6. SCRAAATCH is the sound and performance art collective of Philadelphia-based artists E. Jane and lawd knows. Drawing from an uninhibited range of styles and sounds, the duo’s performances take the shape of chaotic and energetic live/ DJ hybrids that merge African diasporic art and contemporary US culture and literature with vocal pop, rap, R&B and experimental electronics. Having performed and exhibited their experiments at the likes of MoMA’s PS1, the New Museum in New York and Philadelphia’s ICA, SCRAAATCH make their Dutch debut at Rewire 2018. Artists

Širom

SOPHIE (live)

Sven Kacirek

Hailing from the little village of Lesno Brdo, Širom is the ensemble of Slovenian multi-instrumentalists Iztok Koren, Samo Kutin and Ana Kravanja. Each capable of playing more than a dozen instruments, the trio intertwine diverse musical approaches and an unbridled musical imagination to create a lush tapestry of traditional sounds. Navigating the vibrant sonic landscapes of their new album, I Can Be a Clay Snapper, Širom’s live performances shift between imagined instrumental folk and post-rock meditations, drifting from improvisation to structured composition and back again.

LA-based producer SOPHIE is responsible for some of the most cutting-edge pop and club music of the past decade. Treating sound as sculpture, her strikingly original approach moulds sticky melodies, avant sound design and enigmatic, pitched-up vocals into her own, heavily-synthesised brand of future pop. Taking a bold stride forward to unveil her true identity late last year – as well as a trio of powerful and emotional new singles – SOPHIE presents the Dutch premiere of her new live show, an electrifying multimedia performance replete with vigorous choreography, stunning visuals, live vocals and brand new music. German percussionist and composer Sven Kacirek has a knack for transforming the sounds of any surface into a wondrous, dreamlike soundscape. Rooted in improvisation and his training as a jazz drummer, his compositions often substitute the drum kit in favour of tiny objects and surfaces that he can knock, hit or scratch, weaving these rhythms into a mesmerising patchwork of marimba, xylophone and piano. For his live performances he employs an array of samplers to effectively clone himself, seamlessly improvising gentle layers of looped percussion into elaborate sonic structures. Friday April 6

Syncom Data

The moniker of Jan Katsma and Raoul De Vries, Syncom Data has been a firm fixture of the Rotterdam and The Hague scenes since the late 90s. With a steady stream of releases to their name via their own Syncom Data Records, the duo unleash heavily-distorted, spaced-out live techno that’s steeped and stewed in the local underground.

Umfang One of the co-founders of New York’s Discwoman, Brooklyn-based DJ and producer UMFANG has been a leading force in bringing more representative lineups to dance music. With a slew of releases to her name, in which she synthesises late 90s ambient, industrial drone and polyrhythmic techno deep into spaced-out realms, it’s her DJ-sets that have garnered her widest acclaim. A monthly resident of Bossa Nova Civic Club and host of Technofeminism, UMFANG’s sets serve up a pulsating mix of icy techno and abstract electronics at breakneck speed.

Volvox

A veteran of Boston’s nascent electronic music scene, New York DJ and producer Volvox has rapidly established herself as a dominant force in the Brooklyn underground. With two residencies to her name at famed Bushwick hangout Bossa Nova Civic Club – home to the likes of previous Rewire artists Aurora Halal, Ital and Via App – Volvox has built a reputation for delivering high-octane sets of tough, stripped-back techno and grooving acid. An early member of Discwoman, she performs alongside fellow Discwoman affiliates Umfang, Deena Abdelwahed and Ziúr at Rewire 2018.

Artists

Zimpel/ Ziolek

Ziúr

Zimpel/Ziolek is the union between two of Poland’s most celebrated underground artists: classically-trained clarinetist and composer Waclaw Zimpel and multi-instrumentalist and producer Jakub Ziolek. Joining forces following a chance encounter at one of Zimpel’s shows, their self-titled debut, the first of the duo’s combined efforts, was released to widespread acclaim – even landing the second spot on The Quietus’ Albums of the Year 2017. Creating an extraordinary space where jazz and folk collide, the album is a wondrous fusion of lush psychedelic music of electronic and acoustic origins. Breaking out of the techno mould, Berlin-based DJ and producer Ziúr fuses seemingly incompatible influences and wields them into a new and exciting sound. The result is a functional dancefloor framework built from disparate sonic textures and brainy beats that are clearly meant for big room sound systems. Following back to back EPs in 2016, Ziúr joined the ranks of New York music platform Discwoman and released her debut full-length U Feel Anything? via Planet Mu last October.

Friday April 6

Sat April

7 S

Arto Lindsay & Zs

Avalon Emerson

CARMEN & Matthew Schoen

The past and present of New York’s vibrant avant-garde unite for a unique collaborative performance at Rewire 2018. Renowned for his distinctive fusion of abstract noise and the grooves of Brazilian genres like tropicalia and Bossa nova, Arto Lindsay has stood at the intersection of music and art for over four decades. Relative newcomers by comparison, saxophonist Sam Hillmer, guitarist Patrick Higgins and drummer Greg Fox dispense endless streams of hypnotic free-jazz, prog and minimalist drone as improv trio Zs. Performing alongside the self-taught guitarist, singer and no wave pioneer, Zs effectively push Arto Lindsay’s sultry grooves into dizzying new realms.

Drawing from the vast, dreamlike expanse and abstract textures of her sunbaked home, Arizona-born DJ and producer Avalon Emerson offers a timeless narrative that reflects a passion for the sound design of new wave, the futurism of techno, the soul of American house and the exuberance of rave. Having cut her teeth as a DJ in San Francisco’s storied warehouse party scene, she now hones her lush and eclectic sets from the dance music mecca that is Berlin and has released a string of celebrated original productions for the likes of Whities and Spectral Sound. CARMEN is the alias of Montreal-born music producer and composer Carmen Vanderveken. Currently based in Amsterdam, she uses a range of synths and acoustic instruments to create intimate and eccentric sonic sculptures that extend across audio and visual realms. At Rewire 2018, she’s joined by fellow Montrealer Matthew Schoen, a video artist and motion designer whose works embrace playful imagery, bright colours and strange combinations.

