Adventures in sound: Inside Rewire 2026

With a vast, city-wide programme of bucket-list performances, the festival’s 15th edition rewarded those who leaned into the unexpected, embracing chance encounters, curiosity and a true spirit of discovery.

Rewire bills itself as an ‘international festival for adventurous music.’ Whereas the word ‘experimental’ implies a hypothesis, a controlled environment, a result, ‘adventurous’ suggests something looser: a willingness to set off without knowing where you’ll end up. After four days in Den Haag for the festival’s fifteenth edition, the distinction feels apt. Rewire doesn’t ask you to observe music from a safe distance. It asks you to get lost in it.

The city obliges. Den Haag is a quietly pleasant place for a visitor: clean, flat, walkable. Its historic centre is unhurried, lulling you into a false sense of security that leaves you vulnerable to its stealthy swarms of bicycles. The de facto capital since the time of the Dutch Republic, its architecture is remarkably modest for a seat of power. Even the Grote Kerk – the 15th-century Grand Church and one of Rewire’s 20-plus venues – barely raises its voice above the surrounding streets. With exposed brick facades, few sculptural decorations and a blunt civic finish, it is markedly restrained compared to its Gothic counterparts elsewhere in continental Europe.

What isn’t understated is Amare, a sleek arts complex that towers over its neighbours and anchors the festival’s main programme. Its Concertzaal is fitted with a state-of-the-art sound system that provides monumental reinforcement for Thursday evening’s Caterina Barbieri double bill – the festival’s opening ceremony. The Italian composer’s vivid modular synthesis is first rendered in orchestral form by ONCEIM (the Orchestra of New Musical Creation, Experimentation, and Improvisation), before being visualised in collaboration with artist MFO. The standard of production – immaculate, uncompromising – sets the tone for the weekend. After a couple of days, it becomes difficult to imagine anything less.

The pace of life increases sharply across Rewire’s four days, as attendees move with purpose between venues hosting a programme of over 200 billed artists. Its breadth is staggering – terrifying, even, if you suffer from FOMO. The 15th edition is the biggest yet, offering the chance to catch artists you’ve had on your radar for years, ones you’ve encountered more recently, those whose names you don’t recognise, specially-commissioned collaborations and world premieres. Walking between theatres, churches, clubs and galleries becomes part of the journey, each space threaded through with The Ongoing Hum – this year’s Proximity Music programme of installations, designed to draw attention to the imperceptible rhythms of everyday surroundings.

These are some of our highlights: an aptly modest attempt to map a festival that resists any complete account.

Friday’s programme begins at Koorenhuis. A former grain warehouse, its palimpsestic character resonates with Devon Rexi and John T. Gast, whose recent collaborative album Breathstep draws from dubstep, krautfunk and no-wave. The show unfolds as a murky journey through material and space, the building itself becoming an actor, sculpting, echoing and displacing basslines, melodic fragments and rhythms.

Later that evening, Venezuelan quartet Weed420 play to a capacity room in PAARD II. Their maximalist set is as Gen Z as their name suggests, gobbling up a feast of sounds and belching them back with adolescent irreverence. With cheeky grins fixed in place, they swap mischievous glances and faux-apologetic shrugs over their effect boards. Having emerged so suddenly to internet fame, there is a palpable disbelief that this is their life now, feeding off the energy of a raucous crowd fully enrolled in their school of hyper-emo-cum-DJ-tag-mania-cum-trap.

That night, Egyptian composer and singer Abdullah Miniawy performs his 2025 album Peacock Dreams to a congregation on tenterhooks at Nieuwe Kerk. The church’s resonant acoustics lend the performance a heightened intimacy and gravity. Miniawy’s Arabic incantations – about as evocative as a voice can be – converse with two trombones, the timbres melding until at moments they are indistinguishable. When he finishes, a rhythmic phrase begins fizzing up from disparate parts of the audience; before long, almost the entire congregation has joined him in song, continuing to chant after the trio has left the stage.

On Saturday night, we pile into Amare’s Concertzaal for avant-gardist Oneohtrix Point Never, touring his latest album Tranquilizer alongside visual artist Freeka Tet. As audiovisual collaborations go, few make more sense than this one. In the same way that OPN’s music toes the line between fantasy and hyperrealism, Freeka Tet’s work presents surreal versions of familiar worlds. Equally compelled by the strangeness of dream logic, their collaboration is a hypnagogic trip, lingering in the liminal space between states of consciousness. Part of the allure of OPN’s music is the presence of an observer – whether himself or something more figurative – giving the sense that someone is watching you watch the show, as if lucid dreaming. The visuals press this further, constantly calling into question what you’re consuming and from what angle. Aptly meta, the main projection is a CRT television flickering between generated images, static, and shots of the very room it occupies.

The longest queue of the weekend forms for Los Thuthanaka at PAARD – their name perhaps the most overheard of the four days. Those who make it in are rewarded with one of the weekend’s finest shows. Hailing from the Bolivian Andes, the duo – siblings Joshua Chuquimia Crampton and Chuquimamani-Condori – draw from the ancient melodic traditions of their heritage while arriving at something utterly contemporary. Their stage presence, though understated, is seismic: rooted to the spot, their occasional winks, smiles and tips of their hats enough to send the room spinning. After a faux exit that leaves the audience genuinely suspended, their closing track lands with the force of something inevitable. A moment of absolute triumph.

Running in parallel throughout the evening, in Amare Studio, is something harder to categorise. Between 6 p.m. and 2 a.m., Asian Dope Boys present PHYSIS – an eight-hour durational performance led by Tianzhuo Chen, featuring a supergroup including Dis Fig, Gabber Modus Operandi’s Ican Harem and Kasimyn, and GothTrad. Chen conceives his long-duration works as closer to ritual than theatre, chaos built into the structure as a feature rather than a flaw. PHYSIS bears that out. Each visit yields something unforeseeable: the full-body extremity of Dis Fig’s tortured noise performance; a tender scene, mid-floor, of a dancer nursing a newborn. Performers materialise from shadows or hide in plain sight, the atmosphere one of sustained unease and perpetual anticipation. Rave or theatre, ceremony or club night; it resists the question.

It can sometimes seem that Den Haag’s modesty carries through to its crowds, who at times need coaxing by the likes of Moor Mother, who, during her performance with post-metal group Sumac, issues a stern reminder that this ‘isn’t a classical concert’. Under these circumstances, the energy at Tony Bontana‘s Sunday night set at Korzo is a genuine accolade. In a joyous moment, the rapper succeeds in his command for gun fingers “like we do it in Birmingham”, before pressing further until the crowd surrenders entirely to his brummy-inflected demands for a full-blown moshpit.

It will take you a couple of editions to hone a satisfying approach to Rewire festival: at points you will choose between three or four clashing acts, further compromised by the inevitable queues to enter smaller capacity venues. It’s best to plan your time around a few must-sees and resign the rest to the powers that be. Fortunately, there’s a guarantee that a world-class performance will find you wherever you end up. Far from punishment, choosing to stay put in a venue over risking the wait to enter another will only lead to a transformative moment of serendipitous discovery. As long as you can lean into the right mindset, it’s impossible to leave disappointed.

You arrive at Rewire not knowing where you’ll end up. That is, it turns out, entirely the point. Its focus on ‘adventurous music’ is an organising principle, one that runs from the booking policy down to the experience of moving through the city. You leave dosed with just enough inspiration to carry you through until the next year. Its scale should be unwieldy; yet somehow it isn’t. Fifteen editions in, there is nothing else quite like it.