From barely perceptible vibrations and ambient odysseys to screeching noise and high-BPM chaos, these were our favorite moments of Rewire 2026
When Bronne Keesmaat started programming audiovisual events in 2009 on commission from a visual arts space, he was thinking local. After two successful Wired Festivals, he started thinking global. Then the arts space lost its funding and he lost his job. Two years later, still in his mid 20s, he’d started his own non-profit and booked the first Rewire, a festival that sought to balance a focus on the visual arts with musical performances from international talents like Andy Stott, Hype Williams, and (the then-very popular) Washed Out. It’s been held in the Hague every year since, aside from 2020.
Within a few years, Rewire had dropped its emphasis on the visual, but Keesmaat remains committed to creating a diversity of experience. "We try to learn a bit from the pop music festivals," he tells me over the phone, less than 48 hours after Rewire 2026’s final notes ring out. "When you present different routes during the night, it makes it accessible for an audience to explore stuff they don’t know."
Rewire’s 2026 artists represented dozens of countries, styles, and levels of establishment — from household-name rockers like Kim Gordon to scrappy crews like weed420, a trollish Venezuelan collective virtually untested on the international stage. This year’s booking was diverse in almost every sense of the word, but I felt this diversity most deeply on a decibel level. While all experimental music festivals aim to hold space for the quiet and the loud, Rewire’s programming seemed to hit every level on the dial.
From its subtle "Proximity" sound installations to its most ear-shattering sets, these were the most impactful moments of my Rewire 2026 experience. (NOTE: Without a decibel meter on hand, I ranked these experiences on levels of spiritual loudness, from quietest to most deafening.)
Proximity: The Ongoing Hum
Several sound installations ran at sites across the Hague alongside Rewire’s expansive music lineup this year, all connected thematically by "The Ongoing Hum [that] often remains unnoticed or imperceptible in our everyday surroundings," according to the festival. My personal favorites:
Anaïs Lossouarn’s De Cœur En Choeurs (Hearts in Chorus, From Heart to Heart), in which participants were invited to rub stones hanging from copper wires and listen to the "heartbeats" of those who had interacted with them previously, thereby influencing their own heartbeats, thereby influencing the heartbeats of future stone-rubbing listeners.
Floris Vanhoof’s Antenna, in which a hexagonal antenna mounted on a grand piano on its side received electromagnetic waves that made the piano strings vibrate. The waves, Vanhoof popped in to explain awkwardly to the seven or so people in the small church where the exhibition was held, are always present in the air, and the setup allows the strings to be pulled hundreds of times per second, resulting in sounds no human hands could create.
Johannes Kreidler’s Jet Whistles / The Grand Exhalation, in which Kreidler’s "Thunder Sheet Machine" instruments used precise motors to stretch and compress sheets of steel, bronze, copper, zinc, and silver to produce powerful vibrations around a room, like ghostly winds blowing through the walls of a haunted house.
Civilistjävel! & Mayssa Jallad
The last thing I saw at Rewire 2026 was the final 15 minutes of a collaborative performance by Swedish ambient producer Civilistjävel! (Civilian Bastard!) and Lebanese singer, architect, and urban researcher Malyssa Jallad in an Evangelical church. Through a heavy black curtain, I entered a room blanketed in silence, save for a low ambient drone. Then Jallad’s angelic vibrato flooded the air, holding us in a rapt silence generally reserved for religious experiences. A few minutes before the set ended, she spoke on the irony of performing at the Hague while war criminals wrought havoc with impunity on Gaza and Beirut. When she closed her speech with "Free Lebanon, Free Palestine," a two-minute standing ovation shook the pews.
Laurel Halo & Julian Charrière — Midnight Zone
Listening to Laurel Halo’s live rescoring of Midnight Zone, her recent collaboration with Swiss filmmaker Julian Charrière, in a massive movie theater was a welcome respite from Rewire’s chaotic Saturday-evening programming. Halo’s glacial, textured synth tones set a perfectly eerie soundscape for Charrière’s visual meditation on a deep-sea biome under existential threat.
Beverly Glenn-Copeland & Elizabeth Copeland
Beverly Glenn-Copeland and Elizabeth Copeland are very much in love, and they’ve made it their goal to spread this love far and wide. Glenn-Copeland has been a hero of new-age minimalism since the release of his 1986 masterpiece Keyboard Fantasies. But he, his wife, and a band that briefly included a 16-piece choir, focused on material from his last few records during a nonstop love fest in Rewire’s biggest concert hall. The atmosphere was loose, with audience participation encouraged, but the set was a display of masterful musicianship.