Artists

Chino Amobi Born to Nigerian parents in Virginia, Chino Amobi is a producer, visual artist and sonic activist who weaves music and politics together in a way many other artists of his generation do not dare. Whether it’s on last year’s critically-acclaimed debut Paradiso or 2016’s Airport Music for Black Folk, Chino Amobi expertly harnesses sound as weapon to expose, confront and overcome the power structures in our global society. Alongside Congolese-Belgian producer Nkisi and Portuguese-South African artist Angel Ho, Chino Amobi is one of the founders of NON, a collective of African artists from the content and the diaspora.

Daniel O’Sullivan & Dream Lion Ensemble

London-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Daniel O’Sullivan has made a powerful impact on the international avant community. Whether solo or in his varied collaborative projects, including Grumbling Fur and This Is Not This Heat, Daniel O’Sullivan infuses the familiar everyday experience with traces of the uncanny, the secret and the magical. Released last summer, VELD is an album full of luminous pop incantations, electroacoustic rhythms and shimmering drones, and will be performed with support from the the six-piece Dream Lion Ensemble.

Saturday April 7

Ellen Arkbro + Zinc & Copper present For Organ and Brass

Elysia Crampton presents Red Clouds

FAKA

Swedish composer and sound artist Ellen Arkbro employs traditional acoustic instruments and digital algorithmic synthesis to explore the qualities of musical harmony. On her debut album, For Organ and Brass, she gradually shifts through a series of long, sustained tones that are played by the organ and in parallel by a brass trio of horn, tuba and trombone, and unfold as a slow-moving renaissance blues harmony. Joined by the Berlin-based brass trio Zinc & Copper at Rewire 2018, Ellen Arkbro presents three compositions using both of the organs at the Lutherse Kerk.

Bolivian-born, American-based composer, producer and writer whose works explore the historic roots of queer identity in conjunction with South American spirituality. Using a vast range of artistic expression – from poetry, traditional Aymara theatre and futurist narratives to DJ-sets and electronic composition – she creates an epic and deeply conceptual sonic collage that synthesises Latin genres with dense percussion, mutant samples, delicate synth lines and club music structures. At Rewire 2018, Elysia Crampton presents her new theatrical performance Red Clouds, an extraterrestrial, sci-fi drama that plays out in the depths of outer space and is centred around gas clouds of an entity entitled Artificial Stupidity.

FAKA is the collective of South African artists and musicians Fela Gucci and Desire Marea. Conceived as a cultural movement with a mission to express the experience of “black queer bodies navigating the ‘cis-hetero-topia’ of post-colonial Africa,” FAKA sees them dabbling in a wide range of artistic expression, from sound and live performance to literature, video and photography. Their musical output draws heavily from gqom, and channels the raw brand of South African house into a daring exploration of love, identity and romance woven through tongue clicks and drum beats. Artists

Glice & Dieter Vandoren

Irreversible Entanglements

James Holden & The Animal Spirits

Glice is the brainchild of Amsterdam-based musicians Ruben Braeken and Melle Kromhout. Conceived as an antidote to the song-based, pop-tendencies of their other musical outfits, Glice sees the pair diving into their love of abstract music, producing a deep musical journey that wades into the realms of post-classical and post-industrial music. At Rewire 2018, the duo are joined by Belgian artist, perform and developer Dieter Vandoren, creating an audiovisual performance that combines the visceral sound of Glice with an immersive spatial light installation by Dieter Vandoren.

First coming together to perform at a Musicians Against Police Brutality event in early 2015, Irreversible Entanglements is the free jazz collective of Philadelphia-based poet and noise artist Moor Mother, saxophonist Keir Neuringer, bassist Luke Stewart, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro and drummer Tcheser Holmes. Making their widely-acclaimed recording debut last year, the quintet’s instrumentalists explore the inner sanctum of free jazz improvisation, allowing Moor Mother’s searing poetic narrations of Black trauma, survival and power drive home the powerful tone of each piece. The resulting spirit represents a triumphant return to a central tenet of the free jazz sound as it was originally founded – a vehicle for Black liberation. James Holden is one of the leading lights in the realms of electronic music. With each new project, the British-born artist and producer has undergone a remarkable shift in sound and scope, and his latest, The Animal Spirits, sees him reborn as a live musician and bandleader. Joined by Tom Page on drums and Etienne Jaumet on saxophone, James Holden & The Spirit Animals is a wild ride that unites the melodic vigour of James Holden’s modular synthesiser with a supporting cast of brass, wind and live percussion. It’s an expansive and psychedelic journey through the free-flowing jazz of greats like Don Cherry and Pharoah Sanders, traditional Gnawa rhythms and James Holden’s own folk-trance.

Saturday April 7

Ji Youn Kang

Karen Gwyer

Kepla

Channeling the traditional rites of Korean Shamanism, Ji Youn Kang explores the relationship between musical and physical spaces. In her solo performances, the South Korean composer, sound artist and performer employs a range of traditional and non-traditional instruments to harness the empowering, rhythmic elements and noisy sound sources of Korean ritual music.

A classically trained cellist and violinist, London-based artist and producer Karen Gwyer now navigates the outer realms of contemporary electronic music. Shifting between hypnotic and thickly melodic leftfield techno and acidic, lo-fi psychedelia, her expansive, largely analogue live sets are an intricate collage of pulsating percussion and textured electronics with a sci-fi synth-hum. With a slew of releases for Opal Tapes, No Pain in Pop and Nous, Karen Gwyerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s latest album Rembo sees her journey deeper into the realms of body-music, fully embracing dense dancefloor vibes. Kepla is the alias of Liverpool-based electronic composer and sound artist Jon Davies. Harvesting salvaged audio from a vast range of secondary sources, he crafts elaborate, seemingly dystopian sound worlds that are at once rooted in an earthly ecology and reflective of a distinctly alien lifeforce. Over the past three years, he has produced a self-released EP, co-created the acclaimed Absent Personae with media theorist DeForrest Brown, Jr. and video artist Chris Boyd, and composed the soundtrack for post-human play, The Happy Jug, with author Nathan Jones.

