Le Guess Who?
is back and taking over Utrecht! From November 5–8, 150 artists will perform throughout Utrecht in theaters, clubs, and department stores, as well as at Museum Speelklok! This year, four artists will take the stage in our nave!
Every November, Le Guess Who? takes over the entire city of Utrecht, with more than 150 artists performing in pop venues, theaters, churches, clubs, and more. The festival is all about sounds you rarely or never hear elsewhere, but which offer new perspectives on what’s possible in music.
The line-up
6 november
Roxanne Tataei with HKU students (16:15 – 17:00)
Vocal artist and composer Roxanne Tataei, together with students from the HKU (University of the Arts Utrecht), presents the outcome of an experimental sound workshop. The workshop explores the concept of graphic scoring as a practice of intuition, imagination and embodied listening, stepping outside conventional notation and investigating what can happen when musical decisions emerge from visual stimuli, instinct and the act of listening in the moment. At the heart of this practice is a return to a childlike capacity for curiosity, play and discovery.
Posuposu Otani (18:30 – 19:10)
Throat singer and songwriter Posuposu Otani employs an instrumental palate of open-tuned guitar and the Kohkin (Jew’s Harp) to create an impressionistic sound world that fuses rich harmonics and fluid rhythms, focusing on overtones and timbre. A prominent figure in the Tokyo and Yokohama underground music scenes, his journey has been profoundly influenced by his diverse experiences: his passion for punk, the time he spent in San Francisco’s skateboarding scene, and his travels through India and the Republic of Sakha to study the Kohkin. Now living immersed in the mountainous regions of Kanagawa, Otani’s lyrics often reflect his deep connection to the natural world and the human experience, addressing themes of freedom, nature and self-discovery.
7 november
Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė & Eli Wewentxu (16:15 – 17:00)
After meeting at Le Guess Who? 2024, violinist Eli Wewentxu and kanklės player and singer Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė (Merope) started a collaboration that leads to their album Después de llover and a joint show at Le Guess Who? 2026. Not speaking the same language and having little in common other than the resonance of their instruments, the encounter leads them to explore an imaginary world. A world where they share sounds to build a place where they can go and play with the moisture of the plants growing in the water, listen to the pudus playing with the herons, rest on the floripondios, and perhaps stay there waiting for the rain to return.
CALID (17:45 – 18:30)
Singer and guitarist CALID operates at the intersection of memory, exile and rediscovery. His music draws from the golden era of Afghan folk and classical traditions, reinterpreted through a contemporary, minimalist lens shaped by distance and longing. Born into a culture where poetry and music are inseparable, he approaches each song not as a performance, but as an act of preservation. With his voice, he’s carrying the emotional weight of stories that survived displacement, silence, and time. Rather than modernizing Afghan music for the sake of novelty, he reveals its timelessness through electric guitar arrangements.
Want to learn more about these artists or get more information about Le Guess Who? Visit leguesswho.com