The Hague’s Rewire Festival Embraces The Full Sonic Spectrum

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.)

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.

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.

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.