Fine
Fine Glindvad’s music shares some commonalities with that of Copenhagen contemporaries such as ML Buch, Erika de Casier, and Astrid Sonne. But she displayed another side of her musicality — the folky Americana crooner — at Rewire. Her jangly 2024 debut might have been a bit too cool to merit the title Rocky Top Ballads, but her Friday evening set leaned heavily, and effectively, on her cross-pond influences. Near the end of her set, she performed an unreleased track called "Get In" that should be topping Billboard Country charts by the end of the summer.
Smerz
Smerz — also paragons of the current Copenhagen sound, despite originating in Oslo — bring an unshakably cool aura wherever they go. Friday night, Catharina Stoltenberg stood front and center, her hair and dress rippling with the aid of a well-placed shop fan. Henriette Motzveldt split singing duties and played strikingly clean violin at times, most notably on a jaw-dropping rendition of 2025’s "You’ve Got Time and I’ve Got Money." Less expected for a first-time viewer was virtuosic, keyed-up drummer Rune Kielsgaard, who managed to show off a bit while holding the group in impeccably tight formation.
Standing On The Corner
Brooklyn-based collective Standing On The Corner have been a mysterious entity for a decade now, releasing just several scattered tracks since their 2017 breakout album RED BURNS but still holding the world in thrall. Much of their continued appeal comes from the power of their rare live performances. At Rewire, bandleader Gio Escobar crooned into the mic as if whispering to a long-lost lover, while Jack Nolan alternated between controlled shredding and waltzing blues on his double-neck bass/guitar hybrid. And former members Austin Williamson and Caleb Giles delivered spiky rhythms and bursts of treble melody on the drums and sax, respectively.
Juana Molina
Longtime Argentinian drone-pop luminary Juana Molina brought classics and new cuts from her 2025 album DOGA to The Hague. In what’s become her standard setup—singing, looping, playing guitar and keyboard while Diego López de Arcaute works magic with a drum kit and sample pads—she proved she’s as strong a performer at 64 than she was back in the ’90s. Her new tracks demonstrate both the whimsy of youth and the wisdom of experience.
WRENS
Edgy jazz-rap quartet WRENS (not to be confused with seemingly defunct indie rockers the Wrens) bottled a heavy dose of unruly energy in 2025’s Half Of What You See last year and unleashed it on an unsuspecting Rewire crowd Friday night. The audience seemed better prepared for the group’s fully instrumental freakouts (on which Ryan Easter plays trumpet) than they did when he got on the mic, and he sounded a bit frustrated when he asked the audience how they were feeling for the third time and got a similarly mild-mannered response. Attitudes recalibrated as the set went on, though, and the room began to Easter’s angular turns of phrase the way they did to the rest of the band’s jagged harmonies and rhythms.
Arnold Dreyblatt & Horse Lords
Bringing to life the hypnotic rhythms and whole-tone harmonies that characterized their 2025 collab album Extended Fields, beloved Baltimore math rock four-piece Horse Lord and minimalist composer Arnold Dreyblatt put a room of late-night concertgoers in a sweaty trance — a bit headier than what you’d get on your average dance floor but no less effective.
Everything Is Psychedelic
The mindbending bars of Birmingham rapper Tony Bontana are elevated to another stratosphere by the frenetic beats of the London producer known singularly as psychedelic ensemble. About halfway through their Saturday set in a low-ceilinged basement, Bontana began chanting something to the effect of, "Every single thing in your head, let it go." In passing, the insight command might have felt tossed off, but in that room, in that moment, repeated to the point of incoherence, it was disarmingly profound.
Einstürzende Neubauten
Nearly 50 years after their formation, Blixa Bargeld and his band of German misfits remain true freaks. The industrial pioneers’ performance included a shopping cart, a skeletal set of nightmare chimes, and, of course, plenty of spooky screeches and grim diatribes. In one such speech, Bargeld told the crowd he was born on the last street in Germany where traces of Nazi architecture remain. About 30 people whooped, most of them (hopefully) just caught up in his speech pattern. A disapproving rumble ensued. Stone-faced, Bargeld started the song.
Eraserhead x Xiu Xiu
West Coast weirdos Xiu Xiu have always fixated on the macabre. On their new project, Eraserhead x Xiu Xiu, they reanimate their love of David Lynch (see: 2016’s Xiu Xiu Plays the Music of Twin Peaks) to create a sincerely sinister audiovisual experience. As black-and-white images of starving bodies, sexual depravity, and cartoon violence played behind them on a massive screen, Jamie Stewart and Angela Seo synthesized a terrifying live score inspired by Lynch’s first film, culminating in a cathartic finale in which Stewart smashed glass bottles in a trash can with a long stick.
