Rewire Competition 2024 (Netherlands): Annea Lockwood, Autechre, Alabaster DePlume, Audio system Nook Quartet, Keeley Forsyth, Dialect, goat (jp), SUNN O))), The Sleep of Motive Produces Monsters

(Numerous venues, The Hague, Netherlands, 4-7 April 2024. Competition Spherical-Up by AJ Dehany)

The Hague’s Rewire competition is a trusted bastion of the robustly up to date that sells out on tickets with out promoting out on credibility. In its thirteenth version over three days in twenty venues, headliners included Autechre, Oneohtrix Level By no means, SUNN O))), and this 12 months’s featured artist was Annea Lockwood.

In the long run, alas, the town didn’t allow the deliberate efficiency of Piano Burning (1968), during which a piano is, er, set on hearth. The cinematic programme on the Filmhuis included Sam Inexperienced’s A Movie About Listening which is a superb introduction to Lockwood’s life and work, such because the artistic-musical intersections of her ‘sound maps’ of the rivers Hudson, the Housatonic, and the Danube. Within the gleaming stone of the Lutherse Kerk the small group electroacoustic MAZE Ensemble introduced a few of their collaborations in a live performance of delicate shimmering chamber ambient music learn from Lockwood’s summary graphical notation of marine life. MAZE’s ensemble textures are most compelling when extra tonally indeterminate piano and guitar items give solution to a sonorous 360-degree sound testifying to their freedom and camaraderie as musicians. Their second live performance on the Conservatoriumzaal in a way started at this level however with much less of a artistic sense in a extra minimalistic ambient drone soundscape. One other live performance by Yarn/Wire on the Nationwide Theater (the place Lockwood was sitting there in entrance of me within the viewers) was extra about silence and minimal gestures with plenty of ready solo piano doing the non-tonal Cagean stuff. Maybe setting the piano on hearth would have been a energetic climax, although that’s probably not what Piano Burning was about; however the gestures are maybe at their most attention-grabbing when artistically moderately than extra immediately musically impressed.

I need to admit that to be able to cope with a few of the bitterly tragic gig-clash that led to me lacking the Necks, Gazelle Twin, Julia Holter and Jenny Hval (un-trucking-believable), I discovered myself, throughout MAZE’s extra ambient wallow, sticking on in a single ear the WORM radio feed from the competition hub the Gray Area In The Center to take heed to the Guardian’s Laura Snapes in a panel dialogue in regards to the historical past and significance or in any other case of music journalism. The thin is there’s no cash however nonetheless a variety of ardour, even from readers in addition to writers. My very own ardour for making an attempt to seize all the things I also can led to me, as a result of there’s by no means time to eat something, chowing down hidden beneath retractable seating throughout Annea Lockwood’s listening session the place she memorialised her late companion the composer Ruth Anderson, presenting a transferring album of their tape items, Tête-à-tête.

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Essentially the most bruising results of my gig conflict was selecting to squeeze my approach in on Friday for the legendary English digital music duo Autechre on the huge Grote Kerk. I really like Autechre’s pioneering contribution to the epochal Warp Data sound, however I discovered it an uncomfortable and miserable expertise standing there in a church with a lot different stuff vying for consideration. It appeared depressing to me however I collect individuals discovered it rewarding. I ducked out to catch as a lot as I might of Alabaster DePlume, who was higher than anticipated refining his breakthrough GOLD album sound along with his stalwart band together with Ruth Goller on bass. In the identical venue on Saturday, fellow Brits Audio system Nook Quartet introduced an absorbing ethno-fusion sound, filmic and atmospheric, sitting on one- or two-chord vamps and taking the extra downbeat and ethnicky aspect of Electrical Miles for a journey with violin and flutes over rumbling double bass, locked-in grooves, compound time signatures and energetic improvisation, with even handed use of dissonance and assault.

Keeley Forsyth I wish to name Oldham’s reply to Diamanda Galás. Making higher use of the Grote Kerk than Autechre did, debuting an imposing AV presentation of her forthcoming album The Hole, the arresting singer sounded superb filling the cavernous house with blissful darkness: chamber chanson lit by the sunshine of useless stars, her voice so wealthy and velveteen, accompanied by strings and longstanding collaborator Matthew Bourne on piano and synths.

