After the big success of last year’s first edition of REWIRE, the festival for contemporary art & music decided to take it one step further. They’ve added an extra day, more exhibitions and also the music program is full with a lot of nice artists this year. The whole weekend will take place around the power station in The Hague. Luckily for you the tickets are still for sale.
We could tell you that you have to see DIIV, Lotus Plaza and Young Magic and that you can’t miss Incubate alumni Shackleton, Kangding Ray and Filosofische Stilte, but we think it’s much more interesting to check out acts that we didn’t have seen live yet as well. So here is our favorite five!
At the beginning of this year Halls released his Fragile EP. Four tracks that are equally oppressive, as impressive. Deep, emotional and atmosphere seems to be the keywords of this EP. After this we (and probably a lot more people) were quite curious where Sam Howard would take us with his full debut album, which he released last month on one of our favorite record label of this year: No Pain Of Pop (also Vinyl Williams, Doldrums, Echo Lake). One thing is for certain, with Ark the 21-year old did something completely different. The Line Of Best Fit described it as choir-meets-rave, and also sees this as a contender for album of the year. On REWIRE Halls will make his live debut in our country. WE. CAN’T. WAIT!
So record label Blackest Ever Black is quite frank about what they offer; dark music. You could know them from Raime, maybe the most dark music that you’ve heard at the last edition of Incubate. Another signing is Black Rain, a duo who’s been working with each other from the mid-eigthies. This year they’ve (re)released Now I’m Just A Number: material from 1995, which has been remastered, re-sequenced and is only been released earlier as a part of a soundtrack. Weird story, but nonetheless this post-industrial ambient band is a real recommendation. Like our friends from The Quietus wrote “It’s like, how much more black can rain be? And the answer, of course, is none. None more black.” Now we understand why Blackest Ever Black HAD to release material from this group.
That’s how you’ll get our attention: releasing material on the hot recordlabels (Hippos In Tanks, Hyperdub) and working together with interesting modern-electronic artists as Oneohtrix Point Never and Teengirl Fantasy. Instead of her previous EP’s King Felix and Hour Logic it’s hard to dance to her debut album Quarantine, which Laurel Halo [photo] released this spring. On this record you can hear her experiment with synth noise, weird folky vocals and ambient. Can we get a hooray for girl power? HOORAY!
Juffage is the moniker of Jeffrey T. Smith, a bearded, bespectacled geek who looks the most comfortable at the studio. And with a study oriented on study technique you would think that Smith wouldn’t leave this place. Unfortunately for him (or luckily for us) his last year released record Semicircle is top-notch quality and like NME described: “computer music never sounded so humane“. That’s why this multi-instrumentalist has to come out from his comfortable place to play these nice songs on stage. Pretty interesting to hear that he’s doing this all by himself, probably with some help from loopstations or samples. Lets find out this weekend.
The unpronounceable album GLAQJO XAACSSO sounds like the mysterious (rly, again?) producer from London patten doesn’t knew if he would like to make weird chopped soundscapes or music to dance to. And to be honest, this might be the key to make the music listenable at your living room as well as on the dance floor. The combination between those two is in fact the key of why this record is so addicting. From dreamy, lo-fi production to weird minimal instrumentals, this record, which is by the way also released on No Pain of Po, almost sounds like a melting pot of sounds. Still pretty curious how he will translate this to the dance floor.
| Tweet |
