Lineup
New York-based musician Martin Bisi is hailed as iconic producer who defined the sound of New York noise. This year’s release ‘BC35’ celebrates the 35-year Anniversary his of BC Stud...
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...
‘Concrete Desert’ is a colossal masterpiece created by The Bug (Kevin Martin) and Earth's Dylan Carlson. On this tandem project, Carlson and Martin plunge into deep sonic abysses, with dro...
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In 1975, family group The Staples Jr. Singers released their first and only album: ‘When Do We Get Paid’ - recorded when the gospel band’s youngest members were in their early teenag...
‘The Invaders’ talks about a generation of civil rights activists who originated from Memphis in 1967, consisting of students, Vietnam veterans, musicians and intellectuals who were inspir...
One listen to Duma’s track “Lionsblood” is enough to let us know what this outsider Kenyan project is all about. Martin Khanja and Sam Karugo, figureheads of the flourishing Nairobi...
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...
Arizona duo Trees Speak are nowhere close to slowing down creatively, having recently released their fourth record, 'Vertigo of Flaws', in just over one year. It is a colossal leap into an unknown son...
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)...
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...
Do you know what total destruction sounds like? It’s sounds like MC/singer Miss Red, aka Sharon Stern, and producer The Bug, alias Kevin Martin, hitting the stage. The Bug’s monstrous, all...
Luka Productions is the bedrock of Mali-based producer, multi-instrumentalist and rapper Luka Guinda, responsible for 2017’s more mysterious and downright sensational releases. ‘Fasokan&rs...
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...
Born to a Gabonese father and a Singaporean mother, Devi Mambouka is a quintessential child of the world. After relocating to the United States at twelve, she found singing an unlikely refuge. Nowaday...
Inkhorn Controversy is a band from Utrecht that plays both Dutch and English alternative pop rock. Their sound is Britpop/Postpunk-like with some Progrock influences. With theiridiosyncratic texts the...
For a number of years, LA-based musician Shannon Lay played both for the post-punk number Feels and on her own. She released an array of critically acclaimed solo records which were praised for their...
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...
Besides being a captivating composer, violinist, and vocalist, Jessica Moss is also a skillful story-teller. Listening to her first solo ventures, one is immediately transported into the icy Montreal...
Theater Kikker x U? presents The EarIn the 30-minute one-on-one performance Sensory Sensation Series No.1 – The Ear, the ear of the participant is central. The participant, the ear and the...
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...
Mazaher are a small group of mostly women musicians and singers who play Zãr music: chanting songs and playing hypnotic polyrhythms used as a purification and exorcism ritual to help pacify and...
The hurdy-gurdy is an instrument few play and less master, but Valentín Clastrier does. The French musician’s career started out eclectic, as he picked up on choral singing, the cornet, a...
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...
On his 2021 record, ‘Forfolks’, Tortoise guitarist Jeff Parker proves why he is considered one of contemporary music’s most versatile and innovative composers - be it in pop, rock, j...
Biscuit, Kwake Bass, Peter Bennie, and Raven Bush began playing together as the house band on open-mic night Speakers' Corner in Brixton, London. Fifteen years after their start as a band and more tha...
Dreamcrusher began on Kansas-born, New York City-based Luwayne's Glass Myspace page in 2003. Nineteen years, forty releases (including this February's ‘Dreamcrusher Plays the Hits: (LIVE 2-2-...
Contradiction alone could describe this Copenhagen-based composer, producer and viola player - but it wouldn’t be enough. Inspired by postmodern and minimalist music, singing in a choir and play...
Juan Juan taught his girlfriend to play the drums to his own songs, which draw on the music of Devendra Banhart and The Velvet Underground. His debut album ‘New Mexico’, recorded on a four...
Are you ready for music from Afghanistan? Ghafar Amini is known within the Afghan community in the Netherlands and plays well-known Afghan songs. Along with the music, you will be able to fully experi...
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...
2019 was quite a different year for ethnographic label Ored Recordings. Instead of setting out on expeditions throughout the frozen Caucasus mountains on a quest to collect traditional music from the...
No one does softness - so gentle it brushes moving – like Ichiko Aoba. The Japanese singer has been a staple of the country’s acoustic folk scene since her debut ‘Kamisori Otome...
When Kelman Duran was first invited to play at a party, he opened the set with Biggie’s brooding ‘Suicidal Thoughts’. Over the years, his music has become decidedly more festive. Sta...
Somewhere close to the sounds of trains leaving and entering Utrecht Central Station, you can find the Ping Pong Club. Ping Pong & DJ’s will take place in this industrial former warehouse. P...
Johannesburg-based artist, jazz percussionist, and thinker Tumi Mogorosi's reputation as one of the most captivating young creatives in the South African scene has only amplified since his acclaimed 2...
East Side Radio is an online radio platform streaming from Lisbon’s East Side, Portugal. It’s designed to be a hub connecting widely recognized domestic and international talent. This LGW...
Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk's music began as a contradiction; playing as softly as possible in the time of the loudness of grunge. However, never the kind to stick to a label, they have shifted thei...
Luc Bersier’s band Reymour exchanged the quietness of the Swiss Alps for Brussel’s busyness, and out of it came ‘Leviosa’, released under Amsterdam label Knekelhuis. Their debu...
Hatis Noit’s vocal awakening came at the age of sixteen, during a trip to Nepal in which she was moved by a female monk’s chant. This experience led her to begin exploring the visceral pow...
'Punk is not dead - it's turned into cumbia!' excitedly types a YouTube commentator on Son Rompe Pera's Tiny Desk performance. The Gama brothers began playing the traditional Mexican marimba as childr...
If you’re on the lookout for a perfect description of Japanese duo Tenniscoats, look no further than Swedish soundscape artist Tape’s assessment: 'they literally play themselves to sleep'....
Koen Boeijinga plays saxophone and wind-instruments. At Wishing Well West he explores various eclectic sound worlds through improvisation using saxophones and a wide range of wind-instruments. A conte...
In the Ubuntuhuis you can listen to Ubuntustemmen (voices) Part 1 & 2. In Part 1 you will hear Roos and Amara. Amara plays traditional Guinese kora music and djembé. Roos adds a layer of te...
The performative character of the work of painter Koen Delaere can be compared to experiencing a live music performance or to making music in which meaning evolves while listening and playing. A spont...
The guitar has always occupied a special place in Spanish music - namely in flamenco, where players often perform with complicated and acrobatic techniques. But Madrid-born Víctor Herrero rose...
Paris-based Niamké Désiré began studying graphic design and cinema, but soon enough, he was designing and creating his own digital instruments. After several musical collaboration...
Much has been said about Abdullah Ibrahim (formerly Dollar Brand) - the master pianist and Cape Town anti-apartheid activist gracing Le Guess Who? with a spellbinding solo piano performance. Nelson Ma...
Colombian artist Julián Mayorga reminds us how freeing it can be to not take ourselves too seriously. Upon graduating from a Masters degree in electroacoustics and algorithmic composition in Ma...
Pianist and producer Jamael Dean and singer Sharada Shashidhar were already jazz prodigies in their own right, even before getting together to make more wondrous music. Dean, the grandson of legendary...
‘To carry you from melancholia to utopia’ was how NPR described the effect of Asher Gamedze’s 2020 bandleader debut ‘Dialectic Soul’. Behind the drum set, the Cape Town c...
Norwegian-German saxophonist Bendik Giske has likened his art to the one of a machine, but, still, through his music - most recently his second solo album, 2021’s ‘Cracks’ - there is...
This avant-rock group's relationship with Le Guess Who? goes way back; the three-piece Montreal band has played the festival time and time again. This year, it only made sense to mark our return to fo...
Music as Spectral Infrastructure
As a culmination of the two-day program, Lynnée Denise and Edward George play tracks and music that manifest the strangeness and wonder of sound system culture...
Movies That Matter presents
“Ladies and gentlemen, you wanna change? Come join us now!” In the powerful, inspiring and eye-opening ‘Mrs. F’, Nigerian theatre director Ifeoma F...
Movies That Matter presents
Memory House is the mesmerizing, carefully composed debut of director João Paulo Miranda Maria that follows Cristovam living in the poor, rural north of Brazil. Whe...
Obscure a moment the thinking head, the sovereign eye, the ears of dialogue, the nose of instinct (...) this could create an extraordinary vacancy, an unprecedented brake on the rational injunction in...
Le Guess Who? will host a special lunch at LOU Oudenoord. A place for conversation, reflection, relaxation and great food. Engage in talks with your fellow festival visitors about all the things you&r...
San Francisco-based artist Victoria Shen opposes signal and information through 'chaotic sound'. Her unconventional sonic havoc is carefully built with analog modular synthesizers, vinyl and resin rec...
Lubomyr Melnyk doesn’t like being called a composer; ‘I don’t know what I am’, he says. But the seasoned Ukrainian pianist certainly brought something novel to the instrument,...
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...
Automatic is a fairly recent Stones Throw export, and the positive attention captured by their debut, 2019’s ‘Signals’, prove they are a successful gamble for the left-field label. T...
Haram is an Arabic term for ‘forbidden’, which might give you an idea of what Zubeyda Muzeyyen’s work is all about. This Philadelphia-based artist, DJ and producer throws down club a...
With his nimble improv playing, composer Eli Keszler can make an average drum kit sound like electronic textures. It’s not much of a surprise that sonic contortionists such as Oneohtrix Point Ne...
Renowned for her extraordinary vocal range, The Chicago Reader described Maja S. K. Ratkje as “one of the most astonishing singers on the planet.” Even more of an accomplishment when you t...
