Art,Music
Sound, light, silence: SILA SVETA's hidden symphony for Škoda Auto
Tatiana Tardio
16.05.25
Music
Crossing the Sound: REWIRE 2025
words: Alice Suppa & Mila Azimonti
25.04
There are performances that are not listened to: they are experienced.
And if there is a place where these experiences gather, collide, amplify, that place is Rewire.
In The Hague, for a few days, time seems to change density. Sounds invade theaters, churches, basements, streets, transforming the city into a living, feverish organism, full of invisible voices.
This is not a simple sequence of concerts: it is an atlas of presences, disappearances, returns.
A festival that does not try to tame sound, but lets it explode, collapse, recompose itself in the most unexpected forms.
Between rituals of decay, visceral assaults and dazzling suspensions, Rewire 2025 confirms itself once again as one of the few spaces in which listening becomes a collective crossing — and, at times, a necessary loss.
REWIRE 2025 HIGHLIGHTS
Maritime Rites – Alvin Curran
To inaugurate a very crowded exhibition there is Maritime Rites by Alvin Curran, the composer at the heart of this edition. In front of the Hofvijver basin, a crowd gathers along the bank opposite the Dutch Parliament. Hundreds of people appear out of nowhere: just a quarter of an hour earlier, there wasn’t a soul in sight. It’s even hard to find a good viewpoint –– the Rewire queues don’t even spare the water.
The boats glide in an invisible order, in an aquatic procession suspended between the sacred and the shipwreck. On board: instruments, musicians, an amplifier. Someone reads scores. Others chat, settle in, wait. One blows into a conch shell as big as a megaphone. It is Curran.
Then a trumpet. Two. A clarinet. The cries of seagulls. The sounds arrive in waves, without a precise starting point. There is no stage, no hierarchy, no center. Maritime Rites is a dissonant, disjointed harmony, but at times it touches on the sublime –– a synthesis of Debussy, Gregorian chant and village band.
Perhaps it is a procession for the drowned, the lost. Or more simply an acoustic portrait, a momentary cartography of water: changeable, fragile, unrepeatable.
Ego Death (Aho Ssan & Resina)
Within the walls of the Koninklijke Schouwburg, the air thickens even before the first note. Aho Ssan and Resina enter quietly, yet it is as if the theatre, in an instant, changes its breath.
It all begins with a deep whisper—a tremor, the breathing of something moving beneath the skin of the earth. Then the cello: frayed, torn, a wail that tears the air. In eight nameless fragments, Aho Ssan & Resina build and tear down ephemeral universes. Waves of synthesizer crash into crackling voids;
The cello becomes flesh, memory, tears.
There is no plot, there is no hold. Only the force of transformation. Of dissolution. Of recomposition.
A beam of light rains down on Resina, alone in front of a small piano. From her voice something intact, luminous and vulnerable is born. A fracture, yes, but one that seems necessary, sweet, salvific. For a moment, the entire room seems suspended with her, holding its breath. A crack that opens and is not scary: it makes you feel alive.
Ego Death is not a demonstration of technique — even if the silent virtuosity is there. It is a total abandonment: towards the limit of language, towards the naked heart of sound. The audience remains still, almost fearing that breathing could break the spell. When it all ends, the silence is so full that it is deafening.
Ego Death is a shared crossing into the darkness.
YHWH Nailgun
After days of looping their latest album, this was one of the most anticipated acts. Zack Borzone (vocals) and Jack Tobias (synth) are the first to take the stage: between nervous stretches and jumping on the spot, they scan the audience with a look that is either challenging or mocking — hard to say. They have a magnetic charisma.
The live is an eruption at regular intervals. Theirs is a no wave hardcore with a funk twist, sculpted by Sam Pickard's surgical drums, which dissects rather than keeps time. It's a drum machine disguised as a human being. Borzone alternates slurred lyrics with rhythmic spasms, poised between a state of trance and a drunken night.
The audience is in a state of hysterical grace. Even the band, who moves on stage as if they were at home, seems momentarily disoriented by the feedback. An absolute peak of the festival. And a band to chase wherever they happen to be.
Able Noise
George Knegtel (drums, vocals) and Alex Forster (baritone guitar, vocals) move like two extremities of the same organism.
There is no hierarchy between instruments and bodies: the drums do not accompany, the guitar does not support — they intertwine, chase each other, tug at each other in a continuous dialogue made of tension and release. The two musicians chase each other like nervous impulses: fragmented rolls, dry chords, pauses that weigh more than the notes.
The drums dictate the rhythm, but they are much more: they are the very beat of space. Each stroke is precise, surgical, dug into the void like a thin crack. The baritone guitar, dense and skeletal, moves along these cracks, creating fragile and oscillating geometries.
Drums and guitar bend and support each other, in a tense dialogue that seems to continually seek a balance without ever truly reaching it. Every gesture sounds necessary, never superfluous.
In the midst of this plot, the voice is a living presence, another instrument, capable of fracturing time or suspending it altogether.
Their set is a sound sculpture in constant risk of collapse, and it is precisely in this precariousness that it finds a hypnotic, inescapable strength.
The end is not a silence, but a discharge.
Able Noise dissolve leaving the blood accelerated, the legs ready, the breath short. They set the darkness on fire and let it vibrate, like a breathless race into the night still to be bitten.
Nyokabi Kariuki & Cello Octet Amsterdam
Nyokabi Kariuki’s performance, accompanied by the eight cellists of the Cello Octet Amsterdam, is a tale that illuminates and enchants, told as stories are passed down in the Kikuyu culture, from which she comes. As she talks about her father, her recent obsession with birdwatching, Kariuki does not seem to be performing; rather: keeping company, sharing a threshold.
The world premiere of Birdsongs from Kirinyaga opens with the calls of East African sunbirds, recorded in the vicinity of Mount Kenya. Songs that Nyokabi's voice and the cellos welcome and relaunch, drawing a delicate and porous ecosystem, crossed by moments of otherworldly grace.
They are the same songs, she tells us, that these birds have been repeating for five hundred thousand years, perhaps a million. And if that isn't enough to generate wonder, she insists: that melody is a form of memory. A legacy, a shared lineage between species, that crosses time and resists the colonization of written languages. Songs that, if we know how to listen, will continue to tell us who we are.
Analog pics by Savior of the Females
