Rewire 2017 in 10 shots: Festival for radicalism with a smile

Do it. Make it. Don't care about others. Don't think about the consequences. Then sit on the blisters for a while, they will heal again. Starving for a while for art is not bad either. So choose your own path and enjoy every step. Above all: live in the here and now, all the time. After all, history is made there and then.

Tony Conrad (1940-2016) makes his appearance in a documentary at The Hague's Rewire Festival. The American violinist, filmmaker and artist lives a unique plea for radicalism, with invariably droll funny eyes. It marks the highlights of the festival. And we have something to gain from that too, for later.

Uncompromisingly positive

For three days, Rewire continues Conrad's uncompromisingly positive approach in its varied programme. In it, a lot of smiling faces can be detected, both among raving noisejazzmusicians (Sex Swing) as with creators of kraut-from-nowadays electronics (SUMS). So enjoy, and it gets even more infectious when the artists exhaust themselves in a true run-your-own-rot spectacle (N.M.O.). However, when radicalism is feigned, empty nihilism appears to win out acutely, resulting in a rare misfire in festival performances (Pharmakon).

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Happy tumbling

At Horse Lords in the small Prince27, the bizarre breaks tumble over each other inimitably punishing and tight. We pulled that off nicely, the upwardly curled corners of the Baltimore musicians' mouths seem to suggest. After their show, the record table is stormed; they have made many friends with their freaky rock, which is anything but mainstream. Sex Swing is a lot more angular and gritty a day later, but the Londoners are also cheerful. Like a raving reporter, the spectator's ear shoots through the band, in which every other beat, in a different spot, someone else is having the greatest of fun with breaking news. Thus, Sex Swing turns out to be a thunderous mix of psychedelia in shades of grey, full of crunching baritone saxophone and chalky noise, with a sauce of Neu! gone to doom rock.

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Sum and measure

David 'Kangding Ray' Letellier laughingly chugs his minimalist electronics off the balconies of The Horse. Barry Burns of Mogwai, meanwhile, cleaves the Raster-Noton idiom with sparse but highly effective melodies on spacey synthesiser and splitting guitar. Behind the two, Merline Ettore beats the daylights out of his drum kit with a jazzy motorik hand that recalls Jaki Liebezeit. Together they are called SUMS. The phrase is not only up for grabs, it turns out to be true. SUMS delivers a Can-anno-now jam in optima forma. What began as an occasional project gradually turns out to have more direction, direction and substance. SUMS will soon release an EP that will hopefully be a prelude to more live shows from this trio.

Sparta from Budapest

Gábor Lázár does not do ostentatious jam spheres. He has hung LED beams in the Korzo Theatre (for the first time, normally they are on the floor), the stage floor remains empty. For 22 minutes, the Hungarian fires his installation A Trap for Your Attention towards the audience. Your eye tries to follow the bright light shooting through the space. The spartan electronic sound offers no grip. Lázár bones out electronics to the core and then wrings pulses and bass waves out of them that cleave right through your body and rattle the stands. The hyperfocus stuns and grips, deepens and lingers. If the future of digital music is bare and stripped down, Lázár is the pioneer par excellence.

And no euphoria!

More electronics will come from Lorenzo Senni, on whose band shirt In colossal font, his first name appears. In idol format, 'LORENZO' also appears on a large canvas behind the 'altar' with his machines shredding rave anthems and synthleads. Hard to stomach? Tough luck, thinks Senni. With a big grin, he puts the electronics to work and goes for an awkward dance outside the lights. Then, when it rains beer mugs, Senni conjures a power ballad from the top hat that easily rivals the 'Paradise by the Dashboard Light' of the postrave can be called.

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Of course, a Senni set does not end in euphoria. No other artist at Rewire 2017 asked as many ticklish questions and invited conversation and debate as Senni. Was this irony? An easygoing middle finger? Jeff Koons for the dance floor? Or, above all, a loving, topical ode to rave?

Unsteady dreams

A propos rave: in the queue at the ticket counter, a young man wonders aloud: 'Who the hell is Jeff Mills? Nobody knows the guy and yet he's so high up on the line-up? Surely that's very strange!' Would he even know what rave was? Or Slowdive? Conrad-like Rewire proves that it doesn't matter whether you know this or not. Hordes of visitors, however, only came for the band from Reading.

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Their dreamy and somewhat unsteady singing shoegaze rolls through Het Paard crystal clear. Slowdive's return after more than 20 years is warmly welcomed and, judging by the new material played, there is future in the partly brutally rousing, part humming sweet rock. At least with the band, the mass jubilation leads to a joyous celebration in the form of an encore.

But what did you report now?

Pharmakon prefers to beat all the fun and zest for life out of her audience. What a contrast to the recently released album Contact. On it, she lifts to a frightening level. Live, Margaret Chardiet wields the bluntest of axes. Blunt steamroller drones and cutting circular saw noise form the base over which she screeches her vocal chords to pieces, but it remains unclear what she has to say. She wants to be Whitehouse or Dave Phillips, but mimics what she knows from record or YouTube. And what has been done so many times before - and so much better too. Then nihilism becomes empty; radicalism of and for nothingness. No matter how loud you scream then and how loud you turn up the noise: then it is not a question of not being heard - then there is nothing to be heard.

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Food for thought

Talk about not being heard: Rewire problematises the role of women in (experimental) music with an essay in the programme book and a panel discussion. Jo Kali's text goes bizarrely short at times and makes many assumptions that are highly debatable. Similarly, Pharmakon's plea for a woman's voice in the man's world that is supposedly the noise genre - while radical - is hardly positive. This is more of a King(in) One-Eye argument of the sort: hurray, we have a woman for once! Hoist her on the shield! This is nonsense, as there are many more women active in noise - did the writer just not look? - who also offer original quality and do not imitate men. Still, there is fodder for a lot of conversation, and who knows, pulpy music, in the gender discourse that Rewire helps put on the map.

Daggers

That female empowerment can also be addressed positively, proves Moor Mother. Her performance is stiff with poetic and political eloquence. Camae Ayewa spews her lyrics like a j'accuse! avant la lettre, about discrimination and many other issues that affect her; not just as a woman, but as an African-American, as a young person, as an artist, as a poet.

As she takes the stage, it becomes clear that she carries a huge baggage of animated knowledge and lived, actual history that gobbles up all the attention. You drink the vicious cocktail of her stories and gently cough out the ragged noise and plopping grime beats underneath. Word for word, Moor Mother shows how much her lyrics are daggers that cut through prejudices and pigeonholes to (re)connect. And to think that Fetish Bones is only her first album. Ayewa is far from finished, that much is certain. Right there again you find Tony Conrad's uncompromisingly positive making and doing: living.

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Celebration of radical noise

That's the power of Rewire, celebrating the positivity of radical noise. This can be done - literally - lying in the beanbags, while Kassel Jaeger highly refined musique concrète stacks layer upon layer into a veritable electronic symphony. You can also find it at N.M.O., which subjects itself to a shuttle run test between electronics and drum kit in the middle of the frenzied audience, meanwhile presenting steaming raw techno.

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These are just two of the many faces on which Conrad's enjoyable smile can be seen almost continuously. In doing so, Rewire confirms its status as the spring festival for adventure and experimentation; the pre-eminent plea for radicalism that builds up and meanwhile sketches out vistas with leisurely vision.

Next year again