Le Guess Who 2025 blokkenschema dag 1 - Thursday 6 November 2025

As one half of Ancient Indigenous Africans, turntablist and producer Mutamassik explores traditional Maasai chants mixed with entropic, electronic soundscapes. And in her solo music and mixes, the world-travelling renaissance woman fuses her avant-garde and post-punk background with influences she picked up on her journey from NY to Cairo, and from Amsterdam to Tanzania. Expect a DJ set full heavy synths, polyrhythmic madness and more, live at COSMOS Foyer.

Mas Aya is the solo project of prolific Canadian producer and multi-instrumentalist Brandon Valdivia. When he’s not busy working with the likes of Laraaji, Tanya Tagaq, U.S. Girls, or Run The Jewels, he’s crafting vast, emotive soundscapes of electronic sounds and live instruments. Fresh off his performance with breakout star Lido Pimienta, Mas Aya will take over COSMOS Foyer for a deep and intimate midnight session full of hazy atmospheres and masterful percussion work (possibly joined by some of his collaborators).

Percussionist and composer Tumi Mogorosi is in the vanguard of the South African creative music scene’s burgeoning outernational dimension. He took the drummer’s chair in multiple boundary-pushing formations, including Shabaka and The Ancestors and the avant-garde noiseniks The Wretched. At Le Guess Who? 2025 he leads his own powerful quintet - featuring guitar, bass, alto sax and trumpet. Driven by activist urgency and a large-scale creative vision, Mogorosi explores musical motives and improvisation to create modal grooves rooted in spiritual jazz and hard bop, working toward a sound that celebrates collective expression.  

Free jazz improvisation: check. Punk approach: check. Sound art extravaganza: check. Mopcut is the extraordinary trio consisting of experimental vocalist and electronic musician Audrey Chen; one of Europe’s most renowned percussionists Lukas Koenig; and French guitar-eccentric Julien Desprez. Their energy driven, raging tracks oscillate between unleashed free expression and tamed, tight noise. Structured around ecstatic micro-explosions, they resemble an imaginary form of communication. As a genre liquefying statement, the band’s new album RYOK opens with a brainy fragmentation of grooves and rock riffs to resolve into a noisy hip-hop track with guest appearance from avant rap vanguard MC dälek, who will join them on stage at Le Guess Who? 2025.

أحمد [Ahmed] plays music of heavy rhythm, repetition and syncopation, producing a stamping, swinging, relentlessly propulsive music where profundity and physicality root back to ecstatic feeling. They excavate, reinhabit, and use anew the mid-20th century documents and fragmentary plans of the late musician Ahmed Abdul Malik—who envisioned a vital, forward-leaning jazz that fused American, Arabic, and East African thought, ethics, and beliefs in open and experimental ways. أحمدد [Ahmed] reimagine the notes of Malik as they push for new grounds; melodies respirate, swell, escalate and combust in a driving jazz which is both technical and daring, and ultimately foot-to-the-floor swings.

Nai Barghouti opens Le Guess Who? 2025 alongside Amsterdam Sinfonietta, performing in the Grote Zaal of TivoliVredenburg. Starting up her career at 14 years old with concerts in Ramallah and Cairo, the singer, composer and flutist grew up to be an exceptional virtuosa performing at renowned venues and theaters around the globe. Drawing from Arab legendary singers - as well as tapping into blues, jazz, classical Indian and Brazilian music - she developed her own unique vocal technique NaiStrumentation: a layered ornamental technique for using the voice as a musical instrument. Along the way, Barghouti met the four talented musicians in Amsterdam who developed a repertoire with her and will accompany her, together with the 23-piece orchestra Amsterdam Sinfonietta.

Thrilling experimental pop artist Lido Pimienta spent the past few years studying European classical music to embark on a new ambitious journey. Shifting far from her previous electro pop sound, she remains as captivating and exuberant as ever. Influenced by the solemnity of early Christian hymns, her new album La Belleza is a grand orchestral exploration where Pimienta defies expectations, using contrast to honour her Wayuu ancestors (the Indigenous group from Abya Yala, as Colombia was called before European colonizers re-named it). Her stirring vocal melodies resound over rich symphonic textures like vital expression, celebrating new life and nature’s awakenings. Lido Pimienta will be joined on stage by Utrecht's Flare Quartet and marimba player Tatiana Koleva.

Inspired by the deep, resonant tones of the wooden percussion instrument semantron, the performance Dive Into You unfolds as an oracle, seeking to connect us with our most secret and tender part, underpinned by a composition by musician Aho Ssan and Kat Válastur's haunting vocals and choreography. Válastur hybridizes the figure and function of archaic female oracles with the photosynthetic processes and growth of trees. Bringing this analogy in the theatrical space she creates a captivating solo performance based on how the physical dimensions and temporal aspects of this crossing can be expressed as energy manifestations.

Multi-instrumentalist Yara Asmar is set to mesmerise listeners in the flesh. Her whimsical and haunting pieces showcase intimate glances into the world of the musician - also a video artist, puppeteer and crafter of her own instruments and ethereal scenarios. Vulnerable, intimate and moving, a lot of Asmar’s music was home recorded in Beirut, using cassettes and a phone. Raw field recording and melodic tapes get disturbed by metallic percussive sounds and processed through synths, reverbs and delays. These elements wrap classical music components and accordion drones. The atmosphere of melancholy that pervades her music, Asmar laments, should be familiar to anyone living in the 21st century.

Step into an audiovisual realm of words as mirrors, in a framework of clatter. Welcome to Voice Actor’s pavilion. Surrounded by offering of poetry and recorded introspections, a small-scale construction emerges, built for intimate listening. From the veranda, a crumbling, overgrown statue can be glimpsed, pointing at a nearby pond. Framed by a soundfence of endless space none can leap, the water catches the shimmer of ambient pads and atmospheric beats. A surreal spell pervades the space, a sacred performance suspended in time. Visitors can be seated on large rocks and have the surprising pleasure of hearing tear-stained but triumphant hearts sing.

Grand Maalem Omar Hayat channels the spirit of Gnawa through music that blurs the line between ritual and performance. Based in Essaouira, Morocco, his birthplace and spiritual home, he crafts his own bass guembri by hand, anchoring sound in tradition and soul. Hayat’s concerts unfold as immersive ceremonies, drawing audiences into trance states where rhythm, color and symbolism converge. A mentor to new Maalems, he bridges generations while infusing his art with influences from Jimi Hendrix to Nass El Ghiwane. Humble yet commanding, Omar’s stage presence is a vessel for the sacred, his music not just heard, but a testament to the fusion of tradition and innovation.

Vital and exciting, the music of Assiko Golden Band de Grand Yoff is rooted in a very specific community, Dakar’s nightlife scene, but speaks to the world. For twenty years and across three generations of band members, they have played raucous all-night jams at weddings, secret parties, and political rallies; until grainy cell phone footage of their shows has spread online reaching new audiences globally. Senegalese poet Djiby Ly preaches a message of uplift and cooperation, backed by different percussive instruments plus horns, winds, balafon and the occasional accordion. The sprawling drum collective builds songs on spiritually elevated grooves and ancient polyrhythms–passed on from Senegal, Cameroon and the Gorée Island–to give life to innovative infectious jams. 

Like a magic spell, the psychedelic groove of Peruvian legends Los Wembler’s de Iquitos pulses deeper than ever. Creators of the Amazonian cumbia, this group has been among the pioneers of psychedelic cumbia in the ’60s - when shoemaker Solomon Sanchez decided to form a band with his five sons - bridging celebratory traditions and cutting edge innovation. Recently, the iconic group returned to the studio and unveiled fresh music, including two remixes by Eblis Alvarez of Meridian Brothers. Their mix of psych rock, Afro-Latin rhythms and Latin American Indigenous melodies creates an irresistible journey, lighting up the dance floor.

With their new album the world is still here and so are we - marking a return after two decades - Welsh trio Mclusky hit the stage with the same ragged urgency that first defined them. Indebted to both punk and indie rock, they funnel a noise-rock/post-hardcore assault through razor’s-edge guitar hammering and barked vocals, all tension and burlesque unruliness. Their sound is abrasive but never shapeless: melodic in its own crooked way, sprawling, shouted, deliberately unrefined. And beneath the scorn flickers lucid criticism: a furious, tuneful dismantling of late-capitalist absurdity, with a dirtbag attitude as delivery and noise as critique. 

Even though her discography is very diversified - ranging from trippy left-field to experimental drum & bass and oddball techno - something that permeates all upsammy’s tracks, is the organic touch she brings to her electronic productions. With a keen ear for crystalline melody and intricate rhythm, her music slides across tempo scales and sculpts unheard liquid and vitreous textures. During her live sets she creates kaleidoscopic terrains which will blossom during her show at Le Guess Who? 2025, thanks to the collaboration with Valentina Magaletti. The marvellous drummer-composer has shown numerous times her ability to traverse electronic music genres with her eclectic palette of percussions: together they promise a one of a kind performance.

All hail the return of SUNN O))): a live experience of physical sound, fog and glacial maximalism. Ten years after their curation, the iconic duo will perform again at Le Guess Who?, where they’ll immerse the audience in the profound depth of valve amplification, spectral harmonics, distortion and volume; a journey of primaeval riffs of temporality and massively heavy structures of sound pressure. Their masterful synthesis of drone, noise and doom, reshaped the way we think about music: they forged connections between the realms of metal, contemporary composition, jazz and minimalism with startling results, while remaining true to the eternal principles of volume, density and weight. 

With immersive bass drones and striking video projections, emptyset creates captivating audiovisual experiences that push the boundaries of electronic sound and architectural audiovisual. The multidisciplinary duo explores the sonic possibilities of electroacoustic and computer music, materiality and performance. Their output is informed by the evolution of electronic and improvised music, full frequency production and detailed sound design. Reflecting upon the history of experimental media and global sound practices, their material employs percussion and spatial feedback techniques, raw audio synthesis and custom instrument design. At Le Guess Who? 2025 they present the Dutch premiere of a new performance: Dissever.

An absolute highlight of the 2024 Venice Biennale, Wael Shawky’s video work Drama 1882 addresses a key moment in Egyptian history: the nationalist Urabi Revolution (1879–1882) in which the Egyptian army revolted against increasing European influence. In 1882 the uprising was suppressed by the British, who subsequently occupied the country until 1956.