Lineup
Japanese artist Hatis Noit’s accomplished range is astonishingly self-taught. Hoit is inspired by everything she can find from Gagaku — Japanese classical music —, Bulgarian and Greg...
The Bandcamp-bio for Petbrick deadpans that it’s just ‘Iggor Cavalera (Sepultura) and Wayne Adams making horrible noises that melt your face’. But press play and you’ll find th...
Since its inception a decade ago, King Midas Sound’s gloom-ridden transmutations of dub, lover’s rock and ambient music have made an unyielding impression. Producer Kevin Martin (The Bug)...
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Unconventional and hard to categorize, producer/lyricist Quelle Chris is well-versed in several genres, including punk rock, poetry, abstract soul, and experimental hip-hop. As a beatsmith, he tends t...
Musician, producer and composer Kevin Richard Martin’s chosen moniker has always been a fitting one. As a defiant experimentalist ceaselessly exploring sonic extremities, contrasts and frictiona...
Mega Bog instills a wonderful and somewhat disorienting kind of confusion on her stunning latest LP ‘Dolphine’, conjuring a nautical journey of seventies folk, soft rock, new age and psych...
Stella Chiweshe, The Queen of Mbira, broke new ground by becoming the first artist to successfully combine the mbira with the marimba. She took up the homegrown instrument back in 1964, originally use...
Sarah Louise Henson operates from the roots of Appalachian folk music, but is likewise influenced by spiritual jazz, contemporary classical music and even new age. Her music has never sounded as penet...
Like Stereolab and Broadcast exemplified so fervently before them, Empath’s offbeat brand of guitar pop turns discord and noise on their upside, turning and twisting them into agents of jo...
Angel Bat Dawid’s first album ‘The Oracle’ provides a new radical benchmark for contemporary jazz music, capturing a unique mystique within its economical recording methods. Meditati...
Russian collective Shortparis is all about tension, friction and disruption, obscuring the boundaries between audiovisual theatre, techno raves and punk rock performance. Whether it’s shattering...
Presented by Le Guess Who? & BAK - basis voor actuele kunst
Le Guess Who? and Jeanne van Heeswijk connected the Chicago-based pianist, clarinetist and composer Angel Bat Dawid with visual artist,...
Presented by Le Guess Who? & Utrecht University
In the wake of his recently published fifth book ‘Silenced by Sound: the Music Meritocracy Myth’ and driven by his ongoing field-record...
You know that mechanism where you whisper a message in a circle of people – and as its passed on back to you, that message becomes distorted? That’s a little bit what Portland duo Visible...
As J-E-T-S, producer compadres Jimmy Edgar and Machinedrum (Travis Stewart) developed a project that’s a wee bit more complex than your average cross-pollination of ideas. By applying their comm...
Justin Broadrick (Jesu, Goldflesh, Napalm Death) and Kevin Martin (The Bug, King Midas Sound) initially consolidated their mutual love for abrasive noise, dub and industrial as Techno Animal. If that...
Keys of Light is a piano installation for everyone; it allows the audience to co-create the work by playing the piano. Every note that is played creates a pulse of light or visual element th...
Presented by Le Guess Who? & Springhaver, hosted by John Doran (The Quietus)
Hream follows the 25+ year career male nurse and adult music student Doug Hream Blunt as he embarks on a world tour, p...
Violinist and vocalist Sudan Archives writes, plays, and produces her own music. Drawing inspiration from Sudanese fiddlers, she is self-taught on the violin, and her unique songs also fold in element...
Cellist and composer Mariel Roberts plays her instrument of choice like an actor performs a scene, completely engrossed and enraptured within the composition’s totality. As both solo performer a...
Deerhoof is one of those fantastic beasts the world has been lucky to find, an anomaly of a band that can twist any crunch of noise into saccharine hook-heavy pop euphoria. Their wide-eyed trial-and-e...
Presented by IMPAKT - Centre for Media Culture
The Sound Of One Computer Thinking invokes a paradox or question that is essentially unanswerable. Are love, death or humour uniquely human or biologica...
Hosted by FACT
Belgrade-based DJ Vladimir Ivkovic sees his chosen profession as a deeper philosophy than just filling up dancefloors. For him, DJing is a way to enter or create new places, to trigger...
In cooperation with Utrecht Early Music Festival
Olga Pashchenko, one of the world’s most accomplished piano and keyboard virtuosos, will bring a unique take on one of the most famous horror so...
Brain-melting psychedelic pop that trespasses your neurons like a dream machine on some spaceship. Argentina’s Los Siquicos Litoraleños is truly a baffling operation, embracing wacky expe...
Le Mini Who? is a spin-off festival of Le Guess Who?. It turns venues, cafes, art spaces and even a fire station of the fast-developing and creative area Cartesius into improvised venues for (mainly)...
As a spin-off festival of Le Guess Who?, Le Mini Who? transforms many of Utrecht’s local bars, restaurants, venues and warehouses into improvised venues for (mainly) Dutch underground bands to p...
Efterklang singer Casper Clausen presents his (yet to be released) solo music, made up in a small studio by the river in Cacilhas (Lisbon). With songwriting still in progress, Casper has only played s...
As Lone Taxidermist, musician, performance artist, costume maker and provocateur Natalie Sharp relishes in the grotesque. Her unruly and flamboyant electro-punk performances make audiences an active p...
Collaboratorium
Harpist Mary Lattimore and guitarist William Tyler may have honed radically different string-instruments, their respective cunning for vivid storytelling with instrumental music is re...
Hidden Musics
If it makes any sense – mystical phenomena rarely do – Octavia Mendoza Anario, aka La Bruja de Texcoco (‘The Witch of Texcoco’), reinvigorates the canon of Mexic...
Lending his singular talents to artists as diverse as Liturgy, Glenn Branca and Colin Stetson, drummer extraordinaire Greg Fox’s rapid fire, blistering playing style is a true force of nature. F...
The words ‘holy minimalist’ immediately jump out when skimming the artist biography of Mexican producer Murcof. Fernando Corona appears to shift techno music from its hedonist, more secula...
Many nomadic Tuareg artists channel and preserve the vibrancy of life that was once the everyday in Mali. Ahmed Ag Kaedy initially set out to do the same, but instead his haunting eight-track LP...
Quintessential Ethio-groove performer Ayalèw Mesfin has joined forces with the renowned US-based ensemble Debo band for his first European live performance ever, and in truth, few collaboration...
A true scion of the experimental noise scene, Lasse Marhaug embodies the term noisenik and then some. The Norwegian artist frequently applies a brutalist heavy metal sensibility to his potent and loud...
In the late 80’s, Doug Hream Blunt moonlighted music with a job at a care home in San Francisco. As a relative late bloomer at age 35, he started writing songs after attending a How To Start A B...
Producer and musician Cate Le Bon creates a unique vocabulary of freak folk, post-punk and psych pop. Thanks to her jagged guitar playing and Welsh diction, Le Bon is the definition of elusive. Behind...
“Her playing conjures a vision of some vintage piano genius like Art Tatum coming back to life and getting high on post-minimalism,” Pitchfork once concluded. Indeed, if some renowned comp...
The power of the imagination is arguably the greatest during youth, and Oslo-based collective DNA? AND? bring this notion into play in the most remarkable fashion. Comprised of special needs children...