Rewire Festival 2025

The line could have easily been lost amid the relentless schedule that followed, this one of its opening talks. Instead, I found it planted itself — a quiet seed taking root as Den Haag transformed for its annual weekend of boundary-pushing performances. This ethos of intentional rupture rippled outward, subtly binding together a range of sets over the next few days. Not bad for a passing comment in a muggy room.

Several acts appeared intent on taking familiar musical structures, traditional instruments or established genres, and deliberately twisting them into something new, drawing rapt stares, soft chuckles, and quiet nods of disbelief from those in attendance. Some architects of these moments seemed to treat their instruments not as tools with fixed roles, but as malleable objects to be given new identities. 

Colin Stetson stood alone at the front of the 1,200-seater bowl Concertzaal inside Amare on that same Friday evening, summoning a full ensemble from his bass saxophone. The Canadian sustained endless drones, simultaneous melodies from upper register squeals, combative key clacks, and distorted vocal growls through the sax’s tubing. Even with a shortened set – Stetson had expected an hour, not forty-five minutes – he hastily cut the chatter and played like a man possessed. The audience sat silent, each note tightening the thread of disbelief: a man, a saxophone, and the lungs of an industrial air compressor. I’m still not convinced he’s entirely human.

Alvin Curran offered a different kind of reimagining: one that embraced the ancient voice of instruments while recontextualising them in contemporary forms. At eighty-eight years old, the revered Rewire Artist-in-Focus is something of a grandmaster himself, and performed across several settings. Following the watery pageantry of Maritime Rites on Thursday’s floating opening concert, I caught Curran’s solo set the next evening inside the quaint Lutherse Kerk. This time, he was armed with a piano, what looked like an electronic beat pad, and a shofar — the ancient ram’s horn with a raw, quivering bellow dating back to biblical ritual.

Physically turning between instruments, Curran paired delicate, slow-motion piano chords with violent bursts of vocal, noise and instrumental samples — a blend of reverent ceremony and absurd unpredictability that drew a few chuckles from the pews. Imagine rogue sound collage meets a late-night at Cafe Oto, and you're halfway there. The electronics buzzed, murmured, and mocked, before a deep rumble of the shofar faded into silence. For a moment, it was unclear if this was an interlude, an ending, or something else entirely, before Curran clarified: “That’s it.” No fanfare, no flourish. A simple end to a set that refused to make anything, even its ending, easy to grasp.

If Curran’s set toyed with expectations in a playful, personal register, Rewire’s film and multi-disciplinary programme showed that sound can carry real political weight; that it can document, witness, and hold power to account. Before a word was spoken, The Diary of a Sky had already made itself felt in the low-frequency hums that vibrated the cinema walls. Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s film used these sonic aberrations – consisting of over one year’s worth of recordings capturing Israeli fighter jets circling above Lebanon – as both evidence and atmosphere. It mapped a kind of acoustic occupation, where airspace became both weapon and territory, and only stopped when Israel began deploying jets for action in the nearby Gaza strip. Its message landed heavily. That same day, the UN announced that at least 100 Palestinian children had been killed or injured daily since Israel resumed its strikes on Gaza just two weeks earlier.

This idea of sound as agent – vibration as power – carried forward into The Drum and The Bird, a collaboration between Pan-label head Bill Kouligas and research collective Forensis. Staged at the ringed Koninklijke Schouwburg theatre, the piece examined Germany’s colonial impact on Namibian landscapes. Oral testimonies, archival greyscale photography, and environmental audio traced the violent reshaping of grasslands into dense bush through colonial farming practices. Machine-learning reconstructions vividly reanimated this ecological degradation, positioning the landscape itself as a witness to historical trauma. A trumpet player emerges from a high right balcony, playing mournful notes Namibian’s of the past would have done to reflect such a passing.

As music fans first and foremost, it can be tempting to skip these day-time extracurriculars in favour of rest from the night before. Yet when festival screenings and performances facilitate critical reflection on real-world issues in this way, their impact reaches beyond the purely emotional or sensory pleasures of sound. By deepening cognitive engagement and emotional resonance, these multi-disciplinary experiences – grounded in tangible socio-political realities – enrich the festival experience as a whole, nudging us not only to listen but to question, rethink, and perhaps even act.

