Thank you to everyone who made Saturday such a memorable day. We hope you’ve had a good night’s rest and are prepared for our final festival day. Sunday is packed with things to do, but we’ve prepared another list of highlights to catch today. Here is a handful of selections from our expansive programme of performances, talks, installations, and screenings. Be sure to check out the full programme timetable here, including the return of the Proximity Music exhibition and audio walks, our final day of discussions as part of our context programme, and the last screenings from our film programme at Filmhuis Den Haag.
Brìghde Chaimbeul, Maëva Berthelot & Temitope Ajose ‘Where the Veil is Thin’ – Theater aan het Spui - Zaal 1, 15:00
After her incredible performance yesterday at Lutherse Kerk, piper Brìghde Chaimbeul returns this evening with a special collaborative performance with performance artists Maëva Berthelot and Temitope Ajose titled Where the Veil is Thin: an ode to an enigmatic character from Gaelic mythology. Following a lineage that spans hundreds of years of a folk tradition that beckons the soul and the feet towards movement, Chaimbeul’s attentive compositions drag the bagpipe’s drones out from an ancient-sounding habitat to somewhere that feels utterly contemporary. The project, Where the Veil is Thin, encapsulates this contemporary nature through collaboration with the choreographers and performers Berthelot and Ajose. The performance explores what it is to be a creator and a destroyer, to be both feared and revered, based upon the figure of Cailleach Bheur – a mythological one-eyed giantess. Together, these artists share a story that evokes the eternal frictive dance between a landscape and those who are of it. Experience the wonder of Where the Veil is Thin at Theater aan het Spui this afternoon at 15:00.
goat (jp) – PAARD I, 16:45
The reputation of goat (jp) as an unmissable live group is one that they have truly earned. Bound by an interknit integration of performers but with a frazzled, no-wavey punk edge, the music of goat (jp) defies clear definition. Sounding almost as if they’re computer-sequenced, they are tight beyond reason and renowned as live performers at the height of their craft. Calling it jazz might be wrong, but there is a spiritual quality to their cyclical, kraut-tech songs for guitar, saxophone, percussion, and flute that elicits the communal and improvisational anarchy of jazz. Forever playing with time signatures and expectations of what certain instruments should sound like, they celebrate 10 years together as a band at Rewire with what promises to be an immense performance at PAARD I.
Ben Vida with Yarn/Wire & Nina Dante – Amare - Conservatoriumzaal, 16:45
This spellbinding performance of poetic idiosyncrasies and playful, soft instrumentation appears at Rewire as a European premiere. Composer and sound artist Ben Vida’s collaboration with soprano vocalist Nina Dante and the impeccable ensemble Yarn/Wire is something special. Their album together, The Beat My Head Hit (2023), overflowed with knowledge and intrigue in the form of humorous mundanity and sparkling magic realism. Through strict cadence and flourishes of rhythmic strangeness, Vida’s voice – amplified and duplicated harmoniously by Dante’s singing – provides a steady but unpredictable throughline in the music, broken only by gasps of breath. The duo of vocalists performs in tandem, repeating and echoing off one another, machine-like yet imbued with irrevocable warmth. Beneath this vocal experimentation is the soothing and subtle playing of quartet Yarn/Wire, whose performance yesterday at Koninklijke Schouwburg was enthralling. Their mastery of their instruments provide an ambiguous, hypnotic, and minimal background that give Vida’s and Dante’s voices space to blossom so poetically.
Youmna Saba – Amare - Conservatoriumzaal, 19:00
In a Netherlands premiere, musician, composer, and musicologist Youmna Saba performs on her reimagined oud – cybernetically transformed through a special digital extension that she developed – with accompaniment by her mesmeric vocals. Saba’s attachment uses integrated synthesised electronics that amplify the subtle haptic vibrations of the oud’s fingerboard and its hidden resonances that often slip by the human ear, creating droning subterranean tones. Electroacoustic in its truest sense, Saba’s music feels much like a collaboration between something synthetic and something deeply human. Borrowing from the long tradition of instrument making, she brings a new approach, adapting the oud for exploration into new sonic potentials. The oud speaks just as she does – appearing in her music as an ethereal figure with many urgent things to address and with an uncanny sense of agency and expression. Experience it for yourself at Amare’s Conservatoriumzaal.
