Press Release - Crawler

Germinating from a series of chance encounters in Amsterdam’s experimental music and arts scene, Your Death is a Lullaby is the debut performance and showcase brought to you by Crawler. Founded by Rachella Groen (Zohar) and Harry Castle, the sound experiment channels alienation, desire, and dissent into sonic landscapes that are raw, confrontational, and defiantly unapologetic. