Dekmantel Festival: Rachika Nayar, Salamanda, Lucrecia Dalt, Hieroglyphic being & Jerzy-Mączyński

The groundbreaking Dekmantel Festival is back, and will be hosted in various locations like the Amsterdamse Bos and concerthalls along IJ. The festival presents more than 120 artists in just 5 days. Alongside live performances and DJ sets in the open air, at Amsterdamse Bos, the festival includes a concert program at several venues located on the river banks of the IJ, featuring electronic music, and acts that have influenced contemporary dance music and DJ culture. On 3 August our stage hosts Rachika Nayar, Salamanda, Lucrecia Dalt en Hieroglyphic being & Jerzy-Mączyński.

Rachika Nayar

Rachika Nayar is a Brooklyn-based guitarist, composer and producer. Where her critically acclaimed debut record saw the artist mutating guitar compositions into layers and layers of digitally processed sound, most recently she made the ‘Best of 2022’ lists with a grand plunge into electronic maximalism. Navigating the leftfield territory she describes as ‘a luminescent space between 5 a.m. warehouse raves and urban freeways’, Nayar’s recent tracks are ridden with M1 piano stabs, synthesizer supersaws and glimpses of Amen breaks. As her sophomore album title ‘Heaven Come Crashing’ so perfectly suggests, a live performance by Rachika Nayar is a violently poetic affair.

Salamanda

Salamanda consists of Uman Therma [Sala] and Yetsuby [Manda], two ambient artists/DJs from Seoul who have been very active since finding each other and their delicate sound under lockdown. In the past year, however, the leftfield duo has reached a wider range of listeners around the world through their releases as well as radio shows on NTS and Seoul Community Radio, amongst others. Salamanda – whom you probably encountered on a few must-watch lists for 2023 – believe that every sound has beauty, and love to experiment with any kind of sound they encounter. This has led to a full EP based on the concept of spheres, as well as their most recent album embracing ‘ashbalkum’: the realisation that reality is just a dream.

Lucrecia Dalt

Crafting surreal, sci-fi narratives through experimental composition, Lucrecia Dalt’s music is delicate, ornate and otherworldly. Widely touted as one of the best records of the year, on her 2022 album ¡Ay!, the Colombian artist unspools traditional Latin American genres such as bolero and son, reassembling their signature elements with breathy inhales, metallic synthesiser and esoteric beats. Trained as a geotechnical engineer, and having recently ventured into composing film and TV scores, Lucrecia’s ability to plunder the depths of sound, evoking ever more cavernous and evocative landscapes, is unparalleled.

Hieroglyphic being & Jerzy-Mączyński

Great music collabs should get your heart beating a little faster, and we’re proud to give you the ultimate example at Dekmantel Festival ’23. The joint work of acclaimed American sound artist Jamal Moss (Hieroglyphic Being) and Polish saxophonist/producer/composer Jerzy Maczyński was born in the summer of ’22 during an Amsterdam residency under the wings of curator Pieter Jansen and artist/producer RDS (Rein de Sauvage Nolting). All sonic material created during one week of free improv was recorded and filtered down to 13 tracks – partly intact improv fragments, partly fragments produced over the course of many months – on the forthcoming album ‘Tune in: Universal Harmonies and Frequencies’. One year after the residency that started it all, masterminds Moss & Maczyński will officially premiere live variations from their ever-expanding sound world at Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ.