Rewire is an annual international festival for adventurous music. Across four days from 3 - 6 April 2023, Rewire will return to The Hague with its thirteenth festival edition, bringing together a wide range of musical and interdisciplinary performances, specially commissioned works, club nights, installations, talks, screenings, and more. 

This year, we are again collaborating with Rewire, VIERNULVIER and STUK. Together we will present interdidisciplinary artist from Flanders during Rewire. 

Maya Dhondt

Formerly performing under the name Wendy, maya dhondt is a classically trained pianist and composer creating idiosyncratic glitch-pop and contemporary piano works. Fluttering vocal murmurs mingle with haunted piano strings while programmed fragmented drums spiral in and out of disarray; it is a rich sound world that dhondt has established. With her songs that blur the line between the world of fiction and reality, it’s not surprising to see a quote from magical-realist author Clarice Lispector adorn the Bandcamp page for dhont’s album wow, x (2024): “... you, with your habit of wanting to know why.” This quote hints towards the unknowability of dhondt’s songs, which are each shrouded in an air of mystery. As if emerging out from some hidden place, dhondt’s songs are at times foggy and noir and at others playful and charming. Harnessing this chimerical strangeness, dhondt makes music that twists and turns intuitively. “What I create never stands alone,” she says of her work, “it can be many things at once.”

Elisabeth Klinck

Brussels-based violinist, composer, and performer Elisabeth Klinck's compositions and performances for violin and electronics revel in the subtle and the sacred. She has a background in electroacoustic composition and theatre – in which she performs and for which she also composes. In a constant push and pull, her music wends between fragility and force, as can be heard on her stunning debut album Picture a Frame (2023). Klinck's ambient compositions marry organic textural noise and field recordings with synthesised drones and wailing violins – opening for the listener a window into an otherworldly place. She performs at Rewire 2025 ahead of her forthcoming sophomore album, set to be released on Hallow Ground later this year.

Use Knife

Use Knife is a project by Iraqi vocalist and percussionist Saif Al-Qaissy, Belgian musicians Kwinten Mordijck and Stef Heeren, and multidisciplinary artist Youniss Ahamad – providing scenography and visuals during their show. Stemming from a residency the musicians partook in, Use Knife came together to probe the sonic and thematic overlaps and converges across Eastern and Western approaches to music and thought. The title of their lauded debut album, The Shedding of Skin (2022), refers to humanity’s survival instinct, particularly the impulse and, as is often the case, the necessity to leave war and disaster behind in order to seek new lives in new environments. They use analog and modular electronic machinery to invoke Arabic melodies and percussion, creating club-ready tracks that are potent with industrial energy, ragged post-punk distortion, and kinetic EBM pulses. Use Knife’s hallucinogenic, trance-inducing music ascends to new plains during their raw, pyrexic live shows. At Rewire, Use Knife perform use knifnew music from their anticipated forthcoming album État Coupable (2025) – which bridges culture and politics while merging each of the three band members’ skills in profoundly new ways –  with visuals from Ahamad.

Lukas De Clerck

As part of a new series of playlists and mixes from artists performing at the festival, Rewire and we are proud to present a curated mix by Lukas De Clerck. 

The Brussels-based composer, musician, and artist Lukas De Clerck deals with ancient sonic tools – particularly, he specialises in the aulos, a near-extinct double-reeded Greco-Roman instrument. His self-taught experiments breathe new air, literally, into aulos, such as in his new album The Telescopic Aulos of Atlas (2024) which takes its name from an experimental reimagining of the aulos sculpted by De Clerck. Ahead of De Clerck’s upcoming performance at Rewire 2025, Rewire invited him to prepare a mix of wind instrument music.

De Clerck says of the mix:

“A wind-exclusive mix for the adventurous ear. Noise, Pulse, Drone. A focus on contemporary practices around inventing, reshaping or re-interpreting wind instruments into uncharted territories.”

Lukas De Clerck is an artist of the SHAPE+ platform for innovative music and interdisciplinary art, co-funded by the European Union and Pro Helvetia.

SHAPE+ is co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.