Conducting chaos: Rewire 2025 in 7 sounds

The mind-expanding festival returned for its 14th edition with performances from Laurie Anderson, YHWN Nailgun, Kali Malone and more.

Trying to find a throughline at a festival like Rewire isn’t easy. 

When a programme is put together by fans as passionate and knowledgeable as the minds behind this festival, you can find yourself a little without focus. That’s why the annual decision to pick one or to figures to build days around – this year improviser, sound artist, and writer Alvin Curran – is so smart. Main characters who capture the perspective of the event and encourage audiences, from the off, to explore.

Curran’s half-a-century career is defined by singular works of sound collage and shapeshifting noise. Following his lead, here are a collection of sounds from this year’s Rewire which are still reverberating.  

A TUBA DRIFTING OUT OF EARSHOT DURING ALVIN CURRAN’S MARITIME RITES

This year’s opening concert was staged on the Hofvijver lake. American composer Alvin Curran’s Maritime Rites has been an ongoing project since the 70s, founded in Curran’s fascination with bodies of water. In The Hague, musicians passed each other in boats creating a discordant, floating symphony of sounds with Curran in the middle. Cacophonous, but conducted, chaos. A fitting opening.

  • © Maurice Haak

  • Joan La Barbara © Jan Rijk

JOAN LA BARBARA’S MULTIPHONIC VOCAL TECHNIQUES

Rewire’s curatorial focus on the history of experimental music is one of its enduring selling points – providing an entry-point for young fans of the avant-garde to better understand its architects. Last year it was Annea Lockwood’s microtonal soundscapes and burning pianos. This year, legendary vocalist and composer Joan La Barbara attended for a talk and a rare live performance. La Barbara has been working since the 1970s and collaborated with many fellow masters of experimental composition. It’s 2025 and her multiphonic vocal techniques, where croaky fries (dis)harmonise with conventional singing, still sound revolutionary.

YHWN NAILGUN’S DRUMMER SAM PICKARD

Believe the hype. Buzzy NYC dance-rock band YHWH Nailgun’s full-body dance rock felt perfectly at home in The Hague’s theatre and arts incubator Concordia. It’s easy to pull comparisons to contemporary rock bands like Model/Actriz or early iterations like The Horrors and Factory Floor. But the much-discussed rototom percussion of drummer Sam Pickard gives a melodic roundness to their extreme sound.

  • YHWH Nailgun © Alicia Karsonopoero

LAURIE ANDERSON’S VOLIN (AND LOU REED’S FAVOURITE TAI CHI SONG)

Closing the programme was a characteristically multimedia interrogation of the assailants threatening our world from Laurie Anderson. From filling the giant screens of the Amare concert hall screens with the words that are disappearing under the Trump administration to tender solo violin moments which spotlighted her singular position as an artistic and political force. Anderson finished by directing the 1500-seater venue in a short Tai Chi routine in memory of her husband Lou.

HASSAN ABOU ALAM’S PROCESSED VOCAL SOUNDS

In the basement club beneath Grey Space in The Middle (the festival’s de facto socialising hub), underground Egyptian producer and DJ Hassan Abou Alam built a peak-time live set from his own compositions. Lasting impressions were left by the hyper-processed, chopped vocal sounds from Cairo which were left incomprehensible but ludicrously easy to dance to. And special mention to his closer, a live rework of his Banoffee Pies release Hanshoof.

  • Laurie Anderson © Parcifal Werkman

  • FUJI|||||||||||TA ©Justine Ellul

FUJI|||||||||||TA’S HAND-BUILT ORGAN

Sound artist FUJI|||||||||||TA’s handbuilt organ (based on ancient Japanese performing arts practice “gagaku”) has visited Rewire before. This year though, the machine had been updated. And if the queues into the concert hall or the huddles of people taking photos after the set are anything to go by, it was a technical feat. Whips of sharp, broken-rhythm air and shapeless drone pierced by breathy vocals made all-the-more enthralling by the custom-built instrument that was making them.

KALI MALONE PERFORMING ON AN 18TH CENTURY ORGAN

Staged at a huge Protestant church near the centre of The Hague, Kali Malone’s compositional time-warps of historical methods and tuning systems reached maybe its final form. Her All Life Long project was performed for the first time in the Netherlands on an organ that dates back to 1769. Elsewhere, vocal ensemble Macadam and a small brass section contributed to a headliner-feeling concert which managed to bottle Rewire essential magic – history being recognised and turned into something new. A beautiful drone that kept ringing.

  • Hassan Abou Alam © Jan Rijk

  • Kali Malone © Parcifal Werkman