Rewire is excited to announce the first 42 artists and projects for its 14th edition, taking place between 3 and 6 April 2025 across 20+ cultural venues in the city centre of The Hague. As ever, Rewire will be showcasing genre-traversing and forward-thinking music, special projects, multidisciplinary performances, and much more across four days of sonic experimentation. Reduced 3-Day Passes are on sale until 30 November via rewirefestival.nl/tickets

Over the years, Rewire has championed early pioneers and innovators of experimental music who have impacted the landscape of contemporary music and art. This year, Rewire presents a multi-day focus programme around the work of an influential pioneer of sonic experimentation: composer, performer, improviser, sound artist, and writer Alvin Curran. An uncompromising master of alchemising experimental electronics and environmental found sounds, Curran’s idiosyncratic compositions have spanned decades; across his over-50-year-long career he has stood as a singular force in the landscapes of contemporary classical, free improvisation, sound collage, and electronics. Another pioneering experimental musician, the vocalist and composer Joan La Barbara, will be performing for the first time in the Netherlands in 13 years at Rewire. La Barbara’s shape-shifting work – using extended vocal techniques – foregrounds experimentation and disruption, forever finding new ways of playing the voice-as-instrument in previously unimaginable ways.

In her unique half-metallic doom music, singer, musician, and composer Anna von Hausswolff weaves songs and compositions that radiate with both an immense sense of grandiosity and an introspective secrecy. At Rewire 2025, von Hausswolff presents the premiere of a brand new live show featuring new music, accompanied on stage by a seven-piece band, which includes two drummers. Another artist whose work flutters and expands while retaining an unparalleled sense of intimacy is Colin Stetson. He performs live in the Netherlands for the first time in six years at Rewire 2025, playing music from his new album The Love It Took to Leave You in the grand surroundings of Grote Kerk. The mystical jazz of London-based Caribbean-Belgian composer, producer, and musician Nala Sinephro is inquisitive and existential. Her recently released sophomore album, Endlessness on Warp Records, is flush with warm synthesiser and harp compositions that scale up to cosmic levels of sonic expression. She performs at Rewire in Amare’s gorgeous concert hall alongside her band.

Adored musician, singer, producer, and composer Oklou will arrive at Rewire with her glistening nostalgia-tinted future-pop – where murmuring chamber pop and sparkling ambient production entangle into something chimerical and stunning. Good Sad Happy Bad will present their new album All Kinds of Days live at Rewire 2025. At times krauty, punky, and poppy, Good Sad Happy Bad’s music is always driven by caustic rhythm, hypnotic melody, and an experimental, playful approach. Another group expanding conceptions around the “band” sound are Moin, whose latest offering, You Never End, is a post-hardcore opus that brings in exciting vocal collaborators to contribute, including artist and writer Sophia Al-Maria and Irish-underground “heavy pop” star Olan Monk – both of whom will join Moin on stage at the festival. Also performing is the mercurial and singular composer and singer Arooj Aftab, whose sprawling vocal practice moves across jazz, South Asian classical music, pop, and blues, as can be heard on her new album Night Reign.

Composer Kali Malone will perform her landmark album All Life Long, backed by vocal ensemble Macadam, a brass ensemble, and SUNN O)))’s Stephen O'Malley. There is no better location for Malone’s music, which reinterprets centuries-old polyphonic compositional methods, than The Hague’s Grote Kerk. The improvisational group Osmium bring their morbid machinations of augmented, custom-made acoustic instrumentation, lathered in distortion and electronic manipulation. The group is made up of Oscar-winning composer Hildur Guðnadóttir – composer of Joker, Chernobyl, and Tár – vocalist Rully Shabara of Senyawa, musician James Ginzburg of emptyset, and Grammy-winning composer and sound designer Sam Slater. 

Presenting a world premiere performance of a new audiovisual work, sound artist, DJ, and producer JASSS and artist and director Ben Kreukniet perform at the festival – coupling JASSS’s techno-laden industrial pop and fuzzed-out R&B with Kreukniet’s generative environments of light, video, and installation. With their audiovisual performance The Drum and The Bird, Forensis and PAN label boss Bill Kouligas investigate German colonialism in Namibia – examining the relationship between lost ecologies and colonial exploitation through generative environmental audio, oral testimonies, and spatio-visual modelling. 

