#rwr17

for The Attic Magazine 

Potentially Everything

In recent years it seems that festivals have become the dominant musical events. While it would be rather pointless to add to the debate about the extraordinary surge in festivals, traveling to more and more events and seeing the similarities in tone and programming, one cannot help but wonder – what makes a festival special?

Rewire is a discreet but dense affair in the experimental/dance music hybrid in The Hague, not a very obvious choice when it comes to the Netherlands. The picture-perfect surroundings and walking-friendly size of the city made for a very pleasant festival destination.

While Rewire could be compared to the Unsound/CTM family, it is not an overtly music and contemporary arts festival, nor is part of the SHAPE network, carving a more distinct path. Despite not having an overall theme, subjects such as activism, feminism, nostalgia and emotion in music ran like a red thread through the programming. Adam Harper’s excellent essay The Music of the Body, published in the festival booklet was a very helpful starting point in this respect.

Rewire is certainly a place for discovery: featuring 45 min live sets and having the venues at about 5-10 minutes walking distance from one another with the schedule slightly overlapping, one could potentially experience a significant dose of every act.

This system worked pretty well between the Paard and Prins 27 venues across the street from each other, but going any further one felt the need for a bike, as AGF confessed to literally “running like a child” after her talk, in a failed attempt to catch Pharmakon’s set.

Regardless of those glitches, the three days were perhaps my most action-packed musical vacation.

Tulip Fields, Feminism and Improv

After spending a couple of days in Amsterdam, I took a rideshare to Den Haag, rushing through the flat fields populated with the occasional cattle and monochrome strips of tulips. Armed with my press bracelet, the city was starting to morph into the magical festival bubble as I ran into my friend Max and the rest of the Horse Lords on my way to the Korzo Theater.

Missing the Forest Swords talk right on the nose, I spent some time in the festival-dedicated-area of the lobby and putting together my plan for the evening.

 As the doors finally opened, I was really happy to see my long lost festival sister Amy, a happy coincidence creating a shift in my usual festival narratives, resulting in a more gynocentric experience. Together with her colleague Holly, our new female-journalist-power-group was born. It was the perfect setting for exchanging impressions and making those though choices between conflicting acts.

Our journey began in Paard II, the smaller room of the venue, with a dose of saccharine syncopated beats by Jessy Lanza. I fell in love with her childlike, pitch-perfect crooning when first hearing The Galleria, in collaboration with NYC producer Morgan Geist. Her solo work, while less club friendly, is infused by the same pop sensitivity coupled with heart-on-sleeve emotion and offbeat naïveté. On stage she was a pure sugar rush, enveloping the entire space in her sweetness. Struggling to get closer for some shots, I had a joyous run-in with activist and female:pressure ambassador AGF, adding another piece to the sisterly puzzle.

 Across the street in the dark, cozy stage of Prins 27, the New York trio Zs had just begun their set. A fluttering guitar intro was filling out the space, just as a slowed down tribal drumming started, juxtaposed with doomy saxophone howls and computer glitches by a special first-time guest performer, evolving into a delirious cacophony, seeping in and out of chaos.

Coming back later to the venue for Horse Lords, I arrived in the middle of an all-enveloping, hypnotic, sinuous saxophone solo,  emphasized by Max Eilbacher’s signature abstract electronics. Their second piece started off with quiet guitar finger picking, as the rest of the band was slowly joining in, soon turning into a full-on percussive explosion, with saxophonist Andrew Bernstein joining Sam Haberman on drums and Max picking up the bass. It was a nice change of pace to see them play with the dynamic and explore more meditative moments framing their more rhythmical passages.

 Trances

Back at the Paard, the main hall was packed, resonating with the shoegaze chords of the Slowdive reunion, which transported me straight back to high school.

At the smaller stage, the crowd was anxiously trying to find a spot for the Forest Swords performance. The place was filled to the brim, with a line forming at the entrance. Luckily I had found a comfortable refuge by the staircase, with a great view of the performers in front of a large projection of a black and white photograph featuring a group of horsemen, bare-chested, riding into the sea. His majestic, dark yet danceable elegies and full-bodied beats were making the space almost claustrophobic, rending the room upstairs into a giant resonating box, with overwhelming bass, climaxing with the familiar refrain of Dagger Paths’ Miarches. After first seeing him in Paris back in 2014 and more recently on the big stage at Unsound, it was refreshing to experience this more intimate, focused performance.