For all the conceptual richness packed into these screenings and performances, Rewire’s power is also found in its tempo. Unlike the commercial bustle of my native UK’s festival season, Rewire often moves at The Hague’s more measured pace: thoughtful, sometimes sleepy, often strange. Locals glide by on bikes, down wide, tree-lined streets wearing homogenising linen and loafers, a nod to a city that prizes a kind of quiet freedom over overt spectacle. At times, it felt like the Rewire-d – oftentimes (although not exclusively) a young-passing person of the ‘European Cool’ with identikit fashion indistinguishable from Hackney to Kreuzberg – were trespassing on this Disney-esque place fully content with itself.

Since I last attended Rewire in 2023, https://metalmagazine.eu/en/post/rewire-festival-2023 the city seems to play an even greater role in the festival narrative, too. Nine new venues have been added in that time, expanding Rewire’s footprint without disrupting its intimacy. While mainstays like Paard and Amare still anchor the programme, and every venue remains within a brisk twenty-minute walk (or a much shorter bike ride), this year felt distinctly more spiritual with Lutherse Kerk and Duitse Kerk joining the fold.

Rewire’s most saintly venue, and my standout favourite, was one already in place. The cavernous Grote Kerk: a centuries-old, Gothic-style church crowned with organ pipes installed back in 1738. Even the most ardent atheist would struggle to resist the intoxication of Kali Malone’s near-midnight mass meditation of All Life Long, performed alongside Sunn O)))’s drone-metal guitarist (and her partner) Stephen O’Malley, vocal group Macadam and a small brass section. Her time-stretched organ tones were captured by the Kerk’s architecture and suspended in a heavenly haze of reverberation. Like most around me, I found the best way to take it in was to sit, recline, or surrender my body entirely. Feel a specific tone precisely in one moment, and let the whole thing was over you in the next.

On the flip side, the festival’s energetic, club-oriented roster exploited the city’s more modest venues. The Grey Space in the Middle – Rewire’s aforementioned talk-space-cum-hangout spot – became a nocturnal refuge for those chasing bass pressure. In its low-ceilinged basement, fitted with exposed piping and a faint smell of damp stone, Uruguayan producer Lechuga Zafiro pummelled his CDJs, cutting and cueing punchy cumbia rhythms without pause. Swirling bodies ducked and weaved in and out of both his percussive firing range and the coruscating strobes that lit the floor front-on. As 1 am hits, swathes of punters howl, pleading for the duple pulse to be resuscitated. Others scramble the stairs, emerging from the subterranean world for some air, a cigarette, or a drink — only to find they won’t be getting back in.

Queues aren’t a major problem at Rewire; yes, there’s an uptick on footfall from two years prior, but you’ll find more unpalatable cattle herding practices at insert_tentpole_camping_festival here. That said, you’ll still want to pitch up early for the most popular names. The busiest showing is for arguably the breakout star of the year. Recently co-signed by the likes of Billie Eilish following her acclaimed release, Choke Enough, Oklou’s https://metalmagazine.eu/en/post/oklou Baroque pop commanded a large, feverish crowd to reflect her recent rise. So dense were the crowds that, on two occasions, audience members were close to feinting and needed assistance.

Still, no one was hurt, and the atmosphere was a caring one, with Oklou – herself around eight months pregnant and admitting the set was in some doubt – holding the room with the air of an ethereal trip sitter. Perched beneath cool-toned spotlights, she garnered all attention with stripped-back, largely synth-led and plainly beautiful melodies by which she’s made her name. All the while, she and her guitarist gently swung the ceiling’s hanging bulbs, casting arcs of light that echoed the hypnotic visual language of her collaborator Malibu’s live shows.

During the nursery rhyme-like melody of Blade Bird, I noticed her partner nervously swaying in the sound pit ahead of me — no doubt watching closely as she, breathless at points, pushed gently through the penultimate song. I couldn’t help but imagine the two of them one day recounting these pre-birth lullabies to their future child, as friends leaned into one another, mouthing every lyric, their faces lit by the soft glow of phones. Die-hard members of the avant-garde might scoff at the softness of these dreamy earworms, but moments like this provide welcome relief from the festival’s more demanding sonic explorations. Not only do they sharpen our sense of contrast – light and shade, mainstream and underground – they let us feel the warmth of an entire room smiling in unison.