The many selves of Colin Self – artist, composer, puppeteer, researcher, and dancer – come together in Gasp! – a brand new performance of music, puppetry, video, and text that’s based on their forthcoming album on label RVNG Ltd., r∞L4nGc. Showcasing Self’s iridescent practice of song, movement, and spectacle, Gasp!, which has its world premiere at Rewire 2025, is about trans-dimensional dialogue, spiritual guidance, and queer ancestry. Performing a rare live show after many years on hiatus, legendary improvisational noise duo Yellow Swans – Gabriel Saloman and Pete Swanson – take to the Rewire stage with their noise-encrusted and texturally rich music – spanning noise, psychedelic, industrial, drone, and hardcore. In a European premiere, Olivia Block Trio – formed by renowned experimental composer and media artist Olivia Block – presents the unfurling electroacoustic wonder of The Mountains Pass, accompanied by musicians Paige Naylor on electronics and organ, and Jon Mueller on drums and percussion.

Joining the line-up is Holy Tongue meets Shackleton. The two projects decided to collaborate after a chance meeting, where a remix request blossomed into their bright, sparkling collaborative album on label AD 93. In their winding rhythms and bubbling dub there is a psychedelic sense of life, experimentation, and giddiness: reverberating steel drums mix with saxophonic snarls in their music which is rife with a wild sense of unpredictability.

Seefeel’s sound is one of ethereal echoes, bassy undercurrents, and twinkling melodious ambience. Following a series of adored releases in the mid-nineties, Seefeel went on hiatus in 1997 before returning first in 2010 and again in 2024. They are joined by Darren Seymour on bass to perform a special performance as a trio at Rewire 2025 in Lutherse Kerk. Rachika Nayar is an artist whose colossal works move between post-rock, trance, ambient, and pop; she performs at Rewire with composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Nina Keith as part of a special collaboration. Together, they have been working on a forthcoming release; at Rewire 2025, the duo premiere their new live show on European soil.

Rewire is pleased to announce that the enigmatic underground dance power-house Two Shell will be performing a live set at the festival. With influences as far ranging as R&B, IDM, trap, and metal, the sound of singer, songwriter, and producer Christopher Taylor, aka Body Meat, is hard to pin down; listen to his clubby avant-pop when he performs live at Rewire 2025. Similarly indefinable is the music of Bassvictim. Their various sonic influences of indie-sleaze, noughties mainstream pop, and dance punk are collaged together like letters on a ransom note: creating playful megapixel music for basement evangelists. Drawing from influences of the same era, emma dj will perform a world premiere live performance of his Lay2g album – a blog-house-revivalist release that marks a clubbier direction for the artist.

Rewire 2025 will also host a rare back-to-back set from two experts of abstract electronics and experimental club: DJ Plead and rRoxymore. Their DJ sets together explode with energy, pushing the bass to the forefront while maintaining the joyful melodic undercurrent of their individual and collaborative productions. Harnessing the buoyant bassy rhythms of bubbling – a defining genre of the Netherlands’ Afro-diasporic club landscape – producer and DJ De Schuurman makes his long-overdue Rewire festival debut at this year’s edition.

A stalwart of the underground Egyptian club sound, Hassan Abou Alam comes to Rewire to perform a live set. His inventive electronic productions are distinctive and impossible to define, but one thing is certain: expect sub-bass, and lots of it. Also joining the line-up is music producer and composer rEmPiT g0dDe$$. Her hard trance tracks take traditional tunings of Southeast Asian instruments from Malaysia and the Philippines and combine them with energetic percussion to create bass-heavy club hallucinations.

Zambian-Canadian rapper and producer Backxwash will perform a show of new music at Rewire 2025, bringing her special brand of industrial hip-hop that explodes with brash, maleficent intensity. With a more wistful take on the genre, as heart-wrenching as it is laugh-inducing, the poet, rapper, and “stand-up tragedian” Isaiah Hull performs at Rewire. Above dark glitch-imbued beats and minimal, glittering production, Hull shares his heartfelt and diaristic poems-as-tracks – witty and harrowed and never shying from the grim political realities of life in the UK.

From swooning bluesy R&B refrains to minimal toybox synthesis, Ben LaMar Gay Ensemble’s experimentations in and through jazz bubble with noisy textural wonder and free-spirited adventure. At Rewire, he will play new music from his forthcoming album on International Anthem. Two more exciting jazz groups associated with that label have been confirmed for the next Rewire festival edition: SML and Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti & Frank Rosaly. SML are a forward-thinking cosmic jazz quintet formed by rising luminaries of the West Coast jazz scene: synthesist Jeremiah Chiu, saxophonist Josh Johnson, percussionist Booker Stardrum, guitarist Gregory Uhlmann, and bassist Anna Butterss. Ferragutti & Rosaly will present music from their critically acclaimed MESTIZX alongside an ensemble of musicians. Although jazzy and experimental at its core, their music contains echoes of many influences, from the folk tradition of Bolivia to the psychedelic Tropicália fusions of Brazil.

