We highlight some notable names at The Hague’s delightfully perplexing music & art extravaganza, which takes place this weekend.
The word ‘synergy’ feels almost as dirty as the word ‘content’ these days, but humor me: I can’t help but be awed at how a city can shape a festival and vice versa. Utrecht’s Le Guess Who?, for example, often carries this utopian closeness and warmth – and every year (although I missed last year’s edition) I sink into this humble modesty where universal truths like love, kindred and community prevail. It feels like Utrecht, like a sanctuary more than a danger zone.
The Hague’s Rewire attacks me with an opposite, equally enticing sentiment: something more fantastical, sprawling and electric. Not sure whether I should pin it on the aristocrat air of its architecture, or the fact that war criminals are put here on trial – but seeing some of the most cutting edge artists in full autonomy feels daunting in the best way. I always feel this stirring sense of possibility – as if my atoms are expanding at the mere thought of all the questions left unanswered. Though there’s some overlap between Rewire and the aforementioned Le Guess Who? in programming, the vibe is truly miles apart, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Per usual there’s plenty of brilliance at the top with names like Good Sad Happy Bad, Colin Stetson, Panda Bear, Arooj Aftab, Backxwash (presenting her new album Only Dust Remains), Laurie Anderson and Matmos out and about. But if you allow yourself to amble astray, you might end up witnessing boisterous genre-bending racket-makers like Lord Spikeheart and Body Meat. If you need to give your limbs a rest, we have artists like Kali Malone, Maria Somerville, the duo of claire rousay & more eaze and Eiko Ishibashi – legendary film composer, and particularly so for pandemic-era lifesaver For McCoy – soothe you into obliviousness.
Acts like Taupe, Ben LaMar Gay Ensemble and da Googie & Cara Tivey – an enticing project featuring My Bloody Valentine’s Deb Googe and well-travelled multi-instrumentalist Cara Tivey – will lend their talents well to Koorenhuis’s homely setting (I love Koorenhuis and will leave no opportunity unchecked each year to say it). In the blackest of nights, all bets are off with legends like Hassan Abou Alam and ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U in lockstep with trail blazers like Tayhana and Animistic Beliefs. Through all this hoopla, you’d almost forget the great billy woods will be in the mix as well.
Every year it’s a painstaking ordeal to highlight some of the acts to check out, but here are 10 names that deserve your immediate attention.
Nala Sinephro
Friday – 20:35 – 21:45 – Amare Concertzaal
It feel rather feeble and futile to discuss whether Nala Sinephro’s work leans more towards ambient or jazz. But you do wonder how a record like Endlessness, as well debut Space 1.8, could possibly be performed live. Well, one thing I can say for certain, somehow it’s possible. Listening to her work is like hearing tiny ecosystems of music transform in mere instants – yet her music never seems to be in a hurry either; she is tremendously generous to her listeners, and allowing them to take in all the glorious (micro)tonalities, rhythms and textures coalescing and blending together into higher stratospheres. To see it all unfold at the Amare is guaranteed to leave audience in a continuum of awe and bewilderment.
Kassie Krut
Friday: 23:15 – 00:00 PAARD II
This edition of Rewire appears to have put up a lot more quote-unquote rock bands than recent previous editions. But with Rewire being Rewire and all that, these are far from your straightforward ones – usually known forms get deconstructed or just well, plain destructed. For example, we have YHWH Nailgun pounding Concordia into submission on Friday, but they’ve been a known volatile entity for a good few months. Use Knife is another band to check out: having seen them before, I can confirm they are a bonkers live act.
Brooklyn’s Kassie Krut are – well, still kind of in the middle of the notoriety-O-meter – since they pretty much sprung from the embers of the sadly forever underrated Palm. But they are a wholly different beast, make no mistake. Kassie Krut juxtapose discord with frantic fun on the same wavelength as a Deerhoof, Empath or Water From Your Eyes, and honest to goodness, we can never have enough bands like these. Magically scrumptious is one word to describe these cats. And who knows, you might up dancing a bit as well.
Takkak Takkak
Friday: 00:30 – 01:20 – Concordia
Honestly, they already had me at “gabberfied Game Boys”, but let’s attempt to explain why Takkak Takkak is a must-watch prospect at Rewire. This project lead by Indonesian multi-instrumentalist J. “Mo’ong” Santoso Pribadi and Japanese composer Shigeru Ishihara (aka DJ Scotch Egg) reads as a wacky hybrid of noise-punk show and lab experiment, creating a Mecha-Godzilla scaled noise abomination that’ll rattle your very bones – using both known and self-made instruments. Exciting stuff, especially if you’re able to get a nod of approval from the likes of Boredoms and Lightning Bolt.
Ex-Easter Island Head
Saturday – 22:00 – 20:45 – Korzo
Takkak Takkak will undoubtedly pack a punch, but hitting things doesn’t always have to perform loudness. This astonishing experimental group from Liverpool uses percussive elements to serve silence and sensitivity. In a time when a lot of music springs from the binaries of digital spaces, Ex-Easter Island Head are resourceful in getting novel sounds out of physical things; haptic motors from mobile phones are used, for instance, to extract fresh textures from string instruments and percussion. Voices are recorded on phones, and then repurposed to manipulate melodies through the glorious laws of spatiality.
