Every year Rewire invites a wide range of international artists from all around the world. This year’s edition will feature artists hailing from Shanghai to Beirut, who will grace 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 three 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. Together we selected three exciting acts that are breaking new ground within their respective scenes, and have brought their sound to the stages of STUK and VIERNULVIER. Together we are hosting NAH, Maxime Denuc, and Roméo Poirier & Ohme at Rewire 2024. Time for these artists to be introduced.
With a foundation in DIY punk, noise, avant jazz, electronic music, and hip-hop, the music of prolific percussionist, sound manipulator, and visual artist NAH is a mutant concoction of sounds. In some songs, NAH’s playful chopped sampledelia takes the crooning joyous sounds of gospel, disco, and funk and turns them into noisy, syllabic, rhythmic opuses of experimental electronics. In others, distorted synthesisers sizzle under NAH’s grizzly programmed and live drums, offering up demoniac tracks that urge the body to move. The first single from his forthcoming album Totally Recalled (2024) – which he presents as a special live A/V performance at Rewire 2024 – is a energetic, percussive, and Baltimore-club-infused reconstruction a gospel classic, slabbered with NAH’s unique percussive touch. Totally Recalled promises to be a warped consideration through sound and visuals of the confusion, disconnection, narcissism, anxiety, and fear inherent to modern western experience. Live, NAH performs with a minimal set up featuring no more than a drum kit and various samplers, a performance style which brings the urgency of his music to the fore.
The presentation of this work was made possible thanks to the support of Flemish Arts Centre de Brakke Grond, VierNulVier & STUK.
Brussels-based electronic music composer Maxime Denuc crafts vivid ambient music – most recently taking a focus on church organs in his work. The words “for midi-controlled organ” proudly adorn his recent album Nachthorn (2022). In the album, the strength of his compositions are supported further by the interesting blurring of the lines between physicality and digitality. Although the organ’s notes are sequenced to perfection, the uniqueness of each billowing pipe, of each burst of air, cause a time-worn human element to seep through amidst the arpeggiated sanctity of the midi signal. While the atmospheres of the songs point towards ambience due to the qualities of the instrument of choice, tracks such as “Agoraphobia” and “Fat old sun” summon trance-like visions of club strobes through their rhythmic – but beatless – rave sensibilities. For Rewire, Denuc will debut a performance involving new organ robots that he has developed in collaboration with Brussels-based engineers from Bots Conspiracy and Shakmat. These robots will perform the works of Denuc on the organ at Lutherse Kerk in The Hague as part of the festival.
The presentation of this work was made possible thanks to the support of Flemish Arts Centre de Brakke Grond, VierNulVier & STUK.
As a former lifeguard, Roméo Poirer’s dubby music has always been linked with water: from its washed-out samples to the soaking synthy fluidity that underpins them. His cult debut cassette Plage Arrière (2016) was a meditation on three Greek islands; follow-up Hotel Nota (2020) built on the beachy themes of his first album with a bubbling Balearic calmness. The wavy sensibility of Poirer’s music is bolstered in ways by the tidal movements of his songs, which are themselves often made with revisited samples that wash up on the shores of newer compositions. “I always resample myself, using fragments of a track to make a new one, as an ongoing process,” Poirier says of his ever-expanding archive of self-recorded loops utilised on latest album Living Room (2022): “The sound is evolving with me in parallel and the loops carry in their DNA all transformational stages, filled with previous tracks, sedimented.” Poirier has built a unique sound that’s as if The Caretaker has started an archival ambient project with Jimmy Buffett. That’s to say, as serious, touching, and intentional as the music is, it also has a sense of humour and a vivacious weirdness ingrained around its edges like salt on the rim of a glass. At the festival, Poirier presents a new audiovisual project entitled Tales of Entropy in collaboration with Ohme, a Brussels-based production, research, and education organisation working across art and science. The performance takes a microscopic view to the changing structures of organic matter – combining generative music production, live polarised light microscopy, and computer vision. Feeding video-images into audio-processing, this symbiotic performance blends the senses to create a hypnotic visual and aural landscape like no other.
The presentation of this work was made possible thanks to the support of Flemish Arts Centre de Brakke Grond, VierNulVier & STUK.