With so many intriguing acts beyond the headliners, hard choices were inevitable — especially if you wanted time for a snack of Kibbeling or a bike ride down to Scheveningen. But even a brief encounter with much of the lineup showed how deeply ‘Aya’s Law’, that instinct to find what works, then break it, had taken root.

Korzo’s intimate Zaal felt warmly communal as No Plexus capped their residency as Young Artists in Focus. Backlit by shadowy fabrics, Bec Plexus moved between glitchy pop ballads and theatrical gestures with new-found confidence. Even a cover of Frou Frou’s Let Go felt genuinely their own, proof that experimentation needs time, space, and trust in a music industry – or rather, an economic world – that doesn’t. Kudos to Rewire for continuing to carve out space for local voices to forge their own paths.

That same support for artistic risk carried through to Paard’s main stage, where Jasss presented a fully sculpted reworking of A World of Service with A/V collaborator Ben Kreukniet. Prior to the show, she told me how they were given time, tools, and the freedom to shape the environment (and practice within it) transforming the space into a stark audiovisual field: towering LED walls, a rear screen, and a stage-length light bar that pulsed to design. The resulting brightness was so intense that dancers at the front resorted to sunglasses, a scene more reminiscent of Jasss’ adopted Berlin than her midnight show in The Hague.

Next door in Paard’s second room, Cortical turned up the intensity. Their debut EP may have slipped under the radar in a critical sense, but the duo’s live show offered a fusion of metallic textures, noise-laden percussion, and UK bass-inflected techno that was impossible to ignore. Behind them, warped visuals flickered in hyper-green grids and molten-red glitches to ramp up the sensory onslaught. Like Jasss and Kreukniet, these detail-orientated and decidedly rare collaborative acts are the kind of things festival-goers crave.

Elsewhere, caroline’s seven-piece band made do without their usual audience-in-the-round setup at Concordia, but their deconstructionist leanings were still intact. Songs built up only to fragment again, denying any easy resolution. Magdalena McLean’s whispered violin plucks, Casper Hughes’ teasing drum patterns, each piece dissolved as it formed, gleefully unmooring the listener.

In a quiet moment on Sunday afternoon, Posuposu Otani offered transformation by other means. Armed only with acoustic guitar, jaw harp, and throat, his set shaped folk traditions into something trance-like and transportive. Looping finger-picked riffs gave way to low-frequency throat drones that shook the small theatre like sub-bass. Throughout, Otani paused between songs to speak in English he insisted he barely knew, though his words were clear and quietly moving. He shared how strange it felt to be seen and heard so far from his rural, forest home in Japan, where he rarely crosses paths with anyone. At its conclusion, a fellow attendee summed it all up: “Genuinely heartwarming.”

And then there’s the genre-melting delirium of his compatriot ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U’s two-and-a-half-hour set. Shirtless and sweat-drenched, the near-mythical DJ bulldozed any idea of cohesion. After slamming punishing techno into Radiohead, he capped off an encore with his acid-soaked and near-customary edit of Locked Club’s Kuliki and The Prodigy’s Firestarter with Flume’s euphorically cheesy remix of You & Me. Some wonder if it’s parody by now – a caricature of the eccentric DJ – or just deep obsession in full flight. Either way, the energy never let up, bending DJ convention into something ecstatic and chaotic. Few single-genre sets could’ve whipped up that kind of fan devotion.

As Rewire approaches its fifteenth edition, it finds itself in a strange position. For a festival built on the value of rupture, it now holds a central role in the experimental calendar. Hell, I met someone who flew in from Edmonton, Canada just to see the festivities in person. Its growth – more venues, bigger names, swelling crowds – speaks to a rare trust in curation and a scene hungry for something more than plug-and-play sets and Instagram-ready staging.

And yet, with that growth comes the risk of slipping into the very patterns it once opposed. This year’s edition still felt intimate, idiosyncratic, and deeply personal, but you wonder how long that balance can hold. Rewire’s strength lies in its willingness to let odd ideas breathe, to hand the reins to singular voices rather than consensus. It’s hard to imagine a focus group signing off on much of what makes this festival so special. That’s exactly why it works.

Selfishly, I hope it continues to do so — and given the curation is in the hands of a very select few, I have faith it will. But if the festival does break under the weight of its own success, at least it will have done so entirely on its own terms.