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KEEP.SPACE.FEST #3

Name: KEEP.SPACE.FEST #3
Start: 2026-09-11T16:30:00+02:00
End: 2026-09-12T02:00:00+02:00

Friday, 11 September | 16:30 – 02.00
De Nijverheid | Utrecht

A festival of live improvised music, electronic experiments and DJ sets presented by Space is the Place and Keep It Moving Radio, in collaboration with Gaudeamus.

On 11 September, KEEP.SPACE.FEST returns to Utrecht for its third edition, expanding beyond De Nijverheid to include Vogelfrei and transforming the area into a six-stage playground for adventurous music, performance, and artistic exchange.

TICKETS 25,40€

Annebel b2b Ambu Bambu

Annebel and Ambu Bambu come together in a back-to-back that thrives on musical curiosity and boundary-pushing selections. Layering harmonies, rhythms, and emotional storytelling into an energetic whole, they move fluidly between IDM, leftfield techno, UK-inspired breaks, bass, dubstep, jungle, and dubbed-out club sounds. Both known for a genre-fluid approach and a taste for the unexpected, they create immersive soundscapes that are urgent and rhythmic, blurring genres while remaining strikingly cohesive.

dismade

Focused on in-the-moment improvisation and composition, dismade‘s live performances are open invitations to sit down and let the music guide the experience. He challenges himself and the listener to not get distracted by expectation, but rather to focus on the development in which the music unfolds itself and forms a path for the observer to follow. For KEEP.SPACE, he will take his collected audio files as a starting point for compiling and molding new soundscapes.

Erwan Keravec

Bagpiper, composer and improviser Erwan Keravec seeks out the more unusual sounds, and ways of playing and listening to his instrument, far from its original cultural setting, he is exploring improvised music, free and ‘noise’ jazz, and establishing a repertoire of contemporary music for solo pipes, trio with solo voice and with choir. With an interest in movement and in settings associated with reinvention, he also writes, plays and improvises for dance.

From 2

We might sing each other’s memories as our own, or tell tall tales that feel very real. Either way, it will fit into a band. From 2 is an indie folk mutant in the form of five voices, collecting the melodies and memories of those about to rock.

Goda Žukauskaitė

The body digs the ground for five hours. It cracks the surface and meets the history of the land. What lies beneath? Which stories can it tell? Digging becomes a ritual, where labour transforms into dance. Through rhythm, the body enters a direct relationship with the soil, becoming a tool through which the ground can speak. DIRVA (Lithuanian for soil ready for sowing) is a durational, site-specific performance by Goda Žukauskaitė that proposes land not as property, but as a shared space of care, exchange, and nourishment, leaving an offering for what is yet to come.

Halfie + the0ther

In moments of unbearable climate and social collapes, Halfie + the0ther confront the tension head-on, searching for meaning through art and music. The duo – composed of Anushka Chkheidze (electronics) and Jonathan Bonny (percussion, vocals) – explores how rhythm-driven music can hold space for both despair and hope. The result is an intense live performance rooted in co-creation, in which the audience surrounds the duo and is free to move, drift, and physically engage with the sound. What unfolds is an organic, deeply human encounter: shared perspectives, a shared dancefloor, shared ways of coping.

images meet KSF3:
Matilde Gastaldo curates
Lis Rhodes and Takashi Ito

Film maker and curator Matilde Gastaldo combines film theory with filmmaking, as her projects examine the relationship between cinema and the housing crisis through the production of an experimental essay film. For KEEP.SPACE.FEST, she places together two films offering different ways of thinking about cinema. Lis Rhodes’ Light Reading (1978) explores the separation between language and image, while Takashi Ito’s A Silent Day (2002) explores the relationship between image and memory. Both films leave space for speculation and open interpretation, inviting the subjectivity of the viewer to construct meaning. For the occasion, this openness extends into sound. The original structure of both films remains intact (perhaps Rhodes’ voice-over is preserved) but each screening is accompanied by a live improvised score.

Karen ng

Toronto-based improviser Karen Ng has established herself as a unique musical force: performing on tour with renowned artists or in an intimate venue, audiences have come to know her distinctive tone and remarkable offerings in a variety of contexts. One of Canada’s leading improvisers “with a breathtakingly wide musical scope” (Musicworks) she also collaborates regularly with creative and ad hoc ensembles in the wider improvising scene across Canada, in Europe and the US.

