Before the festival goes live on Thursday, dive into the programme with the last of our ‘Festival Routes’, giving you some tips on stuff to check out during the festival. For our final route we delve into the world of awe-inspiring electronics on offer in the programme. From cutting-edge sound design, piercing distrotion and adrenaline pumping beats to soft and meditative ambience, take a look at some of the artists in the programme who can broadly fall under the umbrella of what we consider electronic music to be.
→ Attend the Rewire 2021 Facebook event.
Melbourne's Conrad Standish and Sam Karmel, aka CS + Kreme, exist completely in their own universe - a genre-skeptical starscape where fuzzy dub, eerie ambience, atonal folk and well-smoked rap can exist together and at once. For Rewire 2021, Karmel and Standish work with Italian motion graphics designer and director Alessandra Leone, an artist known for her dynamic, cutting-edge audiovisual works, on a new audiovisual work entitled 'Storm Rips Banana Tree'. Check out CS + Kreme’s ‘Snoopy’, released last year:
Close friends for years, Byron Westbrook & Koen Holtkamp found themselves on opposite sides of the USA when COVID-19 struck. Their project ‘Chromatic Dispersion’ was conceived as a way to stay connected, beginning as a visual interpretation by Holtkamp of Westbrook's most recent compositions before it evolved into its own idiosyncratic project. As the duo worked together more frequently, they began to allow their work to feed into itself, with Westbrook taking sonic cues from Holtkamp's visual treatments and vice versa. Listen to recent releases from both artists here:
Working both in sound and video, Pierce Warnecke & Matthew Biederman have been releasing music and creating performances and installations for over a decade. At Rewire 2021, the two artists are collaborating on 'Somnifacient Signals', an urgent audiovisual work exploring the possibility of connecting with the audience at the time of heightened physical restrictions. The performance focuses on transformation of live webcam feeds using noise, moshing, feedback, extensive compositing / overlaying, saturation and glitch to transform the bland material into an intense take on experiencing a mediated world and connecting via the internet. Check out music and a teaser from both of them below:
Watch "Somnifacient Signals (excerpts)" by "Matthew Biederman" on https://vimeo.com/
Visual artist, poet and filmmaker Tibyan Mahawah Sanoh's work reflects the interiority and exteriority of her family relationships. Space Afrika (Joshua Inyang and Joshua Tarelle) are a Manchester-based duo who channel the industrial architecture of Northwest England into their minimalist patchworks of rhythm, texture and sensation. Their collaboration with comes in the form of a film, with Sanoh's imagery and Space Afrika’s soundtrack in conversation with one another, painting a vivid portrait of the stories and voices highlighted throughout it. Listen to Space Afrika’s excellent release from last year ‘hybtwibt?’:
Meuko! Meuko! is a solo project of Taipei based artist Pon, the experimental music producer and live performer. Meuko! Meuko! bursted into the experimental music scene in 2017 with her unique sound - its shadowy atmosphere undercuts glitchy dance tracks loaded up with samples and toy noises. NAXS Corp. is a Taiwan based, network embedded art collective founded in 2016. Focused on the accelerated transformation of human experiences, NAXS investigates the dialectic relation between posthuman mythology, animism ritual practices, creating its fictional framework for the internet society. Listen to Meuko! Meuko!’s latest release here:
For Rewire 2021, New York-based techno artist and theorist DeForrest Brown, Jr. (aka Speaker Music) presents exclusive AV performance drawing upon the themes explored in his 2020 album Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry, created in response to recent events surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement. His second release for Planet Mu as Speaker Music channels the modernist Black tradition of rhythm and soul music as an intellectual site and sound of generational trauma, bursting through the frames of Western music and thought. Listen to the album here:
As part of Rewire’s collaboration with Club Qu on the Saturday night of the festival, we present a number of DJ sets taking place inside the virtual club. Get an idea of what to expect here: