Thank you to everyone who made the first day of Rewire 2025 so special. We’re happy to share our second in a series of daily guides into Rewire’s music programme. As with yesterday, there are lots of artists to see, this is just a small selection of potential highlights to catch 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 Proximity Music: Echoes of Entropy exhibition, our film programme at Filmhuis Den Haag, today’s Not to be Senseless programme at Amare’s Swing hall, and the discussions, audio walks, and workshops hosted as part of our context programme.
Holy Tongue meets Shackleton – PAARD I, 18:55
From his beginnings in the UK dubstep scene in the early 2000s, where he co-founded cult label Skull Disco, Shackleton has carved out a name for himself as a multifaceted and pioneering producer over the past two decades; Valentina Magaletti, Al Wootton, and Susumu Mukai are the trio behind Holy Tongue, a jazz-adjacent dub-dance trio whose debut album Deliverance and Spiritual Warfare (2023) followed up a trilogy of critically acclaimed EPs. Holy Tongue and Shackleton came together after a chance meeting, where a remix request blossomed into their sparkling collaborative album on AD 93. Upon listening, it’s clear why they chose to title the album The Tumbling Psychic Joy of Now (2024). It bursts at the seams with percussive energy and echoing delay; in its winding rhythms and bubbling dub there is a psychedelic sense of life and experimentation and giddiness. Watch them this evening at PAARD I.
Sealionwoman – Koorenhuis, 19:00
Vocalist Kitty Whitelaw and double bass player Tye McGivern are the doom folk duo Sealionwoman. Distorted double-bass strings rumble with dark, foreboding, sonorous energy; like a flashlight beam piercing a shadowy night, McGivern's voice cuts through Whitelaw's bass, singing plaintive, beautiful melodies. Illusive and alluring, Sealionwoman's music dabbles in celtic folk tales and mythology: their debut album Siren (2018) was inspired by the Scottish folk tale of the selkie – a creature that shapeshifts between human and seal forms. Their follow-up, Nothing Will Grow in the Soil (2024), moves from water to earth, taking the yew tree and its perennial persistence and pagan influence as a thematic focus. Sprouting from this concept, they nurture songs of droning excellence.
Anna von Hausswolff – Amare - Concertzaal, 20:30
Following Arooj Aftab’s performance earlier in the evening, Amare’s gorgeous concert hall hosts the ethereal, unique, and half-metallic doom-pop of Gothenburg-born singer, pianist, organist, and composer Anna von Hausswolff. She is known for her innovative work at the intersection of tradition and experimentation. With the organ and her voice as her primary instruments, she creates captivating soundscapes that have earned her international acclaim.Rewire is happy to host the premiere of von Hausswolff’s brand new live show – featuring new music from her forthcoming album – where she is accompanied on stage by a seven-piece ensemble, including two drummers.
Elori Saxl – Lutherse Kerk, 21:00
Experimental electronic composer Elori Saxl performs music from her debut album The Blue of Distance (2021) – a vaporous, cinematic work of avant-garde contemporary classical composition – and her recent release Drifts & Surfaces (2024). On Drifts & Surfaces, bristling ambient compositions skirt and blur the lines between jazz, noise and minimalism. Thematically, the effervescent works explore the ways that technology has become inextricably linked with contemporary daily life. Through their trembling ambience, which elicits a sense of generation loss and internet compression, Saxl looks at the intertwining of the physical and digital worlds – delving into the uncanny realities of living a datafied life in constant, precarious flux.
Ego Death (Aho Ssan & Resina) – Koninklijke Schouwburg, 22:00
Aho Ssan is the moniker of electronic musician and artist Niamké Désiré; Resina is the alias of composer and cellist Karolina Rec. Together, they are Ego Death. Désiré and Rec met while contributing to Nicolás Jaar's Weavings (2022). From this initial encounter, they discovered a deep creative resonance – one that reverberates through their vast, immersive soundscapes. Their music brims with dark, cinematic intensity, stretching the tonality of the cello to its breaking point and exploring the textures left in its wake. Crackling noise, field recordings, and expansive synthesis shape their compositions, bringing a dynamic and ever-shifting sonic terrain. A wordless narrative of dissolution and reassembly unfolds – revealing music’s profound capacity as a language of emotion, subjectivity, and spirituality.
