Le Guess Who 2025 blokkenschema dag 4 - Sunday 9 November 2025

oceanfloor.group (Lasse Høgenhof and Ellem Skovhøj) are an inter-local sound collective based in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland. Working with performance, radio, image, objects and song, they create special performances tailormade for each space and environment. Currently they host the pop-up radio show CHEST on The Lake Radio, and are part of the team at Seyðisfjörður Community Radio, one of our 2025 Embassies. In COSMOS Foyer, oceanfloor.group will present a live ambient performance for three voices entitled Sonnet Circle: Swan Sonnets.

LA musician, visual artist and filmmaker Kelman Duran’s electronic abstractions pop up nearly anywhere; from covert clubs to big stages, and from DIY-releases to production credits on Beyoncé’s masterwork ‘Renaissance’. This year – Duran, who is more family than a guest at Le Guess Who? – will help us shut down COSMOS Foyer with his highly potent mix of emotive soundscapes, and rhythms steeped in the afro-caribbean music heritage.

Closing the Le Guess Who? 2025 night in the COSMOS Foyer is Rotterdam-based DJ Klapsalon: a vinyl selector who channels his energy through idiosyncratic sonic creations originating from various depths across the globe. His reputation for the body-moving and soul-troubling crowd is thriving throughout the Universe, bagged with unsettling records he lays at dance meetings, listening gatherings, and radio shows.

Masello Motana transcends disciplines to create work that is both culturally restorative and creatively groundbreaking. Her artistic signature lies in blending nostalgia, social realism and history, to craft experiences that resonate deeply with audiences. Central to her practice is The Vocal Museum, a living archive she founded in 2014, combining live performances, interactive archives and innovative audio-visual projects. Her work guides audiences through South Africa’s sonic heritage to the urban pulse of Kwaito, the genre that paved the way for today’s Amapiano movement. Each performance becomes a collective act of remembrance and actual reconnection, drawing communities into an experience of reverence and resonance. 

Powerful, inventive and fiercely danceable, the music of The Zawose Queens contains spirit and fire. There's the vibrations of the ancestors, coming through on traditional instruments — soaring chizeze fiddle, buzzing illimba thumb piano, ngoma drums that chatter and thunder — and voices that go deep, high and out there. As a liberating ceremony, the Tanzanian duo’s rapturous singing rises in electrifying polyphonic harmony, channeling the spirit of ceremonial dance and natural rhythm, merging organic textures with modern electronic energy.

Inspired by Afropessimist thought and the work of economist Jacques Attali, alternative hip-hop artist Quinton Barnes became interested in noise and its function within the context of Black music. He hoped to situate noise within a context of Black cultural expression, fusing soul and gospel-inspired vocals with noise, pushing the limits of Black genres to their sonic brink. He partnered with composer Michael Cloud Duguay who curated an ensemble of experienced noise performers and free improvisers from Montreal: the Black Noise Ensemble. Together, they will present Barnes’ new ambitious project, Black Noise, whose material ranges from deconstructed acid funk to avant-garde post-rock and footwork.

Multi-faceted artist Hania Rani brings to Le Guess Who? a thrilling storm of synthesised patterns that pulls the listener into a deeply hypnotic trance. The pianist, composer and vocalist has emerged as a genre-blending explorer who has made a name for herself interweaving classical, experimental and electronic influences. Constantly seeking new sounds and challenging herself, Rani introduces her alter-ego Chilling Bambino for just the fourth time after shows in Warsaw, London and Osaka. This ever-evolving sonic identity foregrounds her love for the Prophet (a renowned polyphonic analogue synth) taking the listener on a sonic adventure through dark-tinted electronica and hypnotic rhythms.

Saxophonist Gary Bartz is a jazz master who has shaped the history and evolution of the genre since the 1960s. One of the best purveyors of what he calls “informal composition” (as opposed to traditional jazz improvisation), he has worked with luminaries like Charles Mingus and Miles Davis. For a career spanning show at Le Guess Who? 2025, Bartz performs with NTU Troop, the iconic group who recorded with him some classics like I’ve Known Rivers and Other Bodies and the iconic Harlem Bush Music. Blending soul, funk, African folk music, hard bop and avant-garde jazz, these groundbreaking records have become milestones of jazz innovation and are often sampled by hip-hop artists, as monuments to their lasting impact.

Long captivated by Jaar’s music, Ali Sethi found a space in their collaboration for sonic exploration that seduces, challenges and redefines identities. Composer and performer Sethi blends traditional South Asian melodies with global beats and is known for reviving the ghazal, an ancient poetic form that was taken by Sufi mystics from the Arab world to Persia and throughout the Indian subcontinent. Nicolás Jaar’s abstract productions span shades of pop, ambient, noise and club music and converge with Sethi’s world in their collaborative project Intiha (2023). Rooted in improvisation, the album composition was initiated by Sethi, vocalizing over samples from Jaar’s album Telas. Urdu poems drift through weightless, time-bending productions, at times floating in ambient abstraction, at times bouncing over syncopated bass and traditional Indian rhythms.

Composer and performer Skander Jaïbi premières his debut album Who has the right to closure?: classical structures and intangible soundscapes stemmed from a collaboration with Alicia Verdú Macián in the context of her dance piece CLAUSURA. At Le Guess Who? 2025, the project will be presented as a multidisciplinary performance incorporating various elements from choreography, tailored scenography and live performance and music. The artistic collaboration involves Jaïbi, choreographer and dancer Alicia Verdú Macián, Utrecht’s string ensemble Flare Quartet and Choir Lex et Gaudium. Together with the team of Uncloud, a tailored scenography for the performance and venue will be developed through a residency. 

