Rewire opened its doors on Thursday last week and by the time I arrived on the Friday, the 15th edition of the festival in The Hague was in full swing. The streets around Amare were milling with easily identifiable attendees despite coming from many different countries, all to meet up in The Netherlands to immerse themselves in experimental and notoriously ’difficult’ music. Easily spotted by their characteristic half-run – a gait developed over years as you get wise to the rhythm of shows speckled across venues surrounding Paard. This was my second year and I have already fully mastered it, but sometimes of course you still see desperates breaking out into a run as they realise their favourite artist is about to pack out a small venue and they are most likely missing the show.
The 2026 programme made it as difficult to prioritise as ever, since the thousands of festival-goers could never at one time all fit into one venue – even when it’s one of the city’s largest concert halls. Still, there were some no-brainer pairings that I was thankful for. On the Friday you could weave through Fine, weed420, Smerz and then Tracey. Sadly this also meant I had to give up on another vital strain which included Bby Eco, Susu Laroche and Danksterdam duo La Rat, whose music I heard coming from the speakers of record shops I just barely had time to nip in to.
An interesting megatrend that I observed after CTM and Rewire, was the attempt of curators and bookers to neatly tie current developments into musical movements. As an example, CTM had an artist talk on the theme of noise and redlining in music with producers like Assyouti. Similarly, but in opposition to CTM’s forecasting of hard and bass-heavy beats, Rewire’s talk about ’Fragile Minutes’ included both James K and Malibu. While the former focused on club music, the latter was an inquiry into how ”digital networks and platforms shape not only what we listen to, but how, where, and with whom listening happen”.
This is really interesting to me personally, since I run a platform that probably unwittingly plays a part in forming streams of linked artists that appear together in podcasts, playlists or even just on a landing page. I actually consider which artists I am featuring before and after an article, since our website has no accessible archive. That means, each snapshot of the front page should make sense and not feel too disparate, considering we have no-genre policy.
While the programming of Rewire is undoubtedly set to challenge and open our eyes, of course there are also conscious choices such as allowing us to see both Fine and Smerz, on the assumption that many would be fans of both. The particular sound these artists produce are a part of a current megatrend that have many names and side quests. Many wrongly associate it with Copenhagen, but it’s more of a global response to a scary reality where all we know is war, genocide, financial hardship, mental health problems and so on. A world in which, sometimes it feels like the only thing that helps is turning on the NTS morning show. The softer or fragile sounds considered suitable for busy mornings are also the down we’d like to rest our anguished heads on evenings, afternoons and at the afterparty.
That’s why I refer to this form of music as an ’NTS sound’. Many of the artists have their own shows on the channel, with James K and Malibu being cases in point. Add to that Maria Somerville, who played last year and we begin to get a firmer grip of the styles that it encompasses. From dreampop and shoegaze to ambient and dubby pop. Yes, in 2025 both Maria Somerville and Danish artists Erika de Casier and Molina played Rewire, but in 2026 it felt like these sounds had really taken root.
Fine from Copenhagen is perhaps the most idiosyncratic of these voices as she blends a lot nostalgia for the EARLY nineties into her music, while the others are more into later expressions. Her show at Rewire completely blew any allegations of her being a Hope Sandoval copycat out of the water though. She performed a set of perfectly crafted pop songs, where each one has intricately surprising arrangements. Her latest string of singles (that I hope prefigure album #2) have a timeless air that would have earned her magazine covers in the 90s and in the 2020s, might at least lead to love from niche critics like myself.
You could also feel it in the crowd – both during Fine and many other shows – there was an almost electric atmosphere and an unspoken consensus that what we were witnessing was above and beyond a mere concert. These were life-affirming if not life changing moments. Not so much ’fragile moments’ as moments of burning fervour in the collective love felt for that artist. There were several new Fine songs that were incredible, with one borrowing phrasing from Red Hot Chili Peppers’ ”Under the Bridge” to great effect. It’s going to be one hell of a an album.
I had actually seen Fine, Smerz, James K, Malibu and Acopia all play last year but I really wanted to see them again, so I went out of my way to catch them all at Rewire. I hate to mention it here, but all these artists have been central to evil Spotify’s playlist Cph+ which has surprisingly little to do with Denmark. Fine is the only one of those artists who is from Copenhagen. Yes, she has released music on Escho (which is also home to Smerz, Molina and others) but the actual Copenhagen scene is much more informed by post-Posh Isolation projects like the Unearth event series and the Real Live Radio collective. In fact, it has rubbed people the wrong way to such an extent that Real Live decided to release a compilation called Amager+ (an often derided suburb of Copenhagen).
In 2024 the Danish artist ML Buch played Rewire, and she is arguably the one artist that bridges the so-called Cph+ scene with what I refer to as the NTS sound. When she released Skinned in 2020 it was unique. Just today Bandcamp also published an article that describe aspects of the same thing, called ”Trip-Hop Strikes Back”. It talks about the ’meme-worthy’ Copenhagen scene but also artists like James K. As I’m writing this I’m listening to a record by J. Mcfarlane’s Reality Guest – a Naarm project that pre-figured this current love for dubby beats and low-pass filters with their decidedly ”Slinky” album from 2024. What I’m trying to get at is that there is no ‘scene’ around these artist, they merely share a bunch of inspirations that are central to their generation.
The Smerz show was kind of hard to get in to but it was all glitter, colourful dresses and hair blowing in the wind from the fans on the stage. Something that struck me during the show was how one of those big generational influences is Björk. A thought that resurfaced later when watching Malibu. It also had me recall my early adolescence, when I had a lot of trouble sleeping due to an over-active mind that was never diagnosed but was likely the result of OCD. The only thing that worked – without fail – was putting on my cd of Homogenic in a pair of big headphones and then lying absolutely still until I fell asleep.
There’s a lot about the late 90s’ optimism and anticipation for the future (scary new millennium) and the early 00s maximalist blending of genres that resonates with current artists. If we talk about Tracey for a while, they are a part of a new crop of artists from London – with Bassvictim, Dean Blunt and Lolina’s Relaxin Records being names that spring to mind – who are into different indie scenes of the past. I thought Tracey were virtually unknown, having only released one EP on the acclaimed London label AD93 (also home to James K, feeo, Joanne Robertson, Valentina Magaletti who all played Rewire 2026). But they were showered with appreciation, by a crowd that was decidedly younger than the Rewire average. Considering they were mostly performing with playback and some fragmented visuals it was astounding how the energy in the room had everyone break out in dance.
Tracey is a duo that mixes the happy and bass-heavy club sounds of hyperpop with the sincere and bare-nerves songwriting of indie, much like their fellow Londoners in The Femcels and Worldpeace DMT. When I was flying to Amsterdam there was a moment when we were above the clouds and the sun was shining, after an amazing night where I’d had 2 hours of sleep. It reminded me there are still beautiful things in the world. And as Tracey were playing their latest single with the chorus ”above the clouds, the sun is shining” I felt like it perfectly framed my state of mind that whole weekend.
It also turned out operating on 2 hours of sleep meant I was only half conscious by the time I was watching Park Jiha play the in the Lutherse Kerk after midnight. It was a truly beautiful performance that felt like a perfect note to go out on. That church is one of my favourite venues during Rewire, and in the next article I’ll tell you all about some more precious moments had there. But it also meant giving up on Jasmín and NVST in the Grey Space’s basement. Sadly I didn’t make it to Grey Space at all during the first day, and when I heard of the cancellation of Kavari’s performance my heart sunk a bit.
Kavari had been the number one reason I wanted to come to Rewire this year, having seen her DJ at CTM and I couldn’t wait to witness a live performance by her. But I guess now I’ll have to wait until Nuits Sonores, where she is performing together with Blood of Aza (whom I missed at CTM). But I still wanted to mention Kavari, because perhaps this article made it sound like Rewire now is all about soothing, non-confrontational music. But just like at CTM there is a strong presence of noise and darker expressions at Rewire – for god’s sake, Einstürzende Neubauten were headlining.
So on the Friday there were also noteworthy performances by EYE & C.O.L.O. whose amazing AV show I’d seen at CTM, just like Shapednoise’s AV show with Sevi Iko Dømochevsky. Scottish legend Drew McDowall also performed on the Friday (sadly at the same time as Tracey). But if anyone straddles these two movements of industrial/noise and dreamy ambient it is McDowall, who worked with James K on her 2022 album. He did an AV show with filmmaker Pedro Maia in the Grote Kerk, which in hindsight I regret missing.
I did however snatch a front-row seat for Jim O’Rourke’s and Eiko Ishibashi’s concert on the smaller stage of Amare. Handily, I was staying just across the street from Amare. Their joint album Pareidolia from last year is so beautiful and since I’d missed Ishibashi’s Rewire show last year I just had to redeem myself.
In the next article you will hear more about my highlights from the Saturday.
Top photo: Tracey by Parcifal Werkman
