Rewire Festival 2024 (Netherlands): Annea Lockwood, Autechre, Alabaster DePlume, Speakers Corner Quartet, Keeley Forsyth, Dialect, goat (jp), SUNN O))), The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

(Various venues, The Hague, Netherlands, 4-7 April 2024. Festival Round-Up by AJ Dehany)

The Hague’s Rewire festival is a trusted bastion of the robustly contemporary that sells out on tickets without selling out on credibility. In its thirteenth edition over three days in twenty venues, headliners included Autechre, Oneohtrix Point Never, SUNN O))), and this year’s featured artist was Annea Lockwood.

In the end, alas, the city didn’t permit the planned performance of Piano Burning (1968), in which a piano is, er, set on fire. The cinematic programme at the Filmhuis included Sam Green’s A Film About Listening which is a great introduction to Lockwood’s life and work, such as the artistic-musical intersections of her ‘sound maps’ of the rivers Hudson, the Housatonic, and the Danube. In the gleaming stone of the Lutherse Kerk the small group electroacoustic MAZE Ensemble presented some of their collaborations in a concert of subtle shimmering chamber ambient music read from Lockwood’s abstract graphical notation of marine life. MAZE’s ensemble textures are most compelling when more tonally indeterminate piano and guitar pieces give way to a sonorous 360-degree sound testifying to their freedom and camaraderie as musicians. Their second concert at the Conservatoriumzaal in a sense began at this point but with less of a creative sense in a more minimalistic ambient drone soundscape. Another concert by Yarn/Wire at the National Theater (where Lockwood was sitting there in front of me in the audience) was more about silence and minimal gestures with lots of prepared solo piano doing the non-tonal Cagean stuff. Perhaps setting the piano on fire would have been a lively climax, though that’s not really what Piano Burning was about; but the gestures are perhaps at their most interesting when artistically rather than more directly musically inspired.

I must admit that in order to deal with some of the bitterly tragic gig-clash that led to me missing the Necks, Gazelle Twin, Julia Holter and Jenny Hval (un-trucking-believable), I found myself, during MAZE’s more ambient wallow, sticking on in one ear the WORM radio feed from the festival hub the Grey Space In The Middle to listen to the Guardian’s Laura Snapes in a panel discussion about the history and importance or otherwise of music journalism. The skinny is there’s no money but still a lot of passion, even from readers as well as writers. My own passion for trying to capture everything I can also led to me, because there’s never time to eat anything, chowing down hidden underneath retractable seating during Annea Lockwood’s listening session where she memorialised her late partner the composer Ruth Anderson, presenting a moving album of their tape pieces, Tête-à-tête.

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The most bruising result of my gig clash was choosing to squeeze my way in on Friday for the legendary English electronic music duo Autechre at the massive Grote Kerk. I love Autechre’s pioneering contribution to the epochal Warp Records sound, but I found it an uncomfortable and depressing experience standing there in a church with so much other stuff vying for attention. It seemed miserable to me but I gather people found it rewarding. I ducked out to catch as much as I could of Alabaster DePlume, who was better than expected refining his breakthrough GOLD album sound with his stalwart band including Ruth Goller on bass. In the same venue on Saturday, fellow Brits Speakers Corner Quartet brought an absorbing ethno-fusion sound, filmic and atmospheric, sitting on one- or two-chord vamps and taking the more downbeat and ethnicky side of Electric Miles for a ride with violin and flutes over rumbling double bass, locked-in grooves, compound time signatures and energetic improvisation, with judicious use of dissonance and attack.

Keeley Forsyth I want to call Oldham’s answer to Diamanda Galás. Making better use of the Grote Kerk than Autechre did, debuting a majestic AV presentation of her forthcoming album The Hollow, the arresting singer sounded amazing filling the cavernous space with blissful darkness: chamber chanson lit by the light of dead stars, her voice so rich and velveteen, accompanied by strings and longstanding collaborator Matthew Bourne on piano and synths.

