Rewire announces 3rd wave of artists & projects
February 26 2024, news
With the 13th edition of Rewire moving ever closer, 37 new artists and projects have been added to the line-up of Rewire Festival 2024, including an extensive programme of interdisciplinary works and several collaborations with local cultural organisations.
The Rewire Festival 2024 will be taking place between 4 and 7 April across 20 venues in The Hague, including Amare.
In a world premiere, the incomparable singer, composer, and actor Keeley Forsyth will present her exceptional upcoming album The Hollow at Grote Kerk in an audiovisual performance, backed by a small ensemble. Loraine James presents a rare expanded A/V performance centered around her latest album Gentle Confrontation, alongside musician and drummer Fyn Dobson, with accompanying visuals by motion designer, director, and artist Alessandra Leone. The spiritual, poppy, club-infused “aetherave” sounds of Aïsha Devi find a fitting combination with the stirring scenography of artist Emmanuel Biard: they present Les Immortelles as a Dutch premiere at the festival. With new live A/V show Totally Recalled, beatsmith NAH promises a trippy, warped distillation of the confusion, disconnection, narcissism, and anxiety of modern life. Rounding out these newly announced audiovisual projects is Martin Messier’s 1 Drop 1000 Years. Performed twice on Friday, this bright, visually astounding, and moving performance of light and sound is both a celebration of water’s vitality and a warning about its precious nature in relation to climate change.
Rewire 2024 will welcome The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, a brand new project formed by composer, turntablist, and performer Mariam Rezaei, Mette Rasmussen, Gabriele Mitelli, and Lukas Koenig – their grungy jazz exploits are a wonder. Defying genre, the lush music of Tara Clerkin Trio drips with brightness, texture, and strangeness, borrowing from trip hop, jazz, electronica, and psychedelic rock. Joining the line-up alongside other Mexico City experimental luminaries such as the previously announced Titanic and Amor Muere is Phét Phét Phét, Jarrett Gilgore’s tremendous chamber-pop project that blends jazz, kraut, and ambient influences.
Danish composer and viola player Astrid Sonne will return to Rewire after making her debut in Netherlands five years ago, performing music from her new album Great Doubt – a beacon of dub-infused solemn-pop, where Sonne’s own voice takes the spotlight in an exciting new direction for her. The ghostly, blissful modular-synthesis soundscapes of acclaimed singer and producer Arushi Jain are unparalleled. She performs music from her forthcoming album on Leaving Records, Delight, inspired by Raga Bageshri, a type of raga that depicts the emotion of waiting for a reunion with one’s beloved. A hip hop luminary, active since the late nineties where he started out as a member of the acclaimed underground hip hop group Antipop Consortium, Beans comes to Rewire 2024. With nearly three decades of cutting-edge hip hop under his belt, his latest record ZWAARD is an experimental opus of sounds and bars, produced by Vladislav Delay. Voice artist, composer, performer, and interdisciplinary maker Stephanie Pan will perform The Art of Doing Nothing: a feminist manifesto, a collaboration with Ensemble Klang that celebrates intuitive choices and grounds itself in soft, “feminine” qualities like vulnerability and emotionality.
In a collaboration between Rewire and art space Nest, artist duo Atelier Impopulaire will present the second part of their Before We Love project: 12 Gates. This large-scale multi-screen installation integrates rare archival material with new footage of the UMBRA Poets Workshop – the 1960s organisation the project is about. Twice per day this installation is activated with a performance by Blacks’ Myths – the New York City–based experimental jazz duo featuring Luke Stewart on bass and Trae Crudup on drums. Blacks’ Myths also perform their own live show at the festival. Joining up with gallery Das Leben am Haverkamp, Rewire hosts an exhibition of artists Caz Egelie & Jesse Strikwerda titled A Staged Slumber.
