Text by CLOT Magazine
Following their traditional New Year’s gathering, FIBER Festival and The Rest Is Noise open the year 2025 with a showcase of unique acts from the international festival circuit in Amsterdam alongside emerging talent from the Netherlands.
For this year (and their 8th undertaking this collaboration), the teams behind the two institutions invite their audience into the ceremonial realms of Aïsha Devi and Emmanuel Biard‘s Les Immortelles and the new world premiere Thức Tỉnh by Animistic Beliefs & Jeisson Drenth. The evening will be musically complemented by Amsterdam-based justin case (DJ) and will kick off with a talk led by writer Eelco Couvreur.
This edition focuses on audiovisual performance artists who transcend the conventional projection screen by integrating costume design, traditional instruments, set design, lighting, and spatial design. Thematically, the performances convey powerful narratives in response to a society growing increasingly intolerant under new political realities. All featured creators draw from ancestral stories, explorations of identity and heritage, trauma, the lasting impacts of European colonialism, and the ways rave culture and spiritual decolonization create spaces for new realities and healing energies.
Aïsha Devi, one of the most outstanding names in electronic music of the last decade, blends a mysticism inspired by her indigenous Nepalese heritage with a sharpened club intelligence. The live audiovisual show of Les Immortelles, which features lighting design and scenography from Emmanuel Biard, seeks to unravel the strict boundaries of life and death, suggesting experiences beyond body and spirit.
This show takes on Devi´s last and most personal album, Death is Home, in a style she calls “aetherave.” This work is both a manifesto and a quest, exploring her Nepali identity and the space for healing. Growing up amid abuse and isolation, she has always used her art as a method of healing, transforming earthly pasts into alternative contemporary realities that transcend the material world and offer spiritual freedom. Death is Home is a search for her late father, B.K. Gurung—a Nepali drummer she never knew—and serves as both a lifeline and refuge in modern life.
Musicians Linh Luu and Mar Lalihatu—together forming Animistic Beliefs—and multidisciplinary artist Jeisson Drenth’s contemplative performance Thức Tỉnh (Awaken) touches on themes of queerness, colonialism, hope and self-expression, ultimately culminating in a rave that celebrates the complexity and the genesis of new narratives. The world premiere audiovisual show merges ancestral narratives into modern apparitions. Drawing on traditions from Vietnamese-Chinese, Moluccan and Pre-Columbian cultures, the trio brings this heritage to life through the use of traditional instruments such as the Tifa drum and the Tayronian ceramic flute, among others.
FIBER x The Rest Is Noise 2025 takes place on 10 January at Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam. Find tickets here.
