Subbacultcha’s Highlights of FIBER Festival 2026

On the first summer days where the nights turn fluttering, light, warm and nebulous, the multidisciplinary FIBER Festival returns to take over Amsterdam. Spread across 4 days at 8 of Amsterdam’s most distinct venues, this year’s edition brings together close to 60 artists at the forefronts of experimental music, sound art, live performances and digital culture, including artists we’ve been adoring and obsessing about, and upcoming acts waiting to be discovered. 

Guided by the duality of the theme Fragile Forces, this edition explores sensitivity, fragility and softness as forces of their own. 

Filled with intimate and considered programme with a special focus on sound art, you can lose yourself among nuanced listening sessions, immersive audiovisual performances, boundary pushing live sets, new artworks, and club nights keeping you up till dawn hours. Here are the highlights Subbacultcha team can’t wait to dive in. 

Whatever the Weather & Bapari
Thursday 28 May, de Brakke Grond

Enveloping, immersive and warmly dense electronics open the festival

Enveloping, immersive and emotionally-laden electronics open the festival to set the tone for the days ahead. One of the most exciting upcoming acts, Bapari (Halcyon Veil), presents a brand new live show fusing experimental electronics, R&B & shoegaze. Having contributed to FKA Twigs’ Eusexua, they’re one to keep an eye and an ear out for. 

Under her ambient-adjacent alias Whatever The Weather, Loraine James moves beyond percussive club music into textural, impressionistic, and inward sound explorations. Whatever the Weather draws you to a space filled with intimacy and warm density of drones.

 

Xenia Reaper & Trois-Quarts Taxi System
Thursday 28 May, murmur

Later that same evening, the exquisite listening space murmur opens up to a more psychedelic strain of listening. Xenia Reaper brings their singular approach through textured, prismatic synths and meticulous sound design, while Trois-Quarts Taxi System’s detailed, bassy and atmospheric live set merges acoustic and digital realms.

 

Symposium
Friday 29 May & Saturday 30 May, de Brakke Grond

The two-day symposium acts as a vibrant meeting place for adventurous thinkers, artistic makers and listeners. The programme consists of artist talks, inspiring discussions and critical reflections rooted in artistic creation and research. During these days, the festival theme Fragile Forces unravels  from various angles. Speakers include Dean Spade (remote), Geert Lovink, Mindy Seu (remote), Jan Rohlf of CTM Festival, Loma Doom, Woody92, AYO and more. 

Join the symposium to discuss spatial sound, social media toxicity, internet’s impact on sexuality, resisting the ever-accelerating speed of AI progress, and more 

Friday’s programme centres on artistic practices, touching upon fragile and vulnerable ways of producing powerful electronic music, spatial sound within night culture, storytelling through visual and sound art, and more.  The keynote is given Dean Spade, reflecting on the newly expanded edition of Mutual Aid and his recent writing on how to love in a damaged world. 

Saturday shifts towards theoretical and conceptual perspectives, exploring the topics such as social media toxicity, internet’s impact on sexuality, and resisting the ever-accelerating speed of AI progress. 

 

Kara-Lis Coverdale & Anushka Chkheidze
Friday 29 May, Orgelpark 

Orgelpark hosts one of the weekend’s most special concerts. Already majestic in its architecture, the space is further amplified by an impressive state-of-art multichannel sound system of 4DSOUND, featuring over 60 speakers. 

Orgelpark’s majestic architecture is set to echo with special performances by Kara-Lis Coverdale & Anushka Chkheidze on 4DSOUND spatial sound system

One of our long-time favourites, Kara-Lis Coverdale, presents a newly commissioned organ piece, especially created for FIBER. Anushka Chkheidze presents a new version of Intricate Pipes where polyphony, arpeggios, and precisely timed delays extend the MIDI organ into an evolving electronic system, bridging the avant-garde, contemporary classical and IDM realms. 

This feels like one of the festival’s quintessential evenings.  

 

Club Night at Garage Noord
Friday 29 May

Friday night heads to Garage Noord for an intimate club programme that resists any type of genre labels. The two live sets include rapidly rising Nexus (B4mba and Mooki6 of Jokkoo collective), and Souzo. On DJ duties are some of the most forward thinking voices: Piezo b2b upsammy, Remma, LNR and FLORE. Psst.. we just heard that Bobby Beethoven (fka Total Freedom) is set to take over the intimate upstairs room – can you imagine the heat? 

 

 

Crawler (Zohar & Castle) ft. Gervaise
Saturday May 30, de Brakke Grond

Zohar is easily one of our top Amsterdam artists. At FIBER Festival, she’s presenting a debut collaboration with Castle for its first-ever appearance. Crawler invites the audience into an experimental listening space built around raw, dense, physical sound environments.  Confrontational and deliberately resistant to the idea of neutral ‘difficult music’, the performance gravitates in favour of reverberations that are explicitly political, physical, and present. 

 

11 Hours of Performances and Club Night at TILLATEC
Saturday 30 May

The eleven-hour night at TILLATEC deliberately blurs the line between performances, audiovisual concerts, live sets and club

TILLATEC hosts the festival’s longest and most ambitious night: an eleven-hour programme deliberately blurs the line between performances, audiovisual concerts, live sets and club. Open across four spaces – Aula, Washroom, Switchroom (curated by Minimal Collective), and the garden, it’s the perfect summer night.

Among the 16 artists you can find performances, audiovisual shows and live sets by the likes of CORIN, Charlène Dannancier, Slowfoam, Polar Inertia, eoobe, and DJ sets by Batu, gyrofield b2b Simo Cell, NVST, Brent Jacko b2b Okgwa, and Emily Jeanne. 

The night is tied together by scenography created by artists Tharim Cornelisse & Annelieke Rovers, whose new artwork combines hi-tech LED visuals with stained glass installation. 

A night worth pacing yourself for. Or for lounging the garden. If you know us, you know we’ll do both.  

 

Exhibitions
22 May & onwards at de Brakke Grond

Opening already a week before the festival itself, the exhibitions at de Brakke Grond foreground the alluring force of fragility through nine installations. Unfolding across sensitive and ephemeral ways – whispers, plays with light, slowly unfolding undetectable processes – the works invite you to a slowed down, contemplative state. Split into two parts, the exhibitions reflect on the concept of fragility as a strength – Fragile Resonances through sound art and ways of listening, the Fragile Terrains through the vibrancy of matter. 

The exhibitions remain open throughout the full festival – so make use of the intermissions between concerts and symposium at de Brakke Grond to experience the artworks as they unfold over time. 

Some of the artists we’ve been keeping an eye on for a while already are presenting new installations we recommend to indulge in – AYO, Aldo Brinkhoff, Sunjoo Lee & Anaïs Lossouarn.

 

Sound Art Sunday
Sunday 31 May, de Brakke Grond

Sound Art Sunday is one of the quieter corners of the festival programme but one of its most unique and rewarding. Anaïs Lossouarn, who is also part of the exhibition, plays two stone harps in What holds of the living, Hannah Todt presents One and Many Flutes, a large-scale flute sculpture performed by five scattered musicians across the space, while Joris Strijbos brings his moving speaker system Kinetic Sounds to present a composition on it. Worth to peel yourself off of bed from TILLATEC of the night prior- we promise.

 

Abdullah Miniawy Trio & KUNTARI
Sunday 31 May, BIMHUIS

The festival’s closing concert culminates at BIMHUIS. In the double-billed concert, the structures of jazz and spiritual music are stretched, reworked, and broken open. 

Abdullah Miniaway’s performances unfold with quiet intensity, sounding fragile yet powerfully striking 

Abdullah Miniaway Trio’s performances unfold with quiet intensity. The trio explores Egyptian vocal traditions within a sonic intersection of baroque counterpoint, extended brass techniques and electronics. KUNTARI approach sound as a visceral force, merging Indonesian musical traditions with noise, metal, and experimental forms. Percussive guitar, noise, avant-garde textures, and bodily rhythm collide in a raw, ritualistic performance that blurs the line between concert and sonic ceremony.

FIBER Festival 2026 takes place from 28-31 May in Amsterdam. Head to the website of FIBER to learn more.
Subbacultcha members have free access to a selection of the events. Check out our events page  for more info.