 Popping back into Paard I, Blanck Mass, the solo project of Fuck Buttons’ founder Benjamin Jonathan Powers, took us on a journey to the glitchier side of trance with stroboscopic, organic visuals bordering the grotesque. It felt like being transported into a scene from Enter the Void.

This brief excursion was the perfect palate cleanser before GAIKA, although one might argue that nothing could really prepare you for his confrontational, full-on performance. Once he was on stage, the real party started – there were young girls in the front row weaving their hands in pseudo-oriental fashion, bodies swaying to the infectious beats. Behind the contorted figure of the performer, armed with the microphone, a large, Viking-looking metalhead was assuring the backing vocals, together with a DJ. It was a powerful, raw display of emotion coupled with an uncontrollable desire for dancing.

Norwegian duo N.M.O provided the healthy dose of analogue techno workout from the middle of the crowd, crystallizing in the collective catharsis we’ve all been waiting for, complete with sweaty drumming and a Jérôme Bel-esque performance moment when the guy in the Sudden Infant shirt doing 20 air pushups as the sample instructed.

Arca’s DJ set, coupled with Jesse Kanda’s visuals, was one of the most fascinating instances of crowd work I have ever witnessed. He had the roomful of people in the immense space of Paard II fully in his power, toying with our emotions from pumping techno to Destiny’s Child and even a traditional Urdu song, while baby owls, fish guts and African puppies were staring back from the screen. As if he wanted to make us dance, then make us feel guilty for dancing, in a highly nuanced realm between abandon and discomfort. I would have loved to experience the more performative, outlandish costumes side Arca is famed for, but the overall effect was still utterly poignant.

 Disturbance

Saturday started with a morning visit to the AGF/Kubra Khademi rehearsal; the meeting between the two artists happened a couple of years back online, after Antye read the story about the Afghan artist’s brave performance against female harassment in Kabul, which lead to her arrest and current exile. After meeting several times, over the years, the two artists developed ZANSUSPENSION, premiered at the festival.

The show was a highly moving interdisciplinary moment, featuring Kubra descending into the space in a body bag over AGF’s organic textures. Displaying strength and vulnerability, their collaboration seemed like the most natural thing in the world for both performers.

Skipping on the ensuing talk, I rushed to the Grote Kerk for Jayce Clayton aka dj/Rupture’s tribute to the late African American gay composer Julius Eastman. His minimalist piano pieces were resonating in the gorgeous space, the acoustics emphasizing the otherworldly nature of the score. It was a sublime, transportive moment. Jayce framed his tribute with a tongue-in-cheek self referential piece, a humorous and clever commentary on the role of the performer.

Sonic Sisterhood

Rushing back to Paard II, I was faced with a thick crowd blocking the entrance; I could hear Pharmakon’s world-shattering drones from the hallway. Entering the womb-like space covered in red light, I could finally hear her thanatic, visceral screams. Hers was a possessed, consuming performance, oscillating between electronics and her rolling on the floor with punk audacity, before surrendering to pure anarchy and descending into the confused but enthusiastic crowd. It was a good choice of programming to have Wolf Eyes play right before and set the tone.

 Later on, I spotted her at Prins 27, looking very un-demonic with her blonde tresses and biker jacket. We were all waiting for Moor Mother’s set. Antye and Kubra joined us in the front row.

Behind a computer screen and two microphones, Moor Mother started off with a series of texts about black identity on an ambient background, with interjects on a toy theremin. About ten minutes in, things went 180 and I witnessed the most punk rock performance of the festival – she put on a fat grime beat, grabbed a microphone and started pacing and staring down the crowd, while rapping about protests and slavery, before jumping into the crowd for “Deadbeat Protester”.

It was an intense marriage of politics and club culture that would have made DJ Sprinkles proud.

Although the much anticipated club night was about to start in Paard II, it was SØS Gunver Ryberg’s dark blend of masterful analogue techno back at Prins 27 that helped ease out the crowd from noise into club mode.

Booking a series of headlining DJs in the small space of Paard II after all the other performances ended was a miscalculation on the part of the organizers, especially when selling extra tickets especially for the night, leading in general chaos and a frustrating amount of queuing. 

Once again, it was the ladies who ruled this portion of the night as well, Aurora Halal’s live maze of kick drums and meandering beats leading the crowd into a beautifully orchestrated collective delirium.

The Swedes of SHXCXHCXSH went full darkness, but Helena Hauff’s gorgeous mix of Chicago, Detroit anthems and a hint of acid offered the perfect finale for this emotionally charged evening.