BITOI – Lutherse Kerk, 23:15
BITOI is made up of Cassius Lambert on electric bass and vocalists Alexandra Shabo, Lise Kroner, and Anja Tietze Lahrmann. The group’s name is an acronym for “bass is the only instrument,” which, although technically true of the group, is somewhat of a misnomer. Upon hearing the vocalists, one could easily say that they have attained mastery of their instrument of choice: the voice. This choir form the throughline of BITOI’s sound, guiding and leading Lambert’s bass through songs that are equally humble and lavish. With a processed electric bass, Lambert spins gorgeous spectral melodies that belie the bass’s reputation as a low-frequency instrument. Listen to the group perform music from their newly released album in the serene Lutherse Kerk later this evening.
Ex-Easter Island Head – Korzo - Zaal, 22:00
Ex-Easter Island Head are an experimental collective of musicians and composers made up of Benjamin D. Duvall, Benjamin Fair, Jonathan Hering, and Andrew PM Hunt. They perform with percussion and a variety of instruments – notably with mechanically augmented prepared electric guitars, approached with extended techniques. Their ambient- and kraut-rock-infused music is based around cycles and slowly unfurling musical phrases that brim with iridescence. Lathered in texture and permeating with harmonics, their rich repetitions hypnotise and lull. With dauntless creativity, Ex-Easter Island Head transmogrify their instruments, assembling them aurally into something that sounds closer to animal-song than something made by humans. Their shimmering and peculiar electroacoustic songs sound like a collaboration between Akira (1988) composer Shōji Yamashiro and no-wave guitar maestro Glenn Branca.
JASSS & Ben Kreukniet – PAARD I, 23:45
Traversing genres with joyful abandon, artist, producer, and DJ JASSS’s retrofuturist style foregrounds bass and percussion. With releases on labels such as Whities, Never Sleep, and Ostgut Ton, her music has a clear techno orientation, but that doesn’t stop her from sonic forays into industrial pop, nu-metal distortion, and fuzzed-out R&B. Ben Kreukniet is an artist and director who works with light, sound, video, and emerging technologies to create installations, objects, and altered environments; his work looks into themes of subjectivity, ritual, norms, and order. JASSS and Kreukniet worked together on A World of Service. At Rewire, they bring the world premiere of their brand new A/V show AWOS – a subliminal and vulnerable exploration of psychological states, human and inhuman forces, coinciding with JASSS’s upcoming album.
NYX – Grote Kerk, 00:00
As midnight falls upon The Hague, the futuristic choir collective NYX join together at Grote Kerk. The group takes the voice and its potentials to new places, while melding it with sparkling and sincere electronic production. NYX have a holistic approach to their songcraft, creating music that seeks to transform and re-wild the pain embedded in their bodies, and celebrate an untamed and collective feeling of empowerment. Their ethereal music blossoms out from extended vocal techniques which blur the line between voice and instrument. Led by music director Sian O’Gorman, thematically, the project finds connections between the body, architecture, and nature in an effort to create a celestial form of vocal embodiment.
Body Meπa – PAARD II, 18:15
Amidst swirling effects loops and cyclical and explosive percussion, Body Meπa, a group of genre-traversing luminaries, teases out works of delectable scale, cavernous breadth, and diabolic warmth. Coming from differing and intersecting traditions of improvised music, rock, jazz, fusion, and contemporary classical, the four come together as Body Meπa – a group which not so much make post-rock, but rather mutate it. At the group’s core is a cacophonous and joyous process of experimentation in and with time and sustain. They stretch and flatten it out, all the while playing chaotically in the resulting psychedelic half-states that emerge in the mulch.
Photo by Jan Rijk