Artists

Lanark Artefax (live a/v)

Laurence Pike

Lanark Artefax is Calum MacRae, a rising Glasgow-based electronic musician who broke through with the release of Glasz on Lee Gamble’s UIQ. Following up with the widely-acclaimed Whities 011 last year, Lanark Artefax channels the hallmarks of classic 90s IDM deep into the realms of contemporary club music. Never failing to build to a euphoric climax, his productions strike a delicate balance between the fractured electronic sounds of Autechre and Aphex Twin and dizzying salvo’s of bass and grime. At Rewire 2018, Lanark Artefax presents the Dutch premiere of his new live a/v show. Laurence Pike is a prolific drummer, percussionist and composer who has been at the cutting-edge of the electronic and jazz music worlds for the better part of two decades. With a slew of critically-acclaimed albums as part of PVT, Triosk and Szun Waves, as well as off-kilter collaborations with legendary jazz pianist Mike Noch, Bill Callahan and Prefuse 73, the Australian musician released his solo debut in January. Recorded with little more than a drum kit and sampler, Distant Early Warning is a deeply personal sonic journey through Pike’s own jazz history and the electronic experimentation of his bands.

Saturday April 7

Nadia Struiwigh (live)

Sitting somewhere between Biosphere and Boards of Canada, Rotterdam composer, producer and DJ Nadia Struiwigh creates refined downtempo electronica that takes you on a journey of synthesised soundscapes of ambient techno. Awash with melody and warm electronics, her newly-released full-length Lenticular is an expertly crafted album that calls to mind Warpâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Artificial Intelligence series. At Rewire 2018, Nadia Struiwigh unleashes her lauded live hardware set.

Artists

Nina Kraviz A veritable superstar, Nina Kraviz is one of the most popular and influential artists in club music today. Equally comfortable in front of big festival crowds as she in an intimate club setting, the Siberian-born DJ and producer is renowned for her energetic and uncompromising techno sets. Last year’s acclaimed fabric 91 mix offered an acute window into her unique musical world, balancing tracks by veterans like Aphex Twin, Unit Moebius and Woody McBride with the eccentric output of her own distinctive label projects трип and GALAXIID. Expect a heady trip through the electronic outer limits.

Oberman

Oceanic

Paul Twin (live)

The mastermind behind Rotterdam’s soaring Nous’Klaer imprint, Sjoerd Oberman has cultivated a unique local scene around his brand of cerebral dance music since founding the label six years ago. Responsible for releases by the likes of Mattheis, Upsammy and his brother’s Oceanic alias, Oberman’s own dj-sets are drenched in densely-layered, lo-fi tracks, mixing his label’s hypnotic output with a bevy of unknown gems. A mainstay of his brother’s Nous’Klaer label, Oceanic is the alias of rising Rotterdam-based DJ and producer Job Oberman. With a handful of releases to his name, including the collaborative Cosime and edits for labelmate Mattheis, his spellbinding dj-sets find him floating between cascading waves of eclectic, synth-driven house, misty ambient and kaleidoscopic percussion. Born and raised on the White Island, Paul Twin crafts resplendent, psychedelic techno that harkens back to his days throwing countless raves at the island’s enchanted vales and industrial warehouses. Now based in Rotterdam, the producer and live electronic musician dispenses his pulsating melodies via local label Nous’Klaer, striking out ever so often to unleash his lauded, modular synth-driven live set. Saturday April 7

Panda Bear A founding member of seminal experimental pop outfit Animal Collective, Noah Lennox aka Panda Bear is single-handedly responsible for some of the most celebrated albums of the last decade – think Person Pitch and Tomboy. Painting a dazzling collage of indie rock, psychedelic pop and pulsating electronic music, he consistently strives for uncharted territory. Panda Bear heads to Rewire 2018 armed with his latest release A Day With the Homies, which, he explains, cuts through the fluff and delves into the “deeper zones of the frequency spectrum”.

PAUS

Quantum Natives presents Nexus (II) 68

Formed in Lisbon in 2009, PAUS are a Portuguese collective who break all the regular moulds with their unusual constellation. Comprising two drummers – the motor of the band – a bass guitar and an arsenal of synths, the quartet creates elaborate sonic textures that shift between experimental psychedelia and tropical pop. Slated for release on the eve their performance, their new album was recorded on the island of Madeira and captures the sound of PAUS falling in love with the colours and the people of their adopted home. Quantum Natives is a globally dispersed alliance of musicians and artists who create new worlds of mutant electronic music and interactive online portals. At Rewire 2018, Quantum Natives present the world premiere of Nexus (II). A continuation of their Nexus project, the Rewire 2018 commission transports collaborative environments into a mirrored performance space, using audio-visual game-engine tech to explore site-specific inhabitations that link to the network’s diverse pockets and grottos. Artists

Ragazze Quartet performs Laurie Anderson’s Sol

Ragazze Quartet performs Laurie Anderson’s Sol Over the course of a decade, the four members of Dutch ensemble Ragazze Quartet have established themselves as a leading voice in the world of contemporary and classical music. Dabbling in both classical and modern string quartet repertoires, the ensemble are lauded for their innovative and often unconventional programmes as well as their incredible versatility. In a first for a Dutch ensemble, the Ragazze Quartet will perform a work by pioneering New York performance artist and composer and Rewire 2018 Artist in Focus, Laurie Anderson. Written in 1977, ‘Quartet for Sol’ was composed by Laurie Anderson as a tribute to her teacher, the legendary American artist Sol Lewitt. Learn more about Laurie Anderson’s Artist in Focus programme on page 4.