Rewire 2024 will see the fourth edition of Proximity Music, a joint exhibition programme initiated in 2021 by Rewire and iii, which seeks to connect music, architecture, technology, ritual, and play through spatial experiences engaging with all the senses. Between 5 and 7 April, nine newly commissioned and adapted artworks by emerging and established artists will inhabit various locations across the centre of The Hague. Featuring artists Pelle Schilling, Nandita Kumar, Marco Fusinato, Louis Braddock Clarke, Henk Schut, Andrius Arutiunian, Jeanine Verloop, Myra-Ida van der Veen, and Sophia Bulgakova.
Transforming the organ of The Hague’s Lutherse Kerk into a large robotic musical instrument, Maxime Denuc presents both new music and compositions from his acclaimed album Nachthorn – which summons trance-like visions of club strobes through its rhythmic but beatless rave sensibilities. Raphael Rogiński’s works for solo guitar glimmer with improvisational current, bluesy grit, and masterful composition; his music is informed by an ongoing research practice that delves deep into the forgotten traditions of various Eastern European cultures. Drawing also from traditional folk roots is Gordan, featuring vocals by Serbian singer Svetlana Spajić. Their hypnotic and mesmerising music treats ancient folkloric knowledge and melodies from the Balkans as foundations upon which to conduct drone-driven, psychedelic, kraut-punk experiments. Step into the strange world of rhythmic battery, chaos-jazz, and overwhelming electronic magic that HHY & The Macumbas bring. They will be playing music from their anticipated new album, Bom Sangue Mau. Warm distortion, lo-fi echoes, and bittersweet melodies define the music of Sun Kit, the brand new project of musicians Jules Reidy and Andreas Dzialocha. Their forthcoming debut album All the Patterns Inside (2024) places a raw “rock-band” sound under an ethereal electronic veil.
Devon Rexi’s new album Biya Ba Man cements the band as a true highlight of Amsterdam’s underground scene; their special brand of post-punky psych-funk features pitch-shifted vocals intertwining with distorted grooves, propelled by percussion and bass. Another beloved band of the Netherlands’ capital city is indie dance group comforter2, whose “Madchester” revival sounds burst with ecstatic grooves and melancholic melody. While comforter2 are a renowned “band for the club heads,” Rewire is excited to announce a beloved club act for the club heads in Crystallmess: the French-born Ivoirian and Guadeloupean’s uncompromising DJ sets promise an unpredictable array of genres and sounds, ranging from trap and techno to footwork, R&B, and Jersey club. Joining the line-up of DJs at the festival is Moroccan-born Brussels-based DJ ojoo, whose exciting, strange, and genre-defying sets are ram-packed with the dubby dancehall bass.
Taking a club sound and breaking it apart to see what’s inside is Carmen Jaci, whose debut Happy Child is full of buoyant, dancey, sparkling productions that jumble and move around one’s head colourfully like a Rubik's Cube. Marvel in the similarly joyous, toy-box electronic sounds of ROLROLROL, the vibrant collaboration between producer and Brainfeeder Records regular Jameszoo and jazz and electronic musician Niels Broos.
Finally, Rewire is happy to announce a specially commissioned sensory sensitive concert: performer, composer, and artist Clara de Asís’s Off Flame. Based upon the concept of ignis fatuus – the fleeting ghostly light described by travellers of the night in European folklore – this performance is the outcome of de Asís’s ongoing research into the sonic areas of timbre and acoustics. As a speculation on permanence and impermanence, Off Flame offers a low-stimulus space of soft dynamics and multisensory exploration where what is absent eerily speaks just as loudly as that which is there.
Programme Changes
Unfortunately, Space Afrika & Rainy Miller’s collaborative performance is cancelled. Due to logistical reasons outside of Rewire’s control, Amor Muere will now perform on 6 April instead of 7 April, and Titanic on 7 April instead of 6 April. Myriam Bleau will perform on 5 April instead of 6 April.
Tickets
A limited amount of Day Passes for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are still available. 3-Day Passes for Rewire 2024 are now sold out. Book tickets via rewirefestival.nl/tickets
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