Two small speakers, suspended from the ceiling by a wire, face outwards through the opened honeycomb windows of Den Haag’s former American Embassy. They emit a ceaseless, chattering drone. A few feet below them on the paved expanse of the Lange Voorhout, people gather to talk or saunter about; walking between government appointments, or to another café. Two utterly opposite worlds brought together, whether they like it or not, by the machinations of Rewire Festival.
Rewire is adept at staging wildly different iterations of sound. Whether a grand concert from Beverly Glenn-Copeland and Elizabeth Copeland, Einstürzende Neubauten, or Kim Gordon, or spinning, harmonium-like instruments hung from the ceiling of an old bakery, or a chap playing the French bagpipes to what look like the assembled tubes from a homebrew kit: sound – odd, confronting, calming – gets to stretch its muscle.
This is apparent with the two Caterina Barbieri shows in the imposing Amare hall. Known for her mesmerising electronica, Barbieri’s precise, elegant worldview is filtered through two new and starkly differing collaborations – the first, a world premiere with the Onceim orchestra, is a huge and ever-swelling meditation that comes on like a Carla Bley piece. The second, a collaboration with A/V wizard Marcel Weber (MFO), is a delicate call-and-answer piece, using singers and brass. It is elegiac, and wonderfully strange.
Sound is also found in words, their marriage with music chiselled out over centuries. Juana Molina talks of her constant battle with finding the right phrases to fit the musical shapes in her head; JJJJJerome Ellis channels all in their body to track their emotive visions through the Luthersekerk; the pink and gold sunset that floods through the windows transports all there into a Tintorettesque dreamscape. Elsewhere two brilliant shows from hip hop duos Armand Hammer and By Storm use words as pure feeling, a dizzying, regenerative parade of observations and rallying calls; rap’s thespian side on show in stark relief. On the final day, BiIlly Woods and ØKSE play a glorious set where words and music transform into a shining – and immensely groovy – electric eel of information; firing up the neurons of all present.
Rewire can function like a four-day open-air lecture. Here, sound – talked, played – is enlisted as a learning device, with precious words from Suzanne Ciani and Actress, Juana Molina and Mayssa Jallad, and live radio discussions on sound and society, courtesy of Radio WORM. Rewire’s core audience – an ungodly mix of art students and avant-garde malcontents – drink up the information and redeploy it where they can. Information can be found in non-human form, too. Special mention must be made of Mariska de Groot’s installation in the old bread factory, Quartair, where a collection of harmonium-like instruments (based on the mechanical workings of spinning top toys) hang from the ceiling, droning away in an incredibly refreshing manner.
But even when discussing such matters, the sheer oddness of what sound can bring to our lives is something that we maybe take for granted, especially at a festival that deals with the avant-garde. Here, we need to return to the bagpipes and homebrew tubes. The show by Clément Vercelletto, based around the calls of the Nightjar, is a masterful exploration of instrumental space. Waking round his collection of synths, pedals, pipes, tubes and other paraphernalia, sometimes kneeling and playing flute to one element, then shaking some handheld percussion, or wielding his bagpipes in answer to the gurgles emitted by the tubes, Vercelletto transports the audience to another, chthonic, world.
One of Rewire 2026’s greatest shows is also one of its oddest and most mercurial. In the intimate Nieuwekerk, Alejandra Cárdenas, joined by star players Gibrana Cervantes and Ignacio Briceño, creates a kaleidoscopic set full of stark political declamations, endearingly offbeat fairground rides (which sounded like an acid-drenched Orange Juice) and feedback-heavy workouts. As Cárdenas says, the alchemists were interested in transformation, not lead, nor gold. Cárdenas’s political anger is mirrored directly afterwards in an equally breathtaking show by Sumac and Moor Mother. In the cavernous Amare hall, surrounded by amps that look like standing stones nicked from Avebury, the fourpiece threaten to tear an unmendable strip through the cosmic membrane. The black noise of the band, hewn out of meteor debris and launched back into space by Moor Mother’s incredible vocal propulsions, impales the crowd to the spot. An urgency that draws on the spirit of The MC5 and magnifies it tenfold. This is sound as action.
Or sound as vision: Rewire has a long tradition of staging the more benevolent, inspiring elements of the screen technologies that otherwise plague us. In a more traditional iteration of the audiovisual, Xiu Xiu (wearing well-cut suits!) give a performance inspired by Lynch’s Eraserhead in front of a giant screen in the Amare theatre. This show, with its rumbling silences, growls, yells, crashes and occasional shrieks, is a brilliant throwback to a lost world: one of handmade, backwoods incoherence; of pre-parasociality, of mechanical, emotional stuntedness. The chosen imagery, a cut and paste procession of blown-up monochrome analogue images, reminds one of banned books, police files, top shelf smut. Xiu Xiu have old heads on young shoulders, to misquote Jean Broudie, and Eraserhead, as any fule kno, is a film that is over 200 years old, so the reworking – with the violent denouement of smashing beer bottles in a trash can – is entirely fitting.
Eins, zwo, drei, vier! A quick word about two more “traditional” shows is in order: first, a beautiful and patient, if slightly subdued set from Einstürzende Neubauten in the Amare main hall; replete with some very affecting asides from Blixa Bargeld. And to finish, a wonderful set of cosmic electro pop from Juana Molina, that has Paard’s main hall rapt in appreciation. Molina’s ability to transmit and receive music from the spheres spins a golden web around the room. Music – sound – in all its forms, just like the indecipherable chatter streaming from the embassy windows, really is an ever-giving and never-ending language.