Stephan Meidell presents Metrics

SUUNS

Stephan Meidell is Norwegian guitarist and composer who fearlessly ventures into the unknown, using improvisation as a trusted guide. His music exists where genres dissolve, harnessing the guitar as a catalyst for electronic manipulations with sound and a harmonic core to which other elements gravitate. At Rewire 2018, Stephan Meidell conjures his latest album Metrics to life with the help of a full ensemble. Comprising musicians from a wide array of backgrounds, including Norwegian folk music, improvised and contemporary music, baroque and jazz, they create an intricately woven sound universe that unites chamber music, sound art and techno.

Montreal-based outfit SUUNS have refined their unique blend of krautrocking grooves and synth-infused electronics with pinpoint precision over the course of five critically-acclaimed albums. Their latest, Felt, released by their trusted Secretly Canadian home just last month, sees the foursome loosen up and unleash the carefully contained forces that have been at the core since their 2010 debut, Zeroes QC. From the hypnotic future-pop of X-ALT to the sax-smooth post-punk of Peace and Love, the new SUUNS extends their distinctive sonic signature into bright, new atmospheres. Saturday April 7

The Thing

UUUU

The Thing is the legendary trio of Scandinavian free jazz heavyweights Mats Gustafsson (saxophone), Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (bass) and Paal Nilssen-Love (drums). Each an acclaimed musician in their own right, the trio initially formed as a jazz cover band. Having reinterpreted the disparate works of PJ Harvey and Iggy Pop, jazz avant-gardists Don Cherry and Albert Ayler, as well as the likes of The Cramps and Lightning Bolt, The Thing have established themselves as one of the most progressive acts working in free jazz today. Fusing elements of avant-rock, noise and punk, the trio craft a vigorous maelstrom of improvised jazz that is full of grit and power. UUUU is the newly-formed underground supergroup of Wire founder and bassist Edvard Graham Lewis, guitarist Matthew Simms, Coil and Spiritualized keyboardist Thighpaulsandra and Tomaga percussionist Valentina Magaletti. Individually, these four musicians have spent the past few decades pushing the boundaries of sound to their very limits. Collectively, they now form a free-wheeling sonic powerhouse, harnessing a wild and unpredictable sound in which expansive krautrock, psychedelic electronics and post-punk experimentation collide with expressive percussion and other more esoteric fare.

Artists

Vicky Chow performs Tristan Perich’s Surface Image

Visionist & Pedro Maia (live a/v)

Yon Eta

Dubbed the ‘new star of new music’, Canadian-born virtuoso Vicky Chow has captivated audiences around the world with her expressive and nuanced interpretations of contemporary works. At Rewire 2018, she performs Surface Image, a composition for solo piano and 40-channel 1-bit electronics written by Tristan Perich. A stunning marriage of Tristan Perich’s inspired electronic aesthetic and Vicky Chow’s nuanced yet fiercely virtuosic playing, Surface Image is an hour long journey that blurs the line between the electronic and the organic. Learn more about Tristan Perich’s Young Artist in Focus programme 6.

One of modern music’s most elusive experimentalists, Visionist is the alias of London-based producer Louis Carnell. Dissolving all manner of genres – his tracks often bare traces of hip-hop, future garage, dubstep, R&B and footwork – Visionist crafts a futuristic, almost alien form of electronic music that sounds at once highly fabricated and intensely human. At Rewire 2018, Visionist is accompanied by Pedro Maia, a Portuguese filmmaker and audio-visual artist known for his specific interest in working with analog film. His new work for Visionist is one of chaos and absurdity; original, disturbing and surreally beautiful. The Hague-based DJ and producer Yon Eta takes a maximalist approach to his music. Regarding sound while consciously striving to limit the options in the production process, he channels the past, present and future of club culture and pop music into a steady stream of infectious electronic experiments. In addition to regular shows at Red Light Radio and ongoing club series Bar None, Yon Eta runs the DEVORM imprint, a hybrid community challenging the form of AV releases. Saturday April 7

Sun April S

Antenes presents Telegraph Music

Beatriz Ferreyra

CocoonDance presents MOMENTUM 74

Known for her inventive soundscapes and eclectic DJ sets, New York-based DJ, producer and electronic artist Antenes also operates a studio-turned-laboratory of self-made sequencers and modular synthesisers built from vintage telephone equipment. She presents the world premiere of Telegraph Music, a Rewire and RE:VIVE commission (in co-production with COMM Museum) that explores the intertwined histories of electronic music and telecommunications by performing with a one-of-a-kind repurposed switchboard modular setup.

Argentinian composer Beatriz Ferreyra has stood at the vanguard of electroacoustic experimentation since the 1960s. A pioneer of early musique concrète and influential member of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), her own works – anthologised by Editions Mego in 2015 – explore an intuitive method of free electroacoustic composition that embraces a range of tape cutting techniques as well as acoustic instrumentation and electronic technologies, ushering Pierre Schaeffer’s utopian musique concrète into the future. Led by choreographer Rafaële Giovanola, a trio of dancers from her Bonn-based company CocoonDance present their electrifying new performance, MOMENTUM. Unfolding in a club-like atmosphere, accompanied by a feverish, live-produced and pulsating beat, the dancers explode and recede in an incredibly physical and sweat-inducing choreography that explores the connections and boundaries between moving and being moved.

Artists

Golden Retriever Golden Retriever is Matt Carlson and Jonathan Sielaff, a Portland-based duo who have explored an ocean’s worth of sound over the course of eight albums. Primarily working in the intersection of modular synthesis and amplified/effected bass clarinet, the duo combine strong melodicism with an organic approach to experimental electronic sound. At Rewire 2018, Golden Retriever transform their latest album Rotations, released by Thrill Jockey last year, into a lush, meditative and intensely emotional performance.

Jasper Stad houders’ PolyBand

Ivan Vukosavljević & Il Hoon Son

Led by Amsterdam-based guitarist and bassist Jasper Stadhouders, the PolyBand is an ever-expanding collective of musicians and performers whose primary goal is to induce mesmerising and transcendental musical experiences. With a rotating core of guitars, drums and bass, the PolyBand use densely-layered polyrhythmic cycles and complex polytonal environments to craft an intricate and deeply hypnotic collage of sound that plays with the expectations, desires and memories of both performers and audience. Based in The Hague, Serbian-born composer Ivan Vukosavljević explores the sonic possibilities of instruments, using its potential as a core principle in creating his compositions. Joined by Korean pianist Il Hoon Son at Rewire 2018, the pair present a new work in which an electric guitar is placed inside the piano, creating a hybrid instrument where the resonances of both guitar and piano strings reveal an exceptionally intense and intimate palette of sound.

