New programme additions for Conflux 2026

A key innovator in the 1990s Hardtec and Tribe scenes, 69db has been pushing the boundaries of live improvised sets since 1991. As a founding member of Spiral Tribe and R-Zac, he played a pivotal role in shaping the underground rave culture and co-founded Network 23 Recordings, a label that defined the sound of the free party movement in the 1990s. Today, Network 23 continues to inspire a new generation of hard techno producers.

The renewed interest in 90s hard techno has been reflected in record sales. In 2023 alone, 69db released four EPs on Berlin’s Sound Metaphors and a double EP, along with a five-record box set, on Rotterdam’s PRSPCT label — all of which sold out. Responding to this demand, he and his R-Zac partner, Crystal Distortion, launched the “23 Records or Bust!” series, reissuing 23 records from their 90s catalog. The first nine releases sold out in under a year, proving the timeless appeal of their work.

In early 2024, 69db debuted Rooted Sky under his new project, Wave Arising, in collaboration with movement specialist Kynsie Serre. This project blends ambient, tribal, experimental, and hard techno, further expanding his live improvisational approach. The Wave Arising Liveset by 69db, praised for its fusion of hard tribal techno with dub techniques, has already garnered critical acclaim, with Resident Advisor naming it one of the standout performances at Dekmantel 2024. 69db remains a force in electronic music, continuing to evolve his sound and inspire audiences worldwide.

Alex Zhang Hungtai is a multidisciplinary artist focused on improvisation and its correlation with the unconscious. After retiring his project Dirty Beaches, Zhang has focused on explorations of improvised music, free jazz, and his role as a composer. His more recent compositions predominantly work with saxophone and drums while also delving into electronic music.

Besides his solo work, his past collaborators include Tashi Dorji, Che Chen, Chris Williams, Sam Shalabi, David Maranha, and Gabriel Ferrandini. Zhang currently works as a composer for film soundtracks, alongside acting in independent films.

He appeared in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return alongside Dean Hurley and Riley Lynch under the fictitious band name Trouble. His latest film score, Godland by Hlynur Pálmason, was featured in the Un Certain Regard competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

Amrith de Zoete uses industrial materials and techniques such as stainless steel, industrial plastics, pneumatics, and motors, while keeping them connected to their original environments. By using these materials, he suggests that the medium itself is the message, often referencing industrial production facilities.

These seemingly soulless yet lively devices and machines, as seen in factories, are built for speed and inhuman precision. They are responsible for the pristine products we consume. De Zoete aims to reveal this bleak, alienated, yet fearsome system that surrounds us, as it is part of us and defines modern life.

Animistic Beliefs are one of the most distinctive projects to emerge from Rotterdam’s electronic underground. Formed by Mara Lalihatu and Linh Luu, the queer Southeast Asian duo move through DJing, punk-charged hardware live sets, introspective records and theatrical work with a sound shaped by club music, diasporic memory and a taste for the unexpected. Few acts move as comfortably between clubs, museums and theatre stages as this radical Rotterdam pair.

Their DJ sets carry that open-ended musical identity into the club. As selectors, Animistic Beliefs move through global club sounds, breakbeats, UK bass, jersey club, footwork and bass-heavy electronics with curiosity and instinct. Their sets are playful, queer, sensual, high-energy and strange, guided less by genre purity than by a desire to move through the full range of human experience.

This versatility has taken Animistic Beliefs far beyond Rotterdam. Their live and DJ sets have connected with audiences physically and emotionally across Europe, East Asia and the Americas, with appearances at Rewire, Berlin Atonal, CTM, Dekmantel, MUTEK and Nuits Sonores. Their work has been covered by Resident Advisor, DJ Mag, Mixmag, Glamcult and VICE, with RA naming them a must-watch live act in its Breaking Through series; in the Netherlands, MERDEKA won the 3voor12 Award for Best Dutch Album.

Anne Wenzel works on a strong and distinctive oeuvre of monumental ceramic sculptures and installations that are often placed in an accurately orchestrated setting. Wenzel takes a more subversive position between tradition and modernity. Departing from historical iconography, she tackles contemporary and often political themes by using a consciously chosen traditional medium: clay. 

Out of a fascination for the language of heroism, she questions the manipulative force of nationalist architecture and sculpture. Investigating their formal language and history, Wenzel reinterprets the symbolic value by connecting it to current tendencies in political culture.

bela (they/them) is a South Korean musician and performance artist based between Berlin and Prague. bela uses guttural vocals and feedback to build texture and resonance. Conceptually, their work often adopts an autobiographical voice that courses through lived experiences, lineage, and transcendance. In this regard, their music and performance ask to renew or expand the sense of locating around sounds and bodies within the social and celestial sphere.

bela presents an audiovisual performance with Anton Filatov, based on his recent album "Korean Love Sonnets". The work is an intense and direct exploration of the acoustics of the guttural voice in relation to other bodies and spaces. bela discovers romance in its most tactile form, leaning into creaks, feedback, and resonance to create a sombre yet intimate hour, suspended by inhuman notes above the material plane.

bela was awarded honorable mention at ZKM’s GigaHertz Prize PopExperimental awards in 2023 for their work on the album Noise and Cries. They participated in the SHAPE+ Platform in 23’-24’, and are a laureate of La Becque residency in 2026. Their solo and collaborative live performances have been featured at Berlin Atonal; Nowadays, NYC; Schauspielhaus Zürich; Cafe OTO, London; CTM Festival, Berlin; and Unsound Kraków.

