After the wonderful opening performance of the festival yesterday we’re happy to guide you into Rewire 2024’s first full programme day. These are but a few highlights among an expansive programme of performances, talks, installations, and screenings across the city. Be sure to check out the full programme timetable here, including the return of the Proximity Music exhibition and audio walks, an afternoon of discussion as part of our context programme, and our film programme at Filmhuis Den Haag.
Martin Messier ‘1 Drop 1000 Years’ – Theater aan het Spui - Zaal 1, 18:10, 20:15, and 22:45
Rewire presents the European premiere of Montreal-based artist Martin Messier. Having spent over 15 years creating performances and installations which combine robotics, light, sound, and video, his latest piece 1 Drop 1000 Years needs to be seen to be believed. Looking towards the ways in which the world itself self-regulates its temperature – through an oceanic stream called the thermohaline circulation – Messier considers how one drop moves through this system, traversing the globe and changing the world as it travels. This bright, visually stunning performance of light and sound is both a celebration of water’s vitality and a warning about the climatic changes that are slowing down this planetary self-regulation. Performed three times this evening, catch the unmissable 1 Drop 1000 Years at Theater aan het Spui.
Amirtha Kidambi's Elder Ones – Koorenhuis, 19:00
In the intimate surroundings of Koorenhuis, the experimental ensemble Kidambi’s Elder Ones perform their unique blend of free jazz. Their recently released album New Monuments (2024) is a testament to their experimental prowess. The ensemble’s instruments form an intricate landscape for Kidambi’s voice to traverse. Truly making an instrument of her vocal chords, Kidambi’s syllabic, frenzied, and powerful utterances weave into the alluring, hypnotic, and confronting jazz melodies of the ensemble. Dealing with issues such as power, capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, and violence, Amirtha Kidambi's Elder Ones are not shy to confront and resist systems of oppression and control through their music. As such, a sense of ancestral energy pulses through their performances; it feels as though they are not alone on the stage, but are rather carried along by an old knowledge buried deep within the music.
Julia Holter – PAARD I, 20:45
Anyone who caught Julie Holter’s last set at Rewire knows how special of an experience her performances are. Holter’s dreamlike art pop, chameleonic and chimeric, is hard to pin down under a single definition. A broad spectrum of emotions and sounds crowd her songs, from the forlorn chamber-pop excellence of her breakout album Have You in My Wilderness (2015) – where her immaculate songwriting and singing wove into an unprecedented, moving whole – to its darker art pop follow-up Aviary (2018) – which veered into stranger territory of clambering orchestral swirls, daunted dissonance, and cavernous minimalism. She returns to PAARD I with new music from her brand new album Something in the Room She Moves (2024). With this recent music, Holter speaks of “being brought out of [her] comfort zone – into the unknown, playfulness and chaos.”
Chuquimamani-Condori – Korzo - Zaal, 21:15
In a Netherlands premiere, Chuquimamani-Condori’s collage-like assemblages of sound and rhythm grace the stage of Korzo. Buried deep under a layer of spirited, distorted, and noise-encrusted soil, their album DJ E (2023) is a maximalist montage of joy. Combining familiar and new sounds,their music is wonderful and bizarre yet deeply sensitive and touching as well. Their triumphant melodies tell stories of hope for transformation and change, while their approach to texture and rhythm brings visions of hazy sun-burnt evenings on remote dancefloors. Coursing through their music is a deep connection with the Andean huayño and kullawada ceremonial music, bringing with it a specificity to their music that makes it quite unlike anything else.
MIZU – Amare - Conservatoriumzaal, 21:45
In a European premiere, MIZU brings her beautiful soundscapes to Amare’s Conservatoriumzaal. Inviting listeners to traverse her rich universe through cinematic storytelling, MIZU’s stratiform compositions are damaged yet unbroken, offering catharsis. Careening sonic flourishes are underlined by droning loops full of rattling texture and tender orchestral currents. The invigorating and renewing facets of MIZU’s music feel full of a queer, generative sort of possibility, while the meditative cyclical melodies of her songs allow for listeners to wander the borders of their own sense of self – this is the gift of her compositions. Although her musical universe is vast and wide-reaching, it is in the congregation of harmonious sounds that MIZU’s music elicits an immense feeling of closeness.
One Leg One Eye – Lutherse Kerk, 23:00
Taking to the hallowed grounds of Den Haag’s Lutherse Kerk, Ian Lynch of acclaimed folk group Lankum performs music from his solo project One Leg One Eye. Careening with abounding, black metal noise and abyssal, squalid drones, it is truly contemporary yet entrenched too in a traditional air that conjures the rueful spirits of Irish history and myth. The uileann pipes are Lynch’s instrument of choice to build these buttressing pillars of drone. Blending this time-worn instrument with harrowing vocals, post-processing effects, One Leg One Eye pelts a frosty, fallow gale across the often verdant soundscape of Irish traditional music. One can only imagine what a droneful master such as Lynch can conjure in the acoustic confines of a space such as Lutherse Kerk – don’t miss this.
NAH 'Totally Recalled' – Korzo Zaal, 23:15
This live A/V set from the mysterious NAH is one that promises a deluge of aural and visual stimuli – a warped consideration through sound and visuals of the confusion, disconnection, narcissism, anxiety, and fear inherent to modern western experience, based upon his latest album Totally Recalled (2024). 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. 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.
HiTech – PAARD I, 1:10
Headlining PAARD I tonight is one of the most exciting new acts hailing from Detroit: HiTech. Their fresh take on ghettotech music pulls from a wide range of influences to provide a singular sound that is part hip hop, part techno, and all-the-way danceable. The three producers – King Milo, Milf Melly, and 47Chops – had been making music as part of Detroit’s underground rap scene before finding comradery in a strange circumstance: coming to the realisation that they had all been seeing the same person, unbeknownst to each other. After their self-titled debut – they released, Détwat in 2023: a wonderland of diverse ghettotech sounds. It’s rich with sped-up samples, smooth piano chords, catchy hooks, and hip-hop verses. HiTech’s music pulses with a playful energy that spans deep house to techno, even veering in some moments toward R&B and footwork territory.
Myriam Bleau – Korzo - Zaal, 01:35
Digital artist, composer, and performer Myriam Bleau presents the European premiere of Hypermobility at Korzo. It is an audiovisual performance which combines dance music allusions with volumetric laser projections; hyperkinetic patterns of digital synthesis in Supercollider are visualized through a laser beam creating sculpted planes of light above the audience. Bleau considers technology as a collaborator in, rather than just a tool for, her performances and releases which take music and sound as their point of departure to explore strange cybernetic realms. Across her audiovisual performances, interactive installations, and video works she uses code and machine learning as well as physical devices and machines to explore the porous space between the virtual and tactile world. Hypermobility seeks to capture the frantic and addictive sense of movement that defines contemporary western personhood – the tourist and the business-person alike – with a keen attention pointed at the alarming environmental impact of this desire for constant travel and change.
Photo by Parcifal Werkman