Sunday April 8

Juliana Huxtable presents Triptych

Kareem Lotfy

Laura Agnusdei

Juliana Huxtable is a visionary artist traversing New York’s art and club worlds. A writer, poet, multimedia artist, DJ and LGBT activist, her works explore the intersections of race, gender, queerness and identity through a vast range of artistic expression. At Rewire 2018, she presents the world premiere of Triptych, a new commissioned performance for electronics, voice, harp, drums and video. Triptych is an assemblage of sounds rooted in Huxtable’s workshopping with frequent collaborator Joe Heffernan and Detroit-based harpist Ahya Simone. It is presented in three parts and is built around texts exploring the (desired) experience of a subject disappearing or dissolving into their flesh – be it in fear, joy or excitation. Based in Berlin, Cairo-born producer and visual artist Kareem Lotfy is responsible for some of the most dynamic club and experimental music of the recent past. Cultivating a full spectrum of aesthetics, his compositions extend from minimalist ambient on the one end to buoyant, full-frontal bubbling on the other. Having gained widespread acclaim for Fr3sh, his contribution to PAN’s Mono No Aware compilation, as well as transformative mixes for the likes of Radar Radio and The Astral Plane, Kareem Lotfy will be performing his abstract explorations in a live setting. Laura Agnusdei is an Italian saxophonist and student of The Hague’s Institute of Sonology. Classically trained, her compositions star the saxophone in a leading role and fuse acoustic, digital and analogue sound sources to craft verdant sonic landscapes that shift between melody and texture, traditional song form and improvisation. Her debut, Night/ Lights, released by UK-based label The Tapeworm last year, features four stirring electroacoustic compositions that drift from dark to light. Artists

Laurie Anderson presents All the Things I Lost in the Flood Maryam Saleh, Maurice Louca and Tamer Abu Ghazaleh

As the Rewire 2018 Artist in Focus, Laurie Anderson presents an extensive programme, including her new live performance, All the Things I Lost in the Flood. A true pioneer in the realms of electronic music and performance art, Laurie Anderson has been using technology to transform the way we tell stories since the 1970s and continues to be one of the most daring creative voices around today. The latest instalment in Anderson’s continuing work The Language of the Future, All the Things I Lost in the Flood employs spoken word, video, live music and electronics to explore the power and perils of language and storytelling. Corresponding to her newly-released and eponymous book, the performance dissects the relationship between words and images, and provokes questions about beauty, time, reality and memory. Maryam Saleh, Maurice Louca and Tamer Abu Ghazaleh are three of the most powerful and creative musical voices in the Arabic world today. Having each blazed their own path through Egypt’s alternative music scene over the course of a decade, the Cairo-born trio recently united to create their newly-released masterpiece, Lekhfa. Led by Maryam Saleh’s muscular and alluring vocals, they blend elements of traditional Arabic, jazz, rock, shaabi and electronic music into a wonderfully off-kilter sound in which layers of grit and beauty intertwine around the dystopian poems of their contemporary Mido Zoheir.

Sunday April 8

Nadah El Shazly (live with full band) 78

Nadah El Shazly is an Egyptian singer and composer and mainstay of Cairo’s burgeoning underground scene. Having gotten her start in music singing Misfits covers for a hometown punk band, Nadah El Shazly now crafts a mystical blend of Arabic songcraft, improvised avant-jazz, rock and electronica. Composed, written and produced over a two year period, her debut Ahwar is an almost mythological experience that sees Nadah El Shazly’s soaring vocals and Arabic prose accompanied by a rich array of avant-garde arrangements. For her Rewire 2018 performance she’ll be joined by a full band. Artists

Park Jiha

South Korean composer and multi-instrumentalist Park Jiha uses ancient instruments like the piri, yanggeum and saenghwang, as well as the modern sounds of saxophone, bass clarinet, vibraphone and percussion to create vibrant textures of classic ambient and free jazz. A mainstay of Korea’s contemporary music scene as the leader and producer of neotraditional duo, 숨[su:m], her critically-acclaimed solo debut, ‘Communion’ sees Park Jiha unleash a stunning collection of instrumentals that intertwines minimalism and melody with bursts of furious energy and experimentation.

Sunday April 8

Rupert Clervaux & Ben Vince

Sugai Ken

Tom Rogerson

Rupert Clervaux and Ben Vince are both rising stars of London’s experimental music scene. Rupert Clervaux as a multi-talented musician and writer with a string of collaborative and solo projects to his name, including two acclaimed albums with Beatrice Dillon, and Ben Vince as a live-looping saxophonist. Together the duo present an improvised performance of live saxophone looping and percussion that unfolds as a fiercely textural but rhythmically intricate tapestry of sound, shifting between energising grooves and clusters of noise. Sugai Ken is an experimental electronic musician from Kanagawa, an area just outside of Tokyo’s dense urban sprawl. Over the course of his decade-long career, he has refined his deeply resonant and enveloping world of sound into a unique synthesis of traditional Japanese instrumentation and field recordings taken from around his home. His latest album, UkabazUmorezU – which roughly translates to ‘slow and steady wins the race’ – comprises hypnotic ambient compositions that conjure the subtle and profound ambience of a night in Japan. English composer, improvising pianist and keyboardist Tom Rogerson has seen his solo career rocket into the forefront following a chance encounter with ambient legend Brian Eno and the subsequent release of Rogerson’s debut solo album, ‘Finding Shore’. A somewhat collaborative effort – the album features the Moog manipulations and improvisational chops of Eno himself – ‘Finding Shore’ is a supremely serene instrumental work that strikes a balance between Rogerson’s acoustic piano and electronic keyboard compositions.

Artists

Tristan Perich presents Noise Patterns and 1-Bit Solo Za!

Drawing inspiration from the aesthetic simplicity of mathematics, physics and code, New York-based composer and visual artist Tristan Perich transforms traditional forms of composition through groundbreaking works that pair acoustic instrumentation with handmade, 1-bit electronics. As part of his expansive Young Artist in Focus programme, he presents a live performance of his solo works Noise Patterns and 1-Bit Solo on Rewire Sunday. Both compositions explore how digital noise can be shaped and stressed, shifting from glittering static into the mesmerising electronic thump of a nightclub. Learn more about Tristan Perich’s Young Artist in Focus programme on page 6. As Za!, Barcelona-based musicians Papa Dupau and Spazzfrica Ehd wield a tremendous arsenal of instruments and sounds into an electrifying live performance once described as ‘Lightning Bolt beating up a mariachi band’. Combining drums, guitar, kalimba, trumpet and clarinet with live vocal loops and analogue electronics, the duo channel ancestral melodies, African beats, Balinese polyrhythms, thickly-distorted noise, free-jazz and drone-rock into a deeply psychedelic and frenzied post-world music.

Sunday April 8

Special events In addition to the music and discourse programme Rewire also offers several special events throughout the festival weekend. All special events are free of charge for Rewire 2018 ticket holders, some are free for all. Show your Festival or Day pass wristband to guarantee entrance.

The School of Noise Saturday, 7 April â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Koorenhuis The School of Noise invites you to join them on a journey through the wonderful world of sound. Using a variety of noise-making and sound-sculpting machines, their day-long, walk-in workshop serves up a full spectrum of creative and imaginative activities that use sound in accessible, fun and educational ways. Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll be able to play instruments like the theremin and omnichord, observe beautiful Chladni patterns in sand and conduct your own orchestra of fruit and vegetables. The workshop is open to all ages and levels of music experience. The workshop is free and open to all ages and levels of music experience.

invited an array of the finest local record shops and labels to suit all your crate-digging needs. From obscure ambient and electronic experiments through synth, wave and disco rarities to iconic funk, soul and jazz, the likes of Underbelly, Rotibabi, 33|45 and more have it all. The day will be soundtracked by a lineup of local DJs, and food and drinks will be served at the bar. The Hague Record Fair is free accessible.

Rewire DJ Team Weekend – Paard + Korzo

Gary Hill: Always Rings Twice Weekend – West + West Museumkwartier One of the most important artists of his generation, Gary Hill has been working at the intersection of video, sound, performance and installation art since the 1970s. His multilayered investigations offer insight into the phenomenological nature of how we perceive the world through a network of visual, aural and linguistic signals. Presented across two of West Den Haag’s locations on each of the festival days, ‘Always Rings Twice’ is a largescale solo exhibition that celebrates the full spectrum of his work.

We’ll be showcasing some of The Hague’s finest DJs at the Paard foyer on Friday and Saturday and the Korzo foyer on Sunday. Drop by as you weave your way through the Rewire 2018 programme.

Underbelly Vinyl & Books Weekend – Paard + Korzo A veritable mainstay of the Rewire festival landscape, underground and avant-garde curio shop Underbelly presents their unique offering of books, music, noise toys and films at the Paard Foyer (Friday + Saturday) and Korzo Foyer (Sunday). Whether you’re looking for serious sounds or funny noises, avant-garde films or crazy movies, critical writing or playful observations, and fancy art books or handmade zines, Underbelly’s carefully curated selection has it all.

The Hague Record Fair Saturday, 7 April – Zaal 3 Local vinyl aficionados Espresso Records host a special Rewire 2018 edition of their The Hague Record Fair at Zaal 3. Celebrating adventurous music in all its forms, they’ve

carhartt-wip.com

FRI 13 APR

SUGAI KEN + YASUO SUGIBAYASHI Lullabies for Insomniacs label night

WED 25 APR

DNK ENSEMBLE + KONZERT MINIMAL Michael Pisaro’s Tombstones - DNK Days

TUE 29 MAY

HAILU MERGIA SAT 23 + SUN 24 JUN / Location: NDSM-werf

STRANGE SOUNDS FROM BEYOND WED 17 OCT / Location: Bimhuis

WACŁAW ZIMPEL WED 16 JAN

STARGAZE Björk’s Debut

WED 30 JAN

INSOMNIO Zappa’s Yellow Shark

A GET-TOGETHER OF POP AND ELECTRONICS

tickets MUZIEKGEBOUW.NL /THERESTISNOISE

7 juni – 1 juli 2018 hollandfestival.nl

METROPOLE ORKEST & SOLOISTS OF THE SYRIAN BIG BAND Kinan Azmeh, Ibrahim Keivo, Dima Orsho, Moslem Rahal, Special guest: Eric Vloeimans Grensoverschrijdend concert met o.a. nieuw werk van Calliope Tsoupaki 8 – 9 juni, Carré

internationaal podiumkunsten amsterdam

OCTAVIA E. BUTLER’S PARABLE OF THE SOWER Toshi Reagon, Bernice Johnson Reagon Post-apocalyptisch muziektheater, dat tweehonderd jaar zwarte muziek omvat 20 – 21 juni, Muziekgebouw

 PROMS 23 juni, Het Concertgebouw vijf concerten op één dag, voor € 11 per concert, met o.a.