Kim Gordon
The turn to trap and rage rhythms that’s characterized Kim Gordon’s late-blooming solo career has been polarizing, but her power is undeniable live. At Rewire, the 72-year-old Sonic Youth co-founder was implacably cool over Sarah Register’s shredded guitar, Madi Vogt’s deafening drum fills, and Camilla Charlesworth’s heavy bass licks. She commanded the festival’s biggest stage with rockstar magnetism, ripping through tracks from the three increasingly abrasive albums she’s dropped over the past seven years, indifferent to public opinion.
Mandy, Indiana
English-French noise rockers Mandy, Indiana were the only band I watched at Rewire whose set was plagued by a shaky mix, but they still powered through their killer new record Urgh with a lively intensity. The set reached peak tension on album closer "I’ll Ask Her," in which vocalist Valentine Caulfield calls out men who refuse to hold their friends to their account for their despicable behavior ("Yeah, your friend's a fucking rapist but they're all fucking crazy, man"). The set was uneven due to factors beyond their control, but when they hit, they hit.
OK Williams
The scene at Club Laak Saturday night was a frenzy of bodies swarming between the main performance area and a smaller, even sweatier room dubbed the "Toilet Stage" due to the bathroom behind its far wall, an alternative to the long line for the upstairs restroom for those brave enough to push through a sea of night creatures packed shoulder to shoulder. OK Williams, the night’s closing act, started at 5 a.m. and surpassed earlier performers with a genreless mix whose flavors stood out individually rather than dissolving into each other. While I didn’t make it the full two hours, her set was the perfect soundtrack for stumbling out into the sunrise.
Joshua Chuquimia-Crampton
Due to my own poor planning, long lines, and the festival’s admirable policy of denying preferential treatment to media members, I was unable to catch #bandofthemoment Los Thuthanaka. I’ve seen the duo before and found them thoroughly deserving of their current hype, but this was my first time catching their less-widely celebrated half, guitarist Joshua Chuquimia-Crampton, on his own. He was loud to begin with, but the real shredding began after he asked the sound guy to turn him up because he sounded "quiet as fuck." Setting knotty chords and nuclear blasts of distortion to traditional Andean rhythms, he left no one doubting the power of his instrument.
The Bug & Dis Fig
British producer Kevin Martin (better known as the Bug) and Brooklyn/Berlin multi-hyphenate Felicia Chen (better known as Dis Fig) are both prolific collaborators, and their joint 2020 album In Blue brought out new sides of their respective personas. Chen, who has come to be associated with harsh noise and convulsive live sets, presented a more hushed form of rage at Rewire, while Martin leaned into a menace that usually exists only at the edges of his dubby sound. Their set was incredibly loud, but it felt as though a much more potent strain of anger was lurking beneath the surface, as if on a moment’s notice the Bug and Dis Fig could swallow the room whole.
Aaron Dilloway
Aaron Dilloway is among the all-time elite in harsh noise performance. His shows include mangled magnetic tape, unbearably abrasive bowing, and contact mics gargled like salt water. At Rewire, he finished his set — in roughly half its listed run time — with a muted, desperate moaning that was stranger and scarier than anything he’d produced in the previous 20 minutes, leaving an equally awed and disturbed audience in his wake.
weed420
weed420 was the act I was most excited to witness at Rewire 2026, and they exceeded my expectations. Performing as a four-piece with Juan Zamora on guitar and the remaining three members behind laptops, the Venezuelan collective put their collagic, absurdist sound on display to the full extent this setup allowed. Blending elements of psych rock and synthesized noise with chopped-up Latin styles like reggaetón, salsa, and merengue, their sound is obscenely loud, unbelievably chaotic, and still somehow danceable. Call them a meme if you want, but weed420 might be the best band in the world.
∈Y∋ + C.O.L.O
The loudest, most overpowering set I experienced at Rewire came from the mind meld of harsh noise heavyweight Yamantaka Eye (of Boredoms, Hanatrash, and John Zorn’s Naked City) and visual artist C.O.L.O. They started shakily, with the visuals cutting out completely several times. Soon enough, though, Eye’s soundtrack — moving in split-second intervals from high-BPM dance styles like gabber and singeli to pure ear torture — was fully synched to video clips that ranged from staticky fractals to cartoon truck-bed soundsystems to a dark room whose door opened opened onto a massive waterfall. Walking out of the still-shaking venue at 2 a.m. on a Friday into the utterly silent streets of the Hague — "New York never sleeps; we do," a 20-year-old on Molly told me at the club the next night — felt like Rewire in a nutshell.