Concepción Huerta is a multidisciplinary artist with a strong background in audiovisual media and a deep focus on sound. Her practice spans sound design, video installations, spatialized concerts, speculative narratives, and immersive experiences.

Her approach to sound begins with an exploration of the relationship between silence and noise, political space, and sound as a means of enunciation. She investigates resonance, acoustic space, and the physical and psychological impact of sound in relation to the listener.

Her sonic explorations are rooted in recordings of everyday objects and instruments such as synthesizers, which she manipulates through tape recorders and processed tapes to create atmospheres influenced by ambient and noise. Rather than fitting within a specific musical genre, her sound works construct imagined narratives and immersive sonic worlds.

Based in Rotterdam, DJ Easy B is closely linked to the Renegade ZMK Soundsystem and Move Around Sound. His sets combine breaks, UK bass, and techno into high-energy dancefloor fillers, always infused with a dose of subversive spirit. Following his acclaimed trilogy on the Double Cross XX label, he has just released his latest EP, Vendetta.

As a multi-colour laser beam enters a soap bubble (the chemical ancestor of a living cell’s lipid membrane), it splits into microscopic optical branches. Unlike other light sources, the laser's coherent emission gets trapped inside a bubble’s skin, carving out filamentous pathways along which the light propagates unperturbed. During the performance, these laser branches meander through clusters of hemispherical bubbles, which serve as molecule-thin lenses for a 360° laser projection. The projection envelopes the audience in an unfathomable magnification of the electrochemical and optofluidic dynamics within the sensitive skin of a bubble.

For Conflux Festival, Foundscape Orchestra presents a thirty-minute performance at Brutus Rotterdam. Daniel Maalman performs together with Foundscape artists Jaap Mutter and Jasper Schütz, joined by guest musician Farzané, who previously collaborated with Foundscape Orchestra on an earlier site-specific edition of the project. A selection of instruments from the Foundscape Orchestra arsenal is combined with Farzané’s sonic textures. Large and small pneumatic percussion instruments, sound sculptures driven by compressed air, vibration motors and organ pipes form a spatial composition that is partly amplified and partly acoustic, intertwining mechanical rhythms, vibrations and air with Farzané’s sonic world.

Behind the decks Genyten brings her broad range of tastes honed by years of working behind the scenes in festivals, clubs and record labels. From downtempo and wave oddballs to sub-heavy stuff and more club-ready sounds, she’s happiest when unexpected combinations come together and the music gets minds as engaged as much as the feet.

We rely on systems we hardly notice, until the lights go out or the network fails. But in those moments, another kind of knowledge arises: DIY solutions, forgotten analog technologies, and collective ways of making and being.

Off-Grid collects stories of protest infrastructures assembled in neighborhood yards and encrypted Telegram chats, internet cables stretched between apartment blocks, DIY practices, attempts to build a toaster from scratch, and a self-sustaining research capsule designed to operate for up to 120 days in isolation. This book moves across rural art institutions, repurposed power plants, exhibitions curated within forests and farmlands, and the early digital networks of the 1990s to explore what autonomy can mean in a world built on fragile, interconnected systems—and how much room for maneuver remains within them.

A vegan, straight edge noise project of Masami Akita from Japan. Merzbow started out in the noise industrial scene of early 1980s and began releasing music. In the 1990s, Merzbow were influenced by grind core and released an album on the death metal label Relapse. In the late 1990s, he resonated with Mego's "punk computer music" and were one of the first in Japanese Noise Scene to adopt a live performance technique using laptop computers.

Since around 2003, he has practiced veganism from the perspective of "animal rights." He creates works on themes such as "anti-whaling," "anti-dolphin fishing," "anti-fur," and "liberation of livestock animals." In recent years, he has been creating music that is not limited to digital or analog. Recently, he has been experimenting with incorporating AI into album artwork.

He has also collaborated with Balazs Pandi, Mats Gustafsson, Thurston Moore, Boris, Keiji Haino, Richard Pinhas (Heldon), Duenn, Nyantra, Lawrence English, Xiu Xiu, Gezan, Alessandro Cortini, Vanity Productions, Vatican Shadow, Bastard Noise, Meat Beat Manifesto and others.

Dante’s Circle is a collaborative audiovisual performance by Nicky Assmann and Robert Pravda in which continuously changing prismatic colors are created by burning copper panels with automated burners. The panels are positioned in a circular spatial setup and played as a live instrument. The sounds coming from the burners and heated plates are used as a source for the soundscape. This soundscape is further spatialized by means of a rotating loudspeaker setup which is placed at the center of the installation. The copper plates function as both the screens for the prismatic visuals as well as the acoustic reflectors for the projected sounds coming from the circle. As artifacts of the performance six burned copper screens will remain.

Siuli K.O. is always on the hunt for fresh, forward-thinking sounds in bass and leftfield beats. In the 90s, she was at the foundation of the notorious Acid Planet and Industrial Funk parties, and of experimental labels Grijs and Nocturnal State, deep within The Hague's OG underground scene, connected to Unit Moebius, Curley Esoteric, and Spiral Tribe's Network 23.

But she could never stop following her ears, and it was only a matter of time before they led her to London, where she joined the electrobass crew around Radioactive Man, Dexorcist and Audio Illusion. From there, her ears pulled her further still, into post-dubstep, and a deep love for the Bristol sound, opening up the path to the contemporary leftfield fusion of electronics she's known for today.

After a long hiatus, she's back behind the decks on a regular basis, making appearances at Club Laak and Future Intel, and running her biweekly K.O. Show on Radio Tonka / Den Haag FM. Endlessly restless and forever chasing that ultimate sound, she fuses her deep heritage of Bristol and Worldly percussion with pounding Bass and flowy Tek into an irresistible blend she calls Industrial Funk. Expect her to set the dancefloor alight.

Tools for Action develops new forms of assembly and political action through participatory performances, open source skill-sharing workshops, and large-scale inflatable social sculptures. Monumental yet fragile, playful yet confrontational, these inflatable tools become mobile barricades, swarms, and tactical media interventions through choreographed direct-action training. Working across climate justice, anti-fascism, memory culture, and queer and trans* visibility, the collective creates spaces for resistance, solidarity, and collective imagination.

Founded in Berlin in 2012 and emerging from the former Eclectic Electric Collective, Tools for Action has worked internationally in shifting constellations of artists and activists. Since 2019, the collective has operated from Rotterdam through the Tools for Action Foundation. Core collaborators have included Bambi Benkö (formerly Artúr van Balen), Katherine Ball, Jakub Simcik, Tilly Gifford, Sarah Drain, Pascal Espinosa, and Shailoh Phillips.

Few musicians in techno work to sound like no other - Wallis is one of them. A producer, live act, and DJ, she constantly pushes her music into new realms, always searching for something new in a genre that can sometimes struggle to reinvent itself. More at ease building worlds in the studio than chasing the spotlight, her output is driven by obsession, detail, and pure creative instinct.

Her catalog speaks for itself: her DJ sets are packed with mostly her own unreleased material. While many follow trends, Wallis has carved a sound that feels hers unmistakably - unique, distinctive, and future-facing. She only cares about where her music was yesterday and how far she can push it tomorrow. Her recent releases Protect Me From My Friends and Goodbye Berlin deliver exactly that: a much-needed dose of originality in techno.

Wallis has toured across almost every continent, equally at home on a large stage or in a small, intimate, sweaty basement. She has played some of the world’s most respected techno spaces, including Berghain, Basement NYC, and Vent Tokyo, as well as festivals such as Sónar, Parklife, and Nuits Sonores. Beyond the club, she recently produced the music for the Natasha Zinko runway show at London Fashion Week.

wRec is a Rotterdam based project by DJ/producer duo DJ Shahmaran & Himera. Shifting between dark and light, harsh and tender, playful and vulnerable sounds, wRec; is a voyage into distilled dreams and lucid visions of hope amongst wreckage in the form of club music and soundscapes.

Sonic sculptor, composer and scholar Yara Mekawei operates at the threshold, where urban pulse meets mythic echo, where Coptic breath and the Book of The Dead converge with algorithmic code. Ancient texts and scriptures are her music composition source.

She transmutes the ambient rhythms of cities, the liturgical whispers of Sufi antiquity, and the poetic geometries of esoteric texts into immersive divin-sonic architectures that dissolve borders between history and identity.

The auditory alchemy; a synesthetic ritual that turns sound into space, silence into structure. A chant’s glory, a kinetic installation. Breath, mapped as collective memory. This is transubstantiation, not translation. For Mekawei, sound is vessel, voyage, and verb: carrying ancestral wisdom, threading temporal layers, speaking across sensorial divides.

For Conflux festival 2026, Zoro Feigl builds upon his earlier work where he takes simple movements into repetition and elegance. His sculptural elements seems to be found in nature, discovered instead of made. Where their movement departs from the natural their rhythms become discomforting. Our perception of reality might be fooled while the edge between the real and fake is challenged.

This work is commissioned by Conflux festival.