OIKOSPIEL II: HEAT CANTATA David Kanaga, Maze DEAR ESTHER Jessica Curry, The Chinese Room

TRIBUTE TO BLACKSTAR s t a r g a z e, Anna Calvi, Soap&Skin, Laetitia Sadie Een hommage aan David Bowie

Computergames live gespeeld met muzikale begeleiding 24 juni, Muziekgebouw

WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND Daniél Bjarnason Muzikale alchemie met twaalf hoorns en twaalf vleugels

SIGHT MACHINE Trevor Paglen, Kronos Quartet Muziek van o.a. Laurie Anderson met live video-feed van beeldend kunstenaar Trevor Paglen 15 juni, Muziekgebouw

ELECTRO SYMPHONIC ORCHESTRA Colin Benders Ongehoorde muziek van een revolutionair synthesizer-orkest

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Drukkerij GEWADRUPO bvba Hoge Mauw 130 B-2370 Arendonk info@gewa.be +32 (0)14.67.86.69 6 6

GONZO (CIRCUS) EN AND& presenteren

EEN REVOLUTIE IN DE MAAK? Een conversatie over blockchain in de muziekindustrie AND& is een gloednieuw festival in Leuven, waar ondernemers, artiesten en andere vooruitstrevende denkers samenkomen om te praten over technologie en creativiteit in de stad van de toekomst, van Tresor-oprichter Dimitri Hegemann en sextech-expert Stephanie Alys tot Andrew Keen (de ‘antichrist van Silicon Valley’).

panel talk over een thema dat recent voor ophef zorgde: de toepassing van blockchain in de muziekindustrie. Onze sprekers belichten dit complexe maar ongemeen boeiende onderwerp vanuit verschillende hoeken. Ze presenteren enkele concrete initiatieven die reeds zijn opgestart, maar gaan ook dieper in op de mogelijke gevolgen voor de ‘muziekindustrie’ op lange termijn.

Verder valt er tijdens de vierdaagse volop muziek, kunst en tech demonstraties te beleven, met shows van onder andere Dijf Sanders, Africaine 808, Dengue Dengue Dengue, Laurel Halo, Legowelt, Donna Leap, Bicep, Joy Orbison, JLin, Jordan Rakei, Stuff., Laura Misch, Kamaal Williams en vele anderen.

Hou zeker onze e-nieuwsbrief en social media in de gaten voor de aankondiging van de gasten! En neem alvast een kijkje op de website van AND& voor het volledige programma van summit én festival, alsook voor tickets.

Tijdens de summit op vrijdag 4 mei presenteert Gonzo (Circus) een inspirerende

WANNEER: 2-5 mei 2018 WAAR: Op verschillende locaties in Leuven

www.andleuven.com

T/M 27 MEI 2018 25 T/ DEN HAAG

/ 15 STAGES IN THE HAGUE CENTRE /

100 ACTS A.O. THE BELLRAYS / THE CHARM THE FURY / AFTERPARTEES TUSKY / FATA BOOM / ORGEL VRETEN / IT IT ANITA WWW.SNIESTER.NL

XX OOX D D 10313 0 A A N N R I R I O T T A A 3 DDOOXX PPARA CH 013 3 AAD AH AC N0 NP N W I I RW T IN R EW C 1 1 C VR VE CHT I 0 I A V N V N R R I I I O OVIC IN KKO VERW PPAA CHT TTK AC AH VE VERW IOBBAAT IO VVICIC IN AAMMEE

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KIJK VOOR ONS VOLLEDIGE PROGRAMMA KIJK VOOR ONS VOLLEDIGE PROGRAMMA OPOP KIJK VOOR ONS VOLLEDIGE PROGRAMMA OP KIJK KIJK VOOR VOOR ONS ONS VOLLEDIGE VOLLEDIGE PROGRAMMA PROGRAMMA OPOP

14 APR

Transition Festival

O.A. JAGA JAZZIST, PHRONESIS, SONS OF KEMET & MAMMAL HANDS

19 APR

Federico Albanese

15 MEI

God Is an Astronaut

16 MEI 20 MEI

Reinbert de Leeuw speelt Satie Fluister: Jan Swerts

25 MEI

Akua Naru

26 MEI

Sleep

31 MEI

COURTNEY BARNETT

3 JUNI

The Sea and Cake

10 JUNI 20 JUNI

Fluister: Saffronkeira + Siavash Amini EELS

19 AUG

Cigarettes After Sex

4 SEP

Hauschka

6 OKT

James Farm

JOSHUA REDMAN, AARON PARKS, MATT PENMAN & ERIC HARLAND

12 OKT

Beach House

12 OKT

MARTIN KOHLSTEDT

18 OKT

The Bad Plus

8-11 NOV Le Guess Who? festival

Q U E E N S O F T H E STO N E AG E A N D E R S O N . PA A K & T H E F R E E N AT I O N A L S N I C K C AV E & T H E B A D S E E D S D AV I D B Y R N E • F E V E R R AY • F I N K FRANZ FERDINAND • LEON BRIDGES MGMT • NILS FRAHM • ODESZA • SAMPHA T H E B L AC K M A D O N N A • C A L E X I C O • C U RT I S H A R D I N G D E J E U G D VA N T E G E N W O O R D I G • F I R S T A I D K I T • G O L D L I N K JAMES HOLDEN & THE ANIMAL SPIRITS J O N H O P K I N S L I V E • J U N G L E • O H S E E S • P O R T U G A L .T H E M A N S T. V I N C E N T • T H E B R E E D E R S • T O M M I S C H • W E N D E BÖKKERS

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LA FEMME

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IDLES

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J . B E R N A R DT

MOSES SUMNEY TA M I N O

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JOE GODDARD (LIVE)

M U YAY O R I F

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PA L M B O M E N I I

• TA N K A N D T H E B A N G A S

• YUNGBLUD

..and more to come

29 JUNI T/M 1 JULI 2018 GROENE HEUVELS

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BEUNINGEN

w w w. d o w n t h e r a b b i t h o l e . n l

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KO KO KO ! PA R C E L S

REWIRE SPECIAL OFFER

THE WIRE 410 | APRIL 2018

Mar y H a l vo r s o n Super strings theory THE WIRE TAPPER CD Anthology of underground

01 Alchymie & Gregg Skloff “’Oumuamua (excerpt)” From The Oort Cloud (Aerocade) alchymiemusic.com/alchymie-gregg-skloff, aerocademusic.com 02 Running “Feminine” From For Us By Us (Olde English Spelling Bee) soundcloud.com/runningtracks, facebook.com/runningtracks 03 Lino Capra Vaccina “Metafisica Del Suono (excerpt)” From Metafisiche Del Suono (Dark Companion)