For some artists, music experimentation and avant-garde emerge as natural expressions, fruits of years of evolution and artistic research. From a very young age, violinist Valentina Goncharova was immersed in chamber and classical music, studying first in Kyiv and later in Leningrad. By the 1970s, her interest expanded to contemporary composition, free jazz and underground rock, but when she found herself outside of those scenes, she felt compelled to craft her own sonic language. Together with her husband, she developed pickups for her violin, enabling multi-track and electronic manipulation to forge her unique sound. This way, Goncharova started exploring the electro-acoustic textures that now characterise her erratic improvised sets and meandrous compositions.

Utrecht's independent print workshop Kapitaal, once again hosts the official Le Guess Who? Hangout through all things print and sound. The program is a culmination of print, live music, DJ's, and performances, hosted together with Stranded FM.12:30 | Tiago Caetano (solo live)13:15 | Spurn (DJ set)Local egg-punk heroes Spurn (KapitaalRecords) played the Hangout last LGW? edition and decided to come back for a dj-set filled with punk classics and new sounds to fire up the Sunday stage...This is ROCK!14:15 | Goblin Daycare (live)15:30 | Arc Vale (live)This new project by Zamity Mitelembe (Salutingrome) and Noah Dackus pushes both artists into unknown creative territories. A stark emotive and atmospheric exploration of sound that defies easy categorization.17:00 | M.J.H. Thompson + Volkorkest (live)Rare crossbreed between post-punk and softcore religious pleasures. Some core members + an always rotating cast of strange individuals with various degrees of musical experience will definately surprise.17:45 | Luke Cohlen + Tala Drumcorps (dj set)Returning as an annual ritual, local producer Tala Drum corps + Aural Conduct record label head Luke Cohlen join forces for another signature, thrilling and playful set that leaps across old + new experimental electronics, dub, post-punk and more…

Sometimes music demands to be loud, perceptible by touch, make its way through your bones and shake the foundations. Unrelenting and dynamic, Divide and Dissolve create a cathartic wall of sound fuelled by sociopolitical ideologies, confronting white supremacy and oppressive power dynamics. In their latest album, Insatiable, founder and guitarist Takiaya Reed implements hypnotic woodwind melodies to enhance the instrumental textures rooted in doom, sludge metal, blasts of noise, and tension-guilding passages of avant-classical ambience. 

A true cult icon, Ata Kak brings an electrifying show made of Ghanaian highlife, 90s hip-hop and funk, characterised by his fast-paced Twi raps and high-pitched melodies. Propelled to fame years after his DIY masterpiece Obaa Sima resurfaced, the Ghanaian artist commands the stage with infectious joy and raw energy. With each performance, Ata Kak reintroduces himself to the world with a feel-good groove tornado: danceable, dazzling and simply unique. Over 30 years after his debut, Ata Kak announced his new LP Batakari that he will bring to Le Guess Who? 2025.

Studying percussions and clarinet since very young, at age of 10 Tomoki Sanders was gifted a saxophone by their father Pharoah. Since then, tenor sax became Tomoki’s primary instrument, making their mark for the past 5 years with Kassa Overall‘s supergroup. A vital member of New York’s new generation, showcased via their Tomo Tuesdays, Sanders represents a vector of openness and diversity, ingrained in their Afro-American and Japanese heritage and non-binary identity. A free electron, they greedily explore Great Black Music, urban soundscape, electronic textures and the avant-garde.

Berlin-based Colombian DJ, producer and Le Guess Who? 2025 guest curator Edna Martinez brings La Saramuya soundsystem to TivoliVredenburg’s Pandora to close off the festival with the sounds from Colombia’s Caribbean coast.

At the heart of Le Guess Who? is discovery: the act of seeing, finding, and gaining knowledge of something previously unknown. Question yourself: how much do you need to know about something to enjoy it? How closely are you listening if you already know what to expect? During each festival day, Le Guess Who? presents a secret performance on one of its main stages. These artists are a surprise, so lean in and listen.

Over the last decade, BIG|BRAVE have been forging their unique sound by embracing guitar feedback and cathartic energy rooted in doom metal, drone, slowcore and folk traditions. Always loyal to their sprawling, hypnotic form of experimental rock, they weave emotional themes and poetic scenarios while indulging in rich distorted textures and dynamic drums, punctuated by radiant vocals. The band’s prolific discography highlights their artistic journey, with each album showcasing growth and transformation through their songwriting. On A Chaos of Flowers (2024) they achieve a colossal sound through minimalist approaches, while on the latest Ost (2025) they experiment ambient music with custom-built instruments.

Somewhere between a love letter and a shrug, Smerz’s music is a liminal space that flirts with the listener while keeping an eye on the exit. Sampled strings swell like something borrowed from a nostalgic bittersweet symphony, only to dissolve into synthetic jitters and whispered self-talk. Collaging fleeting moods from handycam footage and deadpan voice memos, their songs draw from classical composition, DIY pop and the experimental edge of computer music. The Norwegian duo builds sonic worlds that are both intimate and askew: tongue-in-cheek stories told with a wink and a perfectly timed silence.

Moin is an iconic yet enigmatic outfit, blending conventional structures with off-kilter compositional techniques. Over the years, they’ve subtly reframed the conversation around what a band can be, walking the line between what's reassuringly familiar and what's unsettling and inquisitive. Their sound re-contextualizes elements of grunge, shoegaze and indie rock into something melancholic but weirdly comforting, while always evolving. For their closing set in Ronda, the trio is joined by multidisciplinary artist and writer Sophia Al-Maria - also featured on their latest albums You Never End and Belly Up - sealing Valentina Magaletti’s guest curation at Le Guess Who? 2025.