Although Croatian Armor, dressed in neon reflective active wear, delivered an eerie, subtle emo ambient set from behind a live palm tree and Swans had a kaleidoscopic, rich set, it was the ladies who shone through day two.

Sun Through Stained Glass    

 Sunday, as music festivals’ dynamics work, was the day of mustering all your strength to power through the rest of the event, moving in a dream-like state of bliss coupled with physical and emotional exhaustion.

I must have turned off three alarms before crawling out of my waterbed in a suburban villa framed by a large empty field with three wind mills and a goat farm (as bucolic as this may sound, it also meant I was staying real far), before making it back to the city.

Wandering between the various venues, I was too antsy to really settle on anything; however, back at the Lutheran Church, Dutch veteran collective The Chi Factory offered exactly what I’ve been looking for – a spot-on New Age ambient trip, complete with nature visuals and a floor full of beanbags. I took a seat among the rest of the audience dozing off while the last of the afternoon’s sunlight was creeping through the stained glass windows.

After his relaxing detour that made my inner hippie glow with joy, I stopped by The Grey Space to check out the Bertus Gerssen photo exhibition, after learning that many of the shots were taken in the infamous Villa K, a musician’s squat in the rich coastal Scheveningen district, which also happened to be my home for the evening. Instead, in front of the building, a crowd of about 40 people, carefully aligned, were standing still and looking straight ahead, wearing white scarves, while a text about guerilla warfare was blasting from the speaker, all to the confusion of both festival goers and passer-by. It was a performance orchestrated by the Das Ensemble Ohne Eigenschaften.

The highlight of the evening and personal festival discovery came from the British duo These Hidden Hands, whose deep, sleepy drones slowly built over more fleshed out beats, then burst into melody in a moment veering on the sublime.

Back in Paris, a friend of mine commented that now “Jeff Mills comes to Europe to do his artsy projects”; to be honest, I’m usually skeptical of these live electronics and classical instrument collaborations, even if it’s between Jeff Mills and Tony Allen – it usually can be amazing or notoriously bad. Despite the two musicians being true masters, technical virtuosos in each of their field, this second meeting of the minds on stage was everything I feared it would be – a major let down. With the exception of perhaps 5 minutes when Jeff’s beats were erring on the more melodic side, nicely filling out the space alongside Tony’s drumming. The rest of the set was rather tinny and flat.

This result could be pinned on the limited rehearsal time due to budget issues. Then again one must argue about the catch 22 of bringing the main headliner to a festival in order to sell tickets yet not facilitate said performer to be at their best and debate the relevance of booking such potentially problematic acts in the first place.

The North Sea

The next day, with my feet in the sand, I was pondering over the intense three days. Looking back at the program, it seemed like the festival managed to touch on some major issues in contemporary society, while addressing the audience’s fears and desires on a more subconscious level. There was talk about activism and political engagement, a lingering penchant for ‘90s’ nostalgia and a proclivity for the darker sounds of the electronic spectrum, those that seem to capture the looming global tragedy, as if they had compiled a collective CT-scan that revealed our late night thoughts.

Its diverse, seemingly erratic choice of artists was actually making sense; I was very pleased with the way they addressed the burning topic of 2016 – women in electronic music. Instead of making a point out of booking female performers, they were seamlessly integrated into the lineup, offering a glimpse into a much needed new reality in which female musicians and DJs are simply referred to as musicians and DJs. As Jo Kali argued in her essay from the festival booklet, “feminism demands a radical cognitive adjustment, not just balancing numbers.”[1]

Enveloped by the calming sound of the North Sea, I could not help but think back at all the exchanges and support I received from fellow feminists during the festival, be it sharing experiences of odd sleeping arrangements with male hosts on tour, or the casual inappropriate touching by random men from the industry or simply Antye and Amy buying my broke ass a drink. Being surrounded by all these wonderful ladies was certainly a privilege.

Although the festival took place the same time as the Rush Hour Weekender, which catered to my usual musical obsessions, I’m happy to have had this rather challenging festival experience.

I believe Rewire has found a tremendous formula for luring club people into the more underground realms of the electronic music spectrum. And, if nothing else, telling your friends you’re a 15 minute bike ride from the beach is always a good argument.

[1] Jo Kali, p.42 There is no “single” woman, Rewire 2017 booklet

Rewire festival took place March 29th-April 2nd 2017 in The Hague