Lineup
Presented by Le Guess Who?, Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, No Seat At The Table, BAK - basis voor actuele kunst, Urban Futures Studio (Utrecht University), RAUM
“In urban social...
Cate Le Bon is celebrated for her playful lyricism, and her inventive pop melodies combined with post-punk takeoffs. Last year, the Welsh avant-pop songwriter released her most tantalizing record yet...
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)...
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With over twenty releases under a closely-related variety of names – Orinoka Crash Suite, OCS, Orange County Sound, The Ohsees, The Oh Sees, and Thee Oh Sees, and now just Oh Sees – f...
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...
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...
Along with Shy Girl and Sega Bodega, French artist and producer Coucou Chloe is the co-founder of burgeoning label/collective NUXXE. Her malformed take on pop music is as mind-melting as it is urgent,...
The adventurous, innovative Dutch band The Ex have defied categorization ever since their origination in 1979. Born out of the punk explosion, when anything and everything was possible, the band have...
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,...
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...
Somehow, Faten Kanaan composes mesmeric, hypnotic music without the use of sequencers or arpeggiators. With that tranquil sense of endlessness as her core principal, she tells evocative stories with b...
Fashion designer Iris van Herpen and sound artist Salvador Breed curate a lineup of artists and performances symbolizing their highly intertwined aesthetics, developed over years of collaborating on n...
Naming a band after something concise and universal seems to naturally generate some of the most physically punishing music in existence. If Sunn O))) and Sleep are part of a three-headed beast of &ld...
Drone-based music often wields the power to blur that stark hierarchy between audience and stage, to level everyone in the room as both participant and listener. Korean duo TENGGER are no exception to...
Japanese composer and percussionist Midori Takada is a true luminary in the world of ambient and experimental music, playing solo, in various groups and theatre productions. In the 1980s and 1990s, Ta...
Godflesh is an austere beast that intersects elements of industrial, metal, noise rock and post-punk in truly defiant, engrossing fashion. With its juggernaut drum thuds, shredding bass throbs, cauter...
Flaunting an impressive resume of bands (notably as singer/guitarist of trance-rock cosmonauts Spacemen3) and production credits (Panda Bear, MGMT, Beach House), Pete Kember’s genius has now spa...
Lebanese-born producer and DJ Rabih Beaini (formerly known as Morphosis) specializes in grainy, imaginative analogue techno. A range of influences—improvisational jazz, krautrock, new wave, elec...
Chicago-born clarinetist and saxophonist Matana Roberts describes her work as “panoramic sound quilting”: think loops, field recordings, chanting and snippets of spirituals. As her ambitio...
Presented by Le Guess Who? & Centraal Museum
As co-creative director for Björk on visuals, mask-maker James Merry is primarily known for his hand embroidery on sportswear, but he also create...
The Sweet Release Of Death triumph over doom-and-gloom with a pinch of dark humor and a penchant for stretching guitar-based music’s outer peripheries. The group forms a maelstrom of ear-splitti...
Presented by Le Guess Who? & Springhaver
The directorial debut from Boots Riley presents an alternate reality of present-day Oakland, California, when telemarketer Cassius Green finds himself in...
In the early 70’s, free-jazz evangelists Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids sprung from the tutelage of the great Cecil Taylor. Drawing furthermore from the vast cosmos of Fela Kuti, Pharaoh Sand...
As Yves Jarvis, Jean-Sebastian Audet’s gauzy post-R&B vignettes are driven by color, both as a visual and thematic component. His 2017 album ‘Good Will Come To You’ (released und...
Some bands exist to obey your sweetest aural proclivities, but Mueran Humanos is no such band. This Argentinian, Berlin-based duo aims to unnerve and shudder with their strangely fascinating, queasy c...
When ex- COIL member Drew McDowall decided to revive the group’s 1998 masterpiece ‘Time Machines’ to the present, two decades after its release, the joke was probably not lost on him...
Collaboratorium
The cartoon physics of Brooklyn experimental outfit Zs, the Lovecraftian doom tandem Ex Eye with Colin Stetson, the blast beat barrages of Liturgy; Greg Fox has an uncanny knack for t...
Composer Maarten Vos is what you’d call a voyager: he transforms traditional instrumentation into newfangled sounds and wields technology like something intricately human. Known as much for his...
Tongue-in-cheek, hilarious and often controversial, Ghanaian duo FOKN Bois coined their sound as gospel porn rap, which might be a cryptic way of calling their art slyly subversive. Their music has be...
The most riveting, template-shifting music often comes from a state of displacement or transience, and the Luxembourg-based, Cape Verde-born ensemble Grupo Pilon is certainly no exception. Founded by...
Tropical Fuck Storm’s wailing backing harmonies sound like a coven chanting hellish incantations, and the filthy percussive thrusts, the otherworldly synth flourishes of the band’s debut L...
“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...
Whether it’s a stage, a computer screen or a page from a book: Jenny Hval’s multi-disciplinary work aims to break beyond these confining zones to form a deeper connection with her audience...
Gyedu-Blay Ambolley is the true originator of simigwa-do, a Ghanaian fusion of afro funk, soul and jazz. His work with the Uhuru Dance Band and the The Apagya Show Band (the latter with one-time mento...
Oiseaux Tempête’s cross-cultural, multi-genre improv rock has a tendency to unfold in places of turmoil, recording records in Greece, Turkey and Lebanon in the past. The core duo of Fr&eac...
The ever-versatile Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe is a soul that keeps creating, with each undertaking achieving new depths, textures and vocabularies. Lowe's been a mainstay with math rockers 90 Day Men and...
Presented by Le Guess Who? & Centraal Museum
James Merry is a visual artist, originally from Gloucestershire in the UK, who is now based in Iceland where he has been living and working with Bj&ou...
Taking his name from a spot near to his heart and home, Phil Elverum of Mount Eerie and The Microphones makes music heavily imbued with that foggy green mood of Washington state. But far from limiting...
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...
Former Screaming Tea Party-member Koichi Yamanoha was once better known for his scream than his whisper. ‘Hazy Eyes Maybe’, the Japanese-born, London-based musician’s debut LP under...
Presented by Centraal Museum
Alles is Rond (All Is Round) was made in the city where Louis Andriessen and Madelon Hooykaas both grew up: Utrecht. Both artists have worked together before, but this is...
In her home country of Zimbabwe, music icon Stella Chiweshe is endearingly called The Queen of Mbira, becoming the first female artist to gain widespread recognition for a strictly male-dominated disc...
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...
Revolt comes in all shapes and sizes for São Paolo-guitarist, producer and songsmith Kiko Dinucci. He cut his teeth in various punk and hardcore bands, filtered that subversive spirit through t...
Moon Duo’s torrent blotchy psychedelics inventively coalesce with meditative, minimalist pop. Indeed, this is inflammatory music that submerges and manifests within the subconscious like a livin...
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...
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...
Loving is an experimental pop collaboration between musicians David Parry, Lucas Henderson and Jesse Henderson. Latest release ‘If l am only my thoughts’ marks a newfound appreciation for...
Príncipe Discos presents, hosted by FACT
“Her music is dazzling in all senses, a trance-inducing tangle of boxy drums, vivid swirls of synthetic melody and buzzsaw grime bass,” The...
Presented by Centraal Museum
Visual artist Eva Spierenburg from Zeist is the winner of the K.F. Hein Stipendium 2018. Physicality is omnipresent in Spierenburg’s work. Whether it is the visuali...
After notable stints as Inga Copeland and Hype Williams (the latter with Dean Blunt), Alina Astrova once again brandishes her signature Baudelairean hybrid of pop and stripped-down tech...
Having become somewhat of a mainstay in Utrecht, Stranded FM celebrate and share music from all over the globe, becoming the city’s bastion for discovering fresh sounds. During their four-year r...
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...
DJ Quesadilla and DJ Fitz, two swashbuckling archeologists of music who habitually turn dancefloors all over the world into journeys of sweet sonic oblivion. The former is one of the most prominent fi...
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...
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...
Equally adept at noisy, feedback-laden jams as spaced-out, repetitive voyages, Mythic Sunship's self-styled "anaconda rock" has been described as one of the most riveting movements of the European psy...
Lightning Bolt’s floor shows are the stuff of myth and legend, unleashing a hailstorm of noise that would leave every venue smoldering in dust and vapors for weeks. Two decades after their accla...
‘FIS’ stands for ‘forever in search’, and in all respects, this is exactly the intent of producer Olly Peryman. The monumental soundscapes of FIS highlight that sense continuit...
Presented by Le Guess Who? & Fotodok & Casco Art Institute
Being born and raised on the island of Curaçao, the work of Kevin Osepa (1994) revolves around his identity and the identity...
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...
Whether it’s the early, more electronic-driven beginnings or excavating field recordings at an abandoned settlement in the Arctic Circle, these Danish pop adventurers express boundless enthusias...
German DJ & producer Mark Ernestus is a sucker for African and Jamaican music. Ernestus’s seven-year collaboration with Ndagga Rhythm Force started during a trip through Senegal, where he wa...
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...
The Necks know no precedent and no peers. And they like it that way – the trio, founded in Australia in 1987, have been happily making music on the fringes for over three decades, where they hav...
Michele Mercure’s shrouded cinematic works overlap ambient, abstract, and industrial sensibilities, always with a keen and playful sense of their surroundings and acoustics. Not surprisingly, th...
Presented by Le Guess Who? & Springhaver
Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn-Copeland Story, tells the time-traveling tale of the mystical musician and vocalist - who gave a very rare performan...
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...
With their curious mix of infernal free-jazz and post-rock, LOTTO are one of the most inventive groups of the Polish underground. Embracing the minimalist spirit of The Necks, Godspeed You! Black Empe...
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...
Le Guess Who?-curator Patrick Higgins, visual artist Matthew Schreiber and choreographer Monica Mirabile will present the European premiere of their awe-inspired audiovisual project DOSSIER X, immersi...
Spazio Disponibile presents
Few DJs and producers are as universally acclaimed in techno circles as Italian connoisseur Donato Dozzy. Dozzy possesses that rare ability to zigzag his way into peoples&...
Príncipe Discos presents, hosted by FACT
DJ Firmeza is a member of the Príncipe Discos crew, one of the most interesting and landmark-shifting movements within the modern European club...
Presented by Le Guess Who? & De Utrechtse Boekenbar
Within the setting of one of Utrechts’ finest curated bookstores, our artistic director Bob van Heur will discuss with Grammy-winning pro...
In 1979, The Raincoats helped shape the timeless notion that punk is what you make it to be—an act of raw expression, not any one sound. Their anarchy was poetic. The group’s debut album &...
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...
Through live interviews, listening sessions, art exhibitions with select LGW? performers and all things print and sound, Kapitaal will transform into a three-day meeting place for craftsmanship and de...
SPAZA are a band with no permanent members, performing in line-ups curated by the South African label Mushroom Hour Half Hour for the specific purpose of recording improvised or workshopped material....
This collaborative project between musicians Yussef Hussain (Y-Bayani), Naomi Addy (Baby Naa), Josie Coppola and Max Weissenfeldt (Philophon Records) straddles the realms of reggae and Ghana’s H...
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...
Presented by BAK - basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht
Trainings for the Not-Yet is a project convened by artist Jeanne van Heeswijk and BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, in collaboration with many other...
Presented by Le Guess Who? & Springhaver
A selection of short films of Glitterbeat's acclaimed Hidden Musics series curated by GRAMMY-winning record producer Ian Brennan (Tinariwen, Zomba Prison...
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...
Like Patrick Higgins, Tyondai Braxton is an innovator in the purest sense. As a former member of Battles, he ventured far beyond the outer dimensions of what we consider pop music. Braxton earned his...
Presented by Le Guess Who? & Springhaver
Part film, part baptism, in Black Mother director Khalik Allah brings us on a spiritual journey through Jamaica. Soaking up its bustling metropolises and...
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3FM: Eva Koreman nieuwe presentator 3voor12 radio 3FM: Le Guess Who? 2018: Ralph-Herman snapt niet wat Colin Stetson doet3FM: Timo op Le Guess Who: van gevoelige liedjes in een kerk t...
“With the able steer of festival curators Jenny Hval, Moon Duo, Fatoumata Diawara, and Iris Van Herpen, this year’s boundary-crossing festival Le Guess Who?? welcomed visitors from over...