One other Brit, Andrew PM Hunt out of Ex-Easter Island Head introduced his solo enterprise Dialect within the intimate basement of GR8. It was a masterclass in how solo loop music doesn’t should be simply repetition and layering in a linear trend. Much more so than with the exhausting minimalism of his band, Hunt makes use of pretty primary gear together with a Nord Stage, multi fx and a tape 4-track to construct intricate types and buildings which have extra dynamic motion between crescendi and wonky chillwave vibes. With some deliberate or collateral glitch owing to the bodily stay means by which he generates the music, it was much more accessible and felt much less ribaldly bizarre than the album Underneath-Between (2021), with the contact of a melodic directness and emotional ache that jogged my memory — now hear me out— of pop-minimalist Mike Oldfield.

If repetition is actually your bag, goat (jp) have been as standard right here as they have been on the London Jazz Competition. Doomy and danceable, they’re typically aligned with jazz due to an explosive open kind method however the language doesn’t actually evoke any explicit style. It’s virtually pure rhythm and noise, intense and unrelenting darkish ultra-minimalism. The drummer is a real Jaki Liebezeit for motor machine facility. Simply if you assume the beat has run its course they introduce one other stage of depth. For a full hour of 48 minutes it’s hypnotic however for those who yearn for melody or many of the customary structure of music then you definately may discover it a bit monotonous and even gruelling.

Through which case SUNN O))) are most likely undoubtedly not your factor. You’ve gotta admire the purity of the enduring noise tub of guitarists Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson— a singular imaginative and prescient of endless guitar noise. In billows of smoke and razing gentle, ten stacks of amps on stage are organized like a primitive stone circle; to proceed the not-so undeliberate Spinal Faucet reference they put on black cloaks. It’s monolithic however the roaring guitar drones and suggestions does undergo discernible actions as totally different frequencies predominate and shift. Inside the deafening however edifying noise there are subtleties shimmering. It’s additionally spectacular to do it for therefore lengthy with out succumbing to the temptation to throw in a couple of licks or some Sabbath riffs. The ultimate part dials it up from low drones and energy chords to earsplitting piercing suggestions then again to black, then extra concerned plectrummy noise the place they’re taking part in moderately than simply holding notes. There may be some sort of modulation that occurs 46-minutes in that may solely be described as RIGHTEOUS and the chap in entrance of me did increase his fist within the air. The guitars and the fists are raised vertically and so the righteousness abides. It needs to be lengthy. It’s important to undergo it. It’s fairly stress-free actually.

In addition to typical performances (if any of that’s precisely typical) there’s an incredible programme of Proximity Music with installations and durational artwork music performances in galleries and fringe venues, with Myra-Ida Van der Veer’s Second Breath performances at nighttime, and Marco Fusinato taking part in noise guitar for eight hours a day within the Pulchri Studio gallery whose everlasting assortment seemed like a necessary go to, one which I didn’t have time to go to. I did catch Henk Shut’s Misplaced Sound set up within the Paleiskerk, the place the physicality of sound was artfully enacted by turrets of speaker cones crammed 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 all the time a blessed second if you really feel like somebody rescues you. In the identical corridor on the Koorenhuis the place I used to be as soon as replenished by my first encounter with the mighty Irreversible Entanglements, the identical tonic was brung by The Sleep of Motive Produces Monsters, a gaggle derived from composer, turntablist, and performer Mariam Rezaei’s residency at Cafe Oto final 12 months, 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 because the bass kilos like an alarm going off, at one level evoking a type of Ivesian nation truthful jazz bands blown up with postmodern humour and craziness, and a thick darkish digital sound from the turntables. Chugging industrial rhythms make you wanna decide up your toes for the 4 to the ground nevertheless it abruptly spasms again to glitchy dysrhythmia. They’re a monster social gathering band with a way of whole having it, a raucous and rapacious bricolage of jazz historical past and arty concepts in a mad bundle of important chaotic power.

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

LINK: REWIRE