Lacuna presents Saz-e-yaad

Saz-e-Yaad is a live performance by producer, composer and sound researcher Lacuna. Working across soundsystem-driven club music, experimental electronics, and archival sound practices, he builds from archival recordings of Kashmiri folk and classical music from the 1980s and 90s.The work approaches Kashmiri music as a fragmented archive shaped by political rupture, migration, oral histories and recordings that have survived in incomplete and unstable forms.These recordings are rebuilt into a live composition in altered and unexpected forms.

Lukraak

Working within the field of free improvisation and experimental music, Marcus Wärnheim and Thomas Jaspers joined forces to founde Lukraak. During KSF3, they present Interrupted Inconsistencies: a live mixtape-ish concert-happening featuring 150 micropieces of 16 seconds each, performed in one continuous 45-minute set. The duo delivers an absurd stream of sounds, improvisation, and performance (from rattling and squeaking recorder flutes to silent stillness and “free energy music”), with contributions from friends, fellow artists, family members, and strangers. The project is a love letter to communal creativity and the local music scene, where the ordinary and the poetic are allowed to coexist.

Mivos Quartet

Devoted to performing works of contemporary composers, Mivos Quartet commissions and premieres new repertoire for string quartet. They are dedicated to creative collaborations with a wide variety of artists and take part in many educational residencies, working with young performers and composers to develop their craft, technical skills and artistic expression. Beyond these activities, Mivos collaborates regularly with guest artists, presents multimedia projects, and performs improvised music.

Nick Neuburg

Percussionist and improviser Nick Neuburg focuses primarily on solo percussion performance, but is also active with various other projects and collaborations, includingg a duo with bassist Brittany Karlson, The Great Link, Sam Newsome’s Trio, several trios with pianist Eli Wallace, and Steven Long’s PRNCX among many others.

Ruidoscuro

Quartet Ruidoscuro presents strict sequential patterns against improvisation to inhabit ritualistic musical movement. The music tells a dark, haunting story in a richly layered context of spinning polyrhythms, bi-tonal melodic material, and pivoting harmonic structures in a new music that defies centralization. Layered systems of repetition, trance-based cycles, and melodic motifs spin and bridge one another, creating space for the listener to become lost in the raw energy of this powerful ensemble. Led by drummer Frank Rosaly, the group features The Ex’s guitarist Andy Moor, and pianist Marta Warelis and multi-instrumentalist Ibelisse Guardia Ferraguti on keyboards and electronics.

SOfaya

8-piece ensemble SOFAYA pays homage to South Africa’s rich heritage, sharing a mixture of musical traditions, histories, and evolutions across decades and genres. Inspired by the work of Busi Mhlongo, Louis Moholo-Moholo, Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath, Zim Ngqawana, Abdullah Ibrahim, and many more. Their vision is rooted in respecting and acknowledging the land, its elders, and all those currently contributing to its living lineage. Led by South African trumpeter James McClure, the band transports with heartfelt melodies and infectious grooves. It’s a journey that’s sincere, vibrant, provocative and wild, yet soothing, soulful, and filled with hope and kindness.

João Guerra – drums | Zenzele Mthembu-Salter – bass | John Dikeman – tenor sax | Diana Dzhabbar – alto sax | James McClure – trumpet | Lezaam Beets – trombone | Marta Warelis – keyboard

Sou & clar3rt

Puck and Sou treat sonic making as a process of interaction, something that emerges through relating and responding with movement and uncertainty in the realm of modular synthesis. They bring together two practices rooted in listening, improvisation, and live electronic performance, where music lives in the space between body and machine.
Alongside the modular system, Puck Wacki works with guitar strings and electromagnetic activation, bringing physical resonance into the electronic soundscape. Instruments are patched, probed, and drawn into response, creating a performance that takes shape as a feedback loop through the negotiation between the body’s organic clock and the internal time of the systems.

Suzan Peeters

Composer and experimental accordionist Suzan Peeters is constantly searching for new timbres and sound textures within the accordion, pushing its acoustic spectrum to its limits by manipulating the interplay between her body and the body of her instrument. With her debut album Cassotto, she places the accordion at the centre of an adventurous and contemporary sound world — one that invites to discover how far an accordion can reach when tradition and imagination intertwine.

Tonto

A pure blast of explosive chaos, this wrecking one-man band detonates drums and vocals in a jungle of distortions and digital artifacts. Tonto came out of the most depraved fever dream of Zu, Deerhoof, Lightning Bolt and Death Grips: a manic collision of noise, groove and raw punk. His live performances are a hallucinatory wall of sound filled with filthy pounding beats, at times African polyrhythms, a lot of hip hop blasting bumbum-cha and occasional 4/4 ass-shaking.