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters – Koorenhuis, 20:30
Stemming from composer, turntablist, and performer Mariam Rezaei’s residency at London’s Cafe OTO late last year, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters stems from a mutant concoction of influences: noise, hip hop, techno, grunge, and free jazz. The group, featuring Rezaei on turntables, Mette Rasmussen on alto saxophone, Gabriele Mitelli on piccolo trumpet and electronics, and Lukas Koenig on drums take to the stage of Koorenhuis at 20:30 this evening to play an unpredictable set of bubbling experimentations. While moments in their music leak with familiar jazz sounds, the scratched techno-fabulations of Rezaei’s turntablism combine with with Mitelli’s ferocious trumpet, Koenig’s blasting drums, and Rasmussen’s snarling sax to form a new sonic combination that brims and explodes outwards into something undefinable. There will be cosmic chanting, spangled noise, and gnarly wails – all coursing with a fun experimentation and chaotic punk character.
Titanic – Koninklijke Schouwburg, 21:00
This world premiere live performance from Titanic – their first live show ever – is sure to be a highlight of this evening. Titanic is a collaboration between cellist, composer, musician, and Rewire alum Mabe Fratti and musician Hector Tosta – AKA I la Católica. Though the project’s title might imply something gargantuan and sprawling, they excel in their moments of slight and subtle jazz-playing just as much as they do in their moments of anthemic and ecstatic pop delivery. Their music is a bossa-supernova of experimental and familiar sounds reaching in lots of directions, linked together by adept songwriting and tonal understanding. The chugging cello riffs hint towards post rock, but their balladic power and chamber pop excellence is undeniable. Throughout Titanic’s songs, a charming sincerity rings out in the falsetto timbres of Fratti’s voice, while its underlying instrumentation promises surprises around every corner. Catch them performing this evening at Koninklijke Schouwburg.
Lolo & Sosaku ‘The End’ – Theater aan het Spui - Zaal 1, 21:00
The performances of avant-garde artist duo Lolo & Sosaku have to be witnessed to be believed. They create industrial noisescapes of whirring motors, rattling parts, and engulfing rhythmic hums. Drowning in feedback and disruptive physical sounds, this group has been creating mesmerising sound sculptures using self-made instruments and contraptions for nearly 20 years. They create music that is at times brimming with almost danceable techno rhythms before collapsing the next moment into itself, grinding to a cacophonous halt in a gaping maw of its own making. They perform The End live at Rewire at Theater aan het Spui this evening; be there to witness the cacophonous songs spewing from their machines.
Nailah Hunter – Amare - Conservatoriumzaal, 21:00
Nailah Hunter is an LA-based multi-instrumentalist and composer creating mystical folk and ethereal pop with an ambient underpinning. She performs at Amare’s Conservatoriumzaal this evening in a European premiere of her enchanting sound world of spectral delay, glistening timbre, and otherworldly vocals. Choosing the harp as her instrument of choice, Hunter was drawn to its majestic tones that summon to the mind dream-worlds and fantasy realms. It’s from this basis, among ambient soundscapes of echoing pads and wondrous harp compositions, that Hunter’s voice shines.The spiritual quality that courses through her songs is undeniable; they are soothing and yet ask questions of the listener at the same, luring them deeper into the submerged, reverberating, and assuring world of echoes she has so artfully created.
Shovel Dance Collective – Lutherse Kerk, 21:15
Nine-piece folk group Shovel Dance Collective gift their audience with many wondrous things: listen to the instruments drone; hear how water trickles under the songs; notice how the forgotten and blunted edges around regional histories – and regional accents – are whetted by harrowing harmony and thoughtful tune. Their recent album, The Water Is The Shovel Of The Shore, explores the relationships in folksong between a people and the waters that surround them. Reels for banjos are nestled among the bustle of whatever may pass the field-recorder’s microphone. The group foregrounds a dedication to the messy histories of folk tradition in what they choose to perform, salvage, amend, and distort through the performance and recordings. In a generous way, Shovel Dance Collective channel the joy and sadness that is held in songs deigned singable by generations because of the power of their simple truths. The distance between different times can sometimes be but a melody’s length, as is proven when they take to the stage to sing newness into forgotten relics. Performing for the first time in the Netherlands at Rewire 2024, this group’s intimate show at Lutherse Kerk promises to be special.
Photo by Rogier Boogaard