Every year Rewire invites a wide range of international artists from all around the world. This year’s edition will feature artists hailing from Osaka to Poznan, who will give it all on the stage in The Hague. But closer to home, across the southern border, new artists are shaping their craft on the stages of Flanders’s cultural institutes. Together with de Brakke Grond, Rewire presents you with four rising talents from the Flemish underground.

Since 1983, de Brakke Grond has promoted Flemish culture in the Netherlands in all its forms: from the visual arts, to music, and to theatre, de Brakke Grond does it all. Tucked away in the heart of Amsterdam they select and monitor the most refreshing acts that lurk in Flemish shadows. Together we picked four exciting acts that are breaking new ground within their respective scenes in cities like Antwerp, Leuven, Ghent, and Brussels, and have brought their sound to the stages of STUK and VierNulVier. Together we are hosting Pak Yan Lau, Dienne, Vica Pacheco, and Youniss at Rewire 2023. Ready for a little who’s who?

Pak Yan Lau

Born in Belgium, with roots in Hong Kong, and now based in Brussels, Pak Yan Lau is a sound artist, improviser, musician, and composer, who has developed over the years a rich, dense, and captivating sound universe from prepared pianos, toy pianos, synths, electronics, and various sound objects. Skilfully blending electro-acoustic approaches, she explores sound in a bewitching way, merging different sound sources with poetry, magic, and finesse. During Rewire 2023, alongside her ensemble, consisting of Vera Cavallin, Giovanni Di Domenico, João Lobo, and Theo Lanau, Pak Yan performs a live rendition of her recent album Bakunawa (2021), delving and digging deep into the sound spectrum of detuned toy pianos, second-hand gong rods, prepared harp, metal tubes, and ring modulators. Instruments were searched for, collected, and bought worldwide: on Japanese street markets, in second hand stores in Brussels, from dedicated Ebay sellers, and from the cellar of Musica Impulse Centre in Neerpelt. The result is a piece both rich in harmonic textures of rather unconventional instruments, shaping an immersive piece of enthralling sonic details.

Bakunawa is a co-production of STUK, nona, Cortizona.

This project performs during Rewire 2023 with the support of Flemish Arts Centre de Brakke Grond, VierNulVier, and STUK.

Dienne

The Belgian composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Dienne builds songs and soundscapes which portray the images and stories that play behind her eyes. Combining analogue instruments like the oboe, the piano, and the flute with reverb-drenched vocals and shimmers of processed electronic sources, she creates hazy pieces of music full of the melancholy of remembrance and loss. 

Her debut album Addio (2022) was released on Nicolás Jaar’s Other People imprint. Following the passing of her grandmother due to Covid-19, and being unable to properly say goodbye due to travel restrictions, Dienne set out to give her farewell in musical form. The result is a deeply intimate work that channels classical instrumentation through foggy electronic experimentation. Memories, biographies, and family histories merge in this simultaneously sombre and optimistic work which plays out like a universal and comforting ode to loved ones lost. 

This project performs during Rewire 2023 with the support of Flemish Arts Centre de Brakke Grond, VierNulVier, and STUK.

Vica Pacheco

Ana Victoria, aka Vica Pacheco, was born in Oaxaca, southern Mexico in 1993. She studied art at La Esmeralda, México City before graduating from Villa Arson, Nice in 2017. Her practice is rooted in experimental music and composition, but she also has a plastic practice working through ceramics and 3D animation. Her work is above all eclectic and energetic, inspired by mythological crossbreeding, prehispanic technologies, and syncretism. She likes to arrange the most heterogeneous or hazardous elements between them to produce sound performances and installations. Pacheco lives and works in Brussels.

Mitote and Ollin are commissioned by iii in collaboration with Rewire, Amare, Overtoon, STUK, and iMal.

Youniss

On his second album White Space, to be released on VIERNULVIER Records on 8 March, the Belgian musician and visual artist Youniss reflects on his own personal “panic attack” instilled by the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. With heralding vocals bathing in polyphonic fragility, shrieking guitar sounds, and rattling patched-up drumwork with electronic-like textures, he delivers his own take on a perfectly imperfect 90s punk rock meets IDM cassette tape – giving a voice to his inner existential outcries.

As an exploration of identity and self-expression, Antwerp-based Youniss moves his way through the awkward, intrusive feelings that accompany performing as a Black man with an Arabic name through the gaze of the western world. The music and graphic concept of White Space is fueled by the pain caused by being misperceived and the feeling of being lost in the search to fit in. Translating this album to stage, Youniss and drummer Tim Caramin explore and express Youniss’s discomfort through music, costume design, set pieces, and projection.

White Space is a co-production with VierNulVier, deSingel, STUK, and de Brakke Grond.