Despite Sun Foot being a three piece, they could easily be defined as the exact opposite of a power trio. Labeled as surf noise and anti-beach pop, the members of Sun Foot play at a low volume, frisky...
Gaining reputation as an ‘all-round musical badass’ and self-proclaimed Synth Queen, SASAMI (Ashworth) is a prolific contributor to the L.A. music scene. On top of that, she’s a musi...
Clarinet master Cüneyt Sepetçi and his Orchestra Dolapdere are among the greatest musicians Turkey has ever produced. Not just adept at blasting out Turkish gypsy music with firecracker fe...
Hailing from Amsterdam, The Mauskovic Dance Band is a brainchild of producer and multi-instrumentalist Nic Niggebrugge, a.k.a Nicola Mauskovic. After years of playing drums for bands like Jacco Gardne...
Before Hailu Mergia fled to America in 1981, his group Walias Band was a guiding light in Ethiopia’s thriving nightclub scene. In America, Mergia ended up driving cabs for almost 30 years, but h...
We welcome 69-year-old Kadri Gopalnath, saxophone maestro and pioneer from India. Gopalnath’s life’s work is to incorporate the woodwind instrument into the classic South Indian Carnatic m...
Takuro Kikuchi’s subdued piano compositions move adrift between tranquility and contemplation. The 35-year-old musician hailing from Sendai, Japan, has been playing since the age of nine, drawin...
With Sons of Kemet, sax wizard Shabaka Hutchings takes cues from Afro-Caribbean carnival to contemporary UK grime and hip hop. This is music played with punk drive, the immediacy of club music and rid...
DNMF is a Lovecraftian abomination comprised of death jazz zealots Dead Neanderthals and prolific experimental musician Machinefabriek. Two formidable elements – the latter’s shrewd on-the...
Le Mini Who? presents the contemporary (Dutch) underground, in collaboration with independent local stores, shops and bars. It transforms Utrecht's city streets into a festival area, with more than fi...
In Utrecht’s suburb Lombok, you're immediately welcomed by Turkish and Moroccan grocery stores, bakeries, the smell of kebab, and huge piles of colorful fruits sold in the streets. The impressiv...
As a hurdy-gurdy player, composer and sound artist, Yann Gourdon focuses on the various ways acoustic instruments work together with landscapes, objects and man-made structures. Simultaneously, he lea...
Montreal's Big|Brave occupy a unique sonic space. Merging guitar torrents, withered noise bursts and shamanic yelps into a fully fleshed-out artistic vision, Big|Brave make believers everywhere their...
Insecure Men is the wacky side project of Fat White Family-member Saul Adamczewski and Ben Romans-Hopcraft (Childhood). First release ‘Karaoke For One’ contains nine stripped cover songs d...
Award-winning Dutch composer, bass clarinet player and saxophonist Joris Roelofs has performed with Han Bennink multiple times since forming an experimental duo together last year. Roelofs has practic...
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...
At last year's Le Guess Who?, British jazz stalwart Shabaka Hutchings performed with free jazz futurists The Comet Is Coming. This time around, Hutchings seeks out ghosts of the past with his South Af...
Liu Fang is known for her virtuosic and expressive interpretation of traditional pipa and guzheng music from China’s classical and folkloric traditions. Celebrated as being one of the greatest v...
Lili Boulanger (1893) is a unique and prodigious case studies in music history, taking up singing, organ, piano, violin, cello and harp at the premature age of five. In 1913, she became the first woma...
Yonatan Gat became known as a member of revolutionary Israeli punk band Monotonix, as well as an acclaimed recording artist. After powwow drum group the Eastern Medicine Singers initially turned down...
Deeply embedded in the Utrecht music scene, Luke Cohlen tries to celebrate all things that spring from his city via his involvement in Stranded FM and with his own Cultfarm events. A DJ himself as wel...
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...
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...
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)...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
British collective Seefeel straddled that chasm between experimental rock and ambient techno long before artists like Radiohead and Broadcast – and even later, Dirty Beaches and Caribou –...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
“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...
Centraal Museum presents
Black Chords is an installation by the French ‘post-conceptual’ artist Saâdane Afif, which consists of thirteen electric guitars and the same number of ampl...
Chasing Reels presents; dir. Paul Elliott & Sean Lamberth
‘The Library Music Film’ is a quest for some of the most original, but largely unnoticed music ever recorded. In the document...
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...
While growing up, Amsterdam based electronic music producer Vincent-Paolo developed an early fascination for the chords in soul music and the drums in his dads jazz records. Initially getting into ele...
Hailing from the Pakistani province Balochistan, Ustad Noor Bakhsh is a master of the Balochi Benju (a type of zither fitted with a keyboard). He is also an expert at the Benju, a Japanese children's...