Niches · 8 picks · Wed to Sun
Exhibitions, audiovisual shows and deep listening.
ADE's art side: dome shows, live coding, installations and listening sessions. Good for an afternoon, or a night when you want to sit down.
By Songpot desk · from the ADE programme, our venue guide and artist notes
Thylacine's cinematic electronics under a dome of fractals.
Thylacine plays long, cinematic pieces that mix acoustic detail with clean synths, while Julius Horsthuis projects fractal animation around you at Fabrique des Lumières. Sit back and look up.
For fans of Jon Hopkins, Nils Frahm
An algorave: music written in code, live.
MYNA builds dark, percussion-heavy patterns in real time while the code is projected; Hellocatfood and Deaxmachina code the visuals. A basement under Volkshotel, and the most nerdy-fun night of the week.
Olafur Eliasson's underwater sound world, inside a 19th-century aquarium.
Deep Seeing Currents slowly wraps you in darkness and the sounds of life underwater, with body-shaking low end on a 4DSOUND spatial system, in ARTIS' historic aquarium from 1882. One of the week's rare things you can't do anywhere else.
Amsterdam's after-dark scene takes over City Hall.
Motie turns the Stopera, city hall and opera house on the Amstel, into a home for the city's night culture for three days. The opening has Young Marco's psychedelic, left-turn sets, Jonny Nash's slow-blooming guitar ambient and Oceanic's live minimal techno.
Motie's second night, ambient first.
Jonny Nash's soft guitar phrases and slow harmonies, Young Marco's elastic, trancey house and Oceanic's mechanical, restrained live techno, inside the Stopera. Calm, local and a bit unusual.
For fans of Gigi Masin
Walk under a huge moving installation of sound and fabric.
Boris Acket's EINDER hangs in the Centrale Markthal, a monumental former market hall: motors, fabric, light and spatial sound slowly transforming through the day. Free to walk through, beautiful in daylight.
For fans of Ryoji Ikeda, Max Cooper
CamelPhat's big-room house show, in a waterfront theatre.
EXPERIENCE is CamelPhat's production-heavy format: thick low end, clean drums and vocal hooks, with Hot Since 82's tech-house snap and Patrick Topping's quick-payoff grooves alongside.
For fans of Solomun, John Summit
What climate change sounds like, under a planetarium dome.
Tom Middleton's soft-focus ambient and Halina Rice's spatial IDM ask what our changing planet sounds like, with the European Space Agency's support, in the ARTIS Planetarium. A talk on listening and altered states follows.
For fans of The Orb, Max Cooper
Times, lineups and tickets are on each event's ADE programme page. Songpot is independent of the festival.