Gaudeamus 2025 Wednesday

Gaudeamus takes over Utrecht from 10 to 14 September 2025 with more than 45 concerts, interdisciplinary performances, workshops and lectures. The Wednesday programme features artists like Eli Keszler, Yaz Lancaster, Zeno van den Broek & HIIIT & Les Percussions de Strasbourg and more.

Yaz Lancaster

Yaz Lancaster is one of this year’s nominees for the Gaudeamus Award, our annual incentive prize for young composers. This experimental artist from New York, whose work is rooted in queer communities, sampling and post-genre collaborations and improvisations, is a good example of the versatility the word ‘composer’ encompasses in 2025. With Lancaster feeling equally at home in underground noise parties and in concert halls, this concert will showcase all facets of their artistry.

They will premiere LUSTER, joined by SMASH.duo to create a sense of shared intimacy through ambient music, semi-improvised gestures and field recordings. With their death ambient duo medium., Lancaster will present BRUXISM, a performance for electronically processed violin, digital, traditional and handmade modular instruments, scent, noise and movement.

Eli Keszler

New York-based composer and percussionist Eli Keszler presents material from his self-titled album released in May this year. A freewheeling, Lynchian song-cycle in which his virtuosic performances traverse a living landscape of abstract electronic sound. Music that breathes, creaks and sighs, with noirish jazz torch songs giving way to skittering drums and cinematic, dubbed-out textures, the lyrics whispered and cried by near-inaudible, distant voices.

A prolific collaborator, Keszler has worked with the likes of Oneohtrix Point Never, Skrillex, Rashad Becker and Laurel Halo in recent years, as well as scoring films. He crossed our path for the first time in 2012, when he was nominated for the Gaudeamus Award with his sound installation Cold Pin. Since then he became an international household name in challenging, experimental music.

Zeno van den Broek & HIIIT & Les Percussions de Strasbourg present WAYS OF [].

What can AI learn from the top percussionists of Les Percussions de Strasbourg and HIIIT? WAYS OF [], the new performance by the exciting Dutch composer and audiovisual artist Zeno van den Broek, pairs six flesh-and-blood percussionists with five percussion robots, who respond to the music through AI-based interactions and visualizations. An exploration of the ever-changing relationship between people, machines and music.

Zeno van den Broek is known for his multidisciplinary, always highly aesthetic, explorations of the mechanical and mathematical. His performances and albums are overwhelming experiences that are both disturbing and strangely calming. Van den Broek has already appeared on stage at Gaudeamus Festival a number of times. In 2018, we released his work Ob-Literate, which he wrote together with Gagi Petrovic, on LP on the Unsounds label.

Part of Gaudeamus 2025. Check out the full festival programme here.

The people at Gaudeamus have kindly offered a limited amount of free tickets for Subbacultcha members. Please make a reservation by sending an email to mailinglist@subbacultcha.nl with ‘Gaudeamus Wednesday’ in the subject line + your name in the email. NB! The registration closes at 11am on 9 September.