All this sonic wizardry could be considered a bit ‘wanky’, however, if the music itself wasn’t completely amazing. Fortunately, EEIH’s humanoid grooves teem with the heart, warmth and elation the best electronic music elicits – even though almost everything, miraculously, has a tangible source – pinpointing that sweet spot between the brainy and the spiritual. Truly a wonderful band that has carved out a lane in music that’s entirely their own.
Maggie Khorrami
Saturday – 00:15 – 00:50 – GR8
Like EEIH, Maggie Khorrami doesn’t wield her instrument in any sort of traditional fashion. But this artist, composer and sound engineer based in The Hague takes us back again to gnarlier sonic pastures. Her violin looks like a prop from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser series: those spikes are not just for show either. The infernal electro-acoustic noise they help generate will twist your innards into all sorts of complicated knots. Khorrami herself possesses a growl that’ll make your hairs erect with terror. Khorrami’s shows aren’t just primal expression either: her work meticulously examines the sensory and audiovisual. It’s not haphazard aural onslaught – it’s efficiently optimised aural onslaught…and, suffice it to say, we’re here for it.
Erika de Casier
Saturday – 20:45 – 21.30 – PAARD I
Rewire is often pegged as a festival for scholarly avant-garde composers and underground experimentalists. That being said, if the history of recorded music over the past decades has told us anything, it’s that the cutting edge always provides the building blocks for how pop will sound in the future. One can’t exist without the other, as records like EUSEXUA by FKA Twigs and Raven by Kelela (who closed Rewire with a mesmerising set two years ago) have recently proven. Erika de Casier is another example of a more mainstream-friendly artist who’s not just a brilliant songwriter, but just as visionary in molding newfangled sounds into a magnetic pop sensibility – like the ripest of fruits.
Nyokabi Kariũki & Cello Octet Amsterdam – Birdsongs from Kĩrĩnyaga
Sunday – 14.15 – 15:00 – Amare Conservatoriumzaal
We have Kenyan composer, vocalist and sound artist Nyokabi Kariũki surrounded by 8 cellists in a room, which in and of itself, should garner some inspiring musical mediations. Birdsongs from Kĩrĩnyaga was hatched when Kariũki stumbled upon a species of African birds who have been singing the same song for thousands of years. It triggers a larger interest in birding, and how it encourages a keenness of our own surroundings.
Kariũki’s work has been as much about exploring new sonic frontiers as it has been to rekindling with what we’ve lost through the erosion of time, to the point where they could be considered one and the same. Birdsongs from Kĩrĩnyaga forms a dialogue between the resilience of nature and the fickleness of modern civilisation – another stepping stone in a magnanimous quest.
Wendy Eisenberg
Sunday – 16:00 – 16:45 – PAARD II
With Viewfinder, Wendy Eisenberg made an experimental pop album about getting their eyes lasered and seeing the world in high definition for the first time. Though their crisp, twee Karen Carpenter-ish voice might suggests a world suddenly brimming with color and tactility, this restless music reckons with a melancholy of “changing isn’t healing” – in their own words.
Sometimes, leaving the mysteries and the unseen unblemished brings its own sense of illumination, as they have found out the hard way. But there are worse detours than making a whole record about it, right? Eisenberg captures this dawning-of urgently realtime, letting the joy of reinvention and a stream-of-consciousness reverie pull their music to unexpected avenues.
Moin ft. Olan Monk, Sophia Al-Maria, and Coby Sey
Sunday – 19:00 – 20:00 – PAARD I
As previously stated, Rewire doesn’t program standard rock outfits. And Moin might be the most unique experimental rock group around: withering down post-hardcore/noise rock to an almost diaristic introspection and warmth. You might call it a bit of a supergroup as well with Tom Halstead and Joe Andrews of Raime (who’ll DJ at Grey Space In The Middle on Saturday night), joining forced with one of earth’s most innovative drummers, Valentina Magaletti (who will perform a set with Holy Tongue and Shackleton on the Thursday). The guest artists featured on excellent latest LP You Never End – Coby Sey, Sophia Al-Maria and Olan Monk – will all be there in the flesh to perform, making this gig extra special.
Angry Blackmen
Sunday – 21.30 – 22.15 – PAARD II
There will be plenty of steam to blow off as Rewire 2025 draws to its stirring conclusion. Leave it to Angry Blackmen to shake the very pillars of heaven. The duo of Quentin Branch and Brian Warren channel the increasingly bizarre and oppressive situation of being alive in America – with a breakneck ferociousness and barbed-wire wit. There’s a lot of shit that stinks behind closed doors, and Angry Blackmen’s music is a ginormous fucking crowbar to pry it all open. And chaos usually ensues – most fortunately, the kind of chaos that breeds camaraderie over calamity.
Rewire takes place 3-6 of April. More info on program and ticket sales here.
Header photo: Parcifal Werkman