12 Hannah Silva “Talking To Silence – Part 1” From Talk In A Bit (Human Kind) hannahsilva.co.uk, humankindrecords.com 13 Ryan Porter “Obamanomics” From The Optimist (World Galaxy/Alpha Pup) worldgalaxyrecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-optimist 14 Capri-Batterie & Stewart Lee “Weigh In Suite (Part IV)” From Bristol Fashion (no label) capri-batterie.com,

15 Sekten “Congratulation Song” From Music For Exercise – Headband (ILK Music) sekten.nu, ilkmusic.com

05 Mark Springer “Teatro Di Castagnoli I, Scansano” From Diving (Exit) markspringer.net, exit.co.uk

16 Jeppe Hoejgaard “Skrig Hvis Du Har Lunger” From Skrig Hvis Du Har Lunger (Kontentum) jeppehojgaard.com, kontentum.net

06 Saint Abdullah “Children At War” From Stars Have Eyes (PTP) soundcloud.com/saintabdullah,

17 Ammar 808 featuring Cheb Hassen Tej “Essoug Rsam” The Wire exclusive (Glitterbeat) facebook.com/ammar808, glitterbeat.com

purpletapepedigree.bandcamp.com 07 Nanook Of The North “Qulingat” From Nanook Of The North (Denovali) denovali.com 08 Dave Clarkson “Kraken” From A Blue Guide To Shore Ghosts And Sea Mystery (Linear Obsessional Recordings) linearobsessional.org, cavendishhouse.bandcamp.com

18 Sarah McQuaid “One Sparrow Down” From If We Dig Any Deeper It Could Get Dangerous (Shovel And A Spade) sarahmcquaid.com, sarahmcquaid.bandcamp.com 19 On Hiatus “Imaginary Friend” From Vapeurs (no label) onhiatusmusic.bandcamp.com, facebook.com/onhiatusmusic

09 BELP “Travelling Thru Galaxies” From Hippopotamus (Jahmoni Music/SVS Records) belp.audio, jahmoni.com

20 Sunna “Amma” From Amma EP (self-released) ssuunnaa.com, ssuunnaa.bandcamp.com

10 Merkaba Macabre “Iridescent (extract)” From Iterations And Afterimages (Psyché Tropes) soundcloud.com/merkaba-macabre, psyche-tropes.com

21 Allenheimer “Hazemaschine” From Fivefiles EP (Unfiled) unfiled.online, unfiled.bandcamp.com

11 Arthur King & The Night Sea “Hi (edit)” From Unknown Movie Night: Pi (Dangerbird) whoisarthurking.com, dangerbirdrecords.com

Cover artwork by Clifford Sage The Wire Tapper 46 is given away with The Wire issue 410 April 2018 Not for sale

Mary Halvorson | Pirate radio DJ sets | Eva-Maria Houben | Richard Youngs

capri-batterie.bandcamp.com

facebook.com/lino.vaccina, darkcompanion.com 04 Nicolas Gaunin “Rongo” From Noa Noa (Artetetra) soundcloud.com/nicolas-gaunin, artetetra.bandcamp.com

THE WIRE 410 | APRIL 2018 The Fringe Music Magazine £4.95 | 9 770952 068113 04

music

PIR ATE R ADIO The Wire Tapper 46

DJ SETS RICHARD YOUNGS E VA-MARIA HOUBEN Peter Blegvad | The Mover Anthony Braxton | Omit Robert Beatty on Grand Royal

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General Festival Info

Rewire Ticket & Info Centre

Night trains

Street address: Riviervismarkt 5

If you’ve travelled to The Hague from surrounding areas in the Netherlands, you’ll 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.

Het Nutshuis is home to the Rewire 2018 Ticket & Info Centre. If you haveve purchased a ticket online, you can exchange your e-ticket for a Rewire 2018 wristband at Het Nutshuis. Press registration and other festival-related information can also be found here. After closing hours, on Friday and Saturday you can exchange your ticket at Paard. Please see timings below. Opening hours

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

Friday 17:00 – 00:00 (from 00.00 at Paard) Saturday 11:00 – 00:00 (from 00.00 at Paard) Sunday 12:00 – 22:00

Discourse

1. Electriciteitsfabriek De Constant Rebecqueplein 20

7. Paard Prinsegracht 12

2. Zaal 3 De Constant Rebecqueplein 20A

8. Lutherse Kerk Lutherse Burgwal 7

3. Korzo Prinsestraat 42

9. Het Magazijn Grote Markt 10

4. Grote Kerk Rond de Grote Kerk 12

10. The Grey Space Paviljoensgracht 20

5. Het Nutshuis Riviervismarkt 5

11. West Museumkwartier Lange Voorhout 34

6. Koorenhuis Prinsegracht 27

12. West Groenewegje 136

100

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Credits Supervisory Board Dunja Colman, David Kenselaar, Remco de Valk

Director, Funding & Development Bronne Keesmaat

Programme Bronne Keesmaat (Head of Programme), Martijn Buser (Co-curator Music), Jo Kali (Co-curator Discourse & Discourse Coordinator), Henk Koolen

Marketing & Communications Bas de Beer (Marketing & Communications Manager), Phil van der Krogt, Anni Nöps (Intern)

Production Ingu van Zuylen (Production Manager), Julia Cano (Intern), Joya de Bock (Volunteer Manager), Barbara de Haan (Artist Service), Annelieke Plugge (Logistics)

Education Zoe Kate Reddy

Design Anja Kaiser & Jim Kühnel (Campaign & identity) Fay Asselbergs & Charlotte Gramberg (Desktop publishing and programme book) Dinamo (Type)

Web Development Basten Stokhuyzen

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Thanks We would like to thank all of our partners and sponsors for their continuous support. A big shout out to our amazing team of volunteers and ambassadors, and of course a big thank you for visiting our festival. Rewire Festival 2018 is organised and presented by Stichting Unfold © 2018 Rewire Festival / Stichting Unfold

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 pr@rewirefestival.nl

Mail P.O. Box 243 2501 CE Den Haag

Funding & Institutional