Every spring, Rewire turns The Hague into a fertile ground for fresh sounds and forward-thinking experimentation. Rewire 2025 is no exception. This year, Rewire welcomes artists from countries as far flung as Japan and Argentina, but many exciting creative currents are flowing much closer to home. Just across the southern Dutch border in Flanders, a new generation is reshaping the underground scene. Rewire is excited to bring this talent to its festival stages.
Rewire has partnered with de Brakke Grond to spotlight four Flemish talents – Elisabeth Klinck, Use Knife, maya dhondt, and Lukas De Clerck – who are pushing sonic boundaries and shaping the future of the Flemish scene. Since 1983, de Brakke Grond has promoted Flemish art in the Netherlands, from theatre and visual arts to innovative music.
Elisabeth Klinck
Brussels-based violinist, composer, and performer Elisabeth Klinck's compositions and performances for violin and electronics revel in the subtle and the sacred. She has a background in electroacoustic composition and theatre – in which she performs and for which she also composes. In a constant push and pull, her music wends between fragility and force, as can be heard on her stunning debut album Picture a Frame (2023). Klinck's ambient compositions marry organic textural noise and field recordings with synthesised drones and wailing violins – opening for the listener a window into an otherworldly place. She performs at Rewire 2025 ahead of her forthcoming sophomore album, set to be released on Hallow Ground later this year.
The presentation of this work was made possible thanks to the support of Flemish Arts Centre de Brakke Grond, VierNulVier & STUK.
Use Knife
Use Knife is a project by Iraqi vocalist and percussionist Saif Al-Qaissy, Belgian musicians Kwinten Mordijck and Stef Heeren, and multidisciplinary artist Youniss Ahamad – providing scenography and visuals during their show. Stemming from a residency the musicians partook in, Use Knife came together to probe the sonic and thematic overlaps and converges across Eastern and Western approaches to music and thought. The title of their lauded debut album, The Shedding of Skin (2022), refers to humanity’s survival instinct, particularly the impulse and, as is often the case, the necessity to leave war and disaster behind in order to seek new lives in new environments. They use analog and modular electronic machinery to invoke Arabic melodies and percussion, creating club-ready tracks that are potent with industrial energy, ragged post-punk distortion, and kinetic EBM pulses. Use Knife’s hallucinogenic, trance-inducing music ascends to new plains during their raw, pyrexic live shows. At Rewire, Use Knife perform new music from their anticipated forthcoming album État Coupable (2025) – which bridges culture and politics while merging each of the three band members’ skills in profoundly new ways – with visuals from Ahamad.
The presentation of this work was made possible thanks to the support of Flemish Arts Centre de Brakke Grond, VierNulVier & STUK.
maya dhondt
Formerly performing under the name Wendy, maya dhondt is a classically trained pianist and composer creating idiosyncratic glitch-pop and contemporary piano works. Fluttering vocal murmurs mingle with haunted piano strings while programmed fragmented drums spiral in and out of disarray; it is a rich sound world that dhondt has established. With her songs that blur the line between the world of fiction and reality, it’s not surprising to see a quote from magical-realist author Clarice Lispector adorn the Bandcamp page for dhont’s album wow, x (2024): “... you, with your habit of wanting to know why.” This quote hints towards the unknowability of dhondt’s songs, which are each shrouded in an air of mystery. As if emerging out from some hidden place, dhondt’s songs are at times foggy and noir and at others playful and charming. Harnessing this chimerical strangeness, dhondt makes music that twists and turns intuitively. “What I create never stands alone,” she says of her work, “it can be many things at once.”
The presentation of this work was made possible thanks to the support of Flemish Arts Centre de Brakke Grond, VierNulVier & STUK.
Lukas De Clerck
Lukas De Clerck is a composer, musician, and artist based in Brussels whose work wanders in the profound and the ancient. He specialises in the aulos: a long-extinct double-reeded Greco-Roman instrument. After spending several years delving into reed-making and playing replicas of ancient auloi, De Clerck has attempted to strip the instrument from its enigmatic past in new, self-taught, and experimental ways. On new album The Telescopic Aulos of Atlas (2024), released on Stephen O'Malley’s label Ideologic Organ, De Clerck reinvents the aulos again as the eponymous telescopic aulos, which stands upright like a sculpture. Transformed anew for modern times, De Clerck’s new interpretation of the aulos unfolds a rich whirring tapestry of sound. “The pipes are a context, a channel for the sound,” he says. “They create a narrative.” The stories they weave are primordial and ceremonial, enlivened by guttural rumblings and volcanic cacophony. Although there is a folk tenor to his music, it too is drenched in otherworldly tones that peer beyond the living human world and convoke visions of alien landscapes beyond simple comprehension. In De Clerk’s fossilised hums, new worlds unfurl.
Lukas De Clerck is an artist 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.
The creation of the Telescopic Aulos is made possible by the support of Flanders, state of the arts and co-producers STUK, Sonic Acts en de Bijloke. Also, the presentation of this work was made possible thanks to the support of Flemish Arts Centre de Brakke Grond, VierNulVier & STUK