Awash in glimmering, reverberating guitars and accompanied by her unmistakable, soft vocals, Maria Somerville creates slowcore for accelerated times. Ahead of her hotly anticipated forthcoming album on label 4AD, Somerville comes to Rewire 2025 to deliver an enchanting set of echoing hymns – sparse and lush in equal measure. Also performing is composer and producer Clarissa Connelly whose recent album on Warp Records, World of Work, is an experimental pop marvel of entangling melodies and sharp instrumentation. Milan W.’s new release on cult label STROOM, Leave Another Day, is folky, wavey, and arboreal. A cornerstone of the Flemish experimental music scene, his sound has morphed and changed through the years, but ever present is a dreamlike penchant for storytelling and texture. 

A rising luminary of that same Flemish scene is maya dhondt: a classically trained pianist and composer who creates idiosyncratic glitch-pop and contemporary piano works. Traversing genres and approaches with similar ease is The Hague–based experimental warble-core guitar and drum duo Able Noise, joining the Rewire 2025 line-up. Their newly released sophomore album High Tide, is a collage-like selection of hauntological gems that reverberate with sonic remnants.

A throughline for Rewire has been artists who subvert their chosen instrument or who create their instruments anew. Ex-Easter Island Head, playing at the festival, are one such group. Made up of musicians and composers made up of Benjamin D. Duvall, Benjamin Fair, Jonathan Hering, and Andrew PM Hunt, the band’s ambient- and kraut-rock-infused music is based around cycles and slowly unfurling musical phrases that brim with iridescence – performed with prepared electric guitars that they augment mechanically. Another hardware hacker Shigeru Ishihara – aka DJ Scotch Egg – performs at the festival alongside Indonesian composer, instrument-builder, and multi-instrumentalist J. "Mo'ong" Santoso Pribadi in the energetic new project Takkak Takkak. On their eponymous debut album, the duo hack together DIY instruments, building a trance-inducing kind of music that swirls with polyrhythmic fervour. 

Two other acts entangled in the world of instrument creation are Lukas De Clerck and FUJI​|​|​|​|​|​||​|​|​|​|​TA. De Clerck reimagines the ancient Greco-Roman aulos to create primordial and ceremonial songs, enlivened by guttural rumblings and volcanic cacophony. FUJI​|​|​|​|​|​||​|​|​|​|​TA returns to Rewire to perform a new set which takes rhythm as its focus, bringing his constantly evolving self-made organ and the years of careful mastery he has dedicated to it. Heralded as “an activistic concert,” in Gagi Petrovic & Modelo62’s Pay To Destroy, the audience members’ behaviour and interaction influences the musical output – polluting and healing parts of the composition. Tackling the effects of global capitalism on the Earth’s environment, the work, also a world premiere performance, seeks to offer a confrontational yet thought-provoking mirror through which the audience can gaze upon consumerist behaviour and its potential outcomes.

First artists and projects for Rewire 2025:

Able Noise
Anna von Hausswolff
Alvin Curran
Arooj Aftab
Backxwash
Bassvictim
Ben LaMar Gay Ensemble
Body Meat
Clarissa Connelly
Colin Self ‘Gasp!’ world premiere
Colin Stetson
De Schuurman
DJ Plead b2b rRoxymore
emma dj (live) world premiereworld premiere
Ex-Easter Island Head
Forensis & Bill Kouligas 'The Drum and The Bird'
FUJI|||||||||||TA
Gagi Petrovic & Modelo62 ‘Pay To Destroy’ world premiere
Good Sad Happy Bad
Hassan Abou Alam (live)
Holy Tongue meets Shackleton
Isaiah Hull
Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti & Frank Rosaly ‘MESTIZX’
JASSS & Ben Kreukniet world premiere
Joan La Barbara
Kali Malone ‘All Life Long’ for Organ, Choir, and Brass
Lukas De Clerck
Maria Somerville
maya dhondt
Milan W.
Moin ft. Sophia Al-Maria & Olan Monk
Nala Sinephro
Oklou
Olivia Block Trio ‘The Mountain Pass’
Osmium (Hildur Guðnadóttir, Rully Shabara, Sam Slater, James Ginzburg)
Rachika Nayar & Nina Keith
rEmPiT g0dDe$$ (live)
Seefeel
SML
Takkak Takkak
Two Shell
Yellow Swans

These are but a handful of the many exploratory and inventive artists you can expect to see at Rewire 2025. Keep an eye out for the next announcements including news about the opening programme on Thursday 3 April, the context programme, installations, workshops, and the film programme.

Tickets
A limited number of Reduced 3-Day Passes are available until 30 November, granting access to the festival programme on 4, 5, and 6 April. Book now via rewirefestival.nl/tickets

Please note: tickets for the opening programme on 3 April will be available at a later date.

Lukas De Clerck and Clarissa Connelly are artists of the SHAPE+ platform for innovative music and interdisciplinary art, co-funded by the European Union and Pro Helvetia.

SHAPE+ is co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.