Another Brit, Andrew PM Hunt out of Ex-Easter Island Head presented his solo venture Dialect in the intimate basement of GR8. It was a masterclass in how solo loop music doesn’t have to be just repetition and layering in a linear fashion. Even more so than with the hard minimalism of his band, Hunt uses fairly basic equipment including a Nord Stage, multi fx and a tape 4-track to build intricate forms and structures that have more dynamic movement between crescendi and wonky chillwave vibes. With some deliberate or collateral glitch owing to the physical live means through which he generates the music, it was a lot more accessible and felt less ribaldly weird than the album Under-Between (2021), with the touch of a melodic directness and emotional ache that reminded me — now hear me out— of pop-minimalist Mike Oldfield.

If repetition is really your bag, goat (jp) were as popular here as they were at the London Jazz Festival. Doomy and danceable, they’re often aligned with jazz because of an explosive open form approach but the language doesn’t really evoke any particular genre. It’s almost pure rhythm and noise, intense and unrelenting dark ultra-minimalism. The drummer is a true Jaki Liebezeit for motor machine facility. Just when you think the beat has run its course they introduce another level of intensity. For a full hour of 48 minutes it’s hypnotic but if you yearn for melody or most of the customary architecture of music then you might find it a bit monotonous or even gruelling.

In which case SUNN O))) are probably definitely not your thing. You’ve gotta admire the purity of the iconic noise bath of guitarists Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson— a singular vision of never-ending guitar noise. In billows of smoke and razing light, ten stacks of amps on stage are arranged like a primitive stone circle; to continue the not-so undeliberate Spinal Tap reference they wear black cloaks. It’s monolithic but the roaring guitar drones and feedback does go through discernible movements as different frequencies predominate and shift. Within the deafening but edifying noise there are subtleties shimmering. It’s also impressive to do it for so long without succumbing to the temptation to throw in a few licks or some Sabbath riffs. The final phase dials it up from low drones and power chords to earsplitting piercing feedback then back to black, then more involved plectrummy noise where they’re playing rather than just holding notes. There is some kind of modulation that happens 46-minutes in that can only be described as RIGHTEOUS and the chap in front of me did raise his fist in the air. The guitars and the fists are raised vertically and so the righteousness abides. It has to be long. You have to go through it. It’s quite relaxing really.

As well as conventional performances (if any of that is exactly conventional) there’s an amazing programme of Proximity Music with installations and durational art music performances in galleries and fringe venues, with Myra-Ida Van der Veer’s Second Breath performances in the dark, and Marco Fusinato playing noise guitar for eight hours a day in the Pulchri Studio gallery whose permanent collection looked like an essential visit, one which I didn’t have time to visit. I did catch Henk Shut’s Lost Sound installation in the Paleiskerk, where the physicality of sound was artfully enacted by turrets of speaker cones filled with leaves, water and plantlife, hypnotically brewing then violently vibrating.

Rewire can wrap you in layers of intellectualism with its day programmes of panels and discussions, so it’s always a blessed moment when you feel like someone rescues you. In the same hall at the Koorenhuis where I was once replenished by my first encounter with the mighty Irreversible Entanglements, the same tonic was brung by The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, a group derived from composer, turntablist, and performer Mariam Rezaei’s residency at Cafe Oto last year, with Mette Rasmussen on alto saxophone, Gabriele Mitelli on piccolo trumpet and electronics, and Lukas Koenig on drums. Horn and sax play scraps of melodies as the bass pounds like an alarm going off, at one point evoking one of those Ivesian country fair jazz bands blown up with postmodern humour and craziness, and a thick dark electronic sound from the turntables. Chugging industrial rhythms make you wanna pick up your feet for the four to the floor but it suddenly spasms back to glitchy dysrhythmia. They’re a monster party band with a sense of total having it, a raucous and rapacious bricolage of jazz history and arty ideas in a mad bundle of vital chaotic energy.

AJ Dehany writes independently about music, art and stuff. ajdehany.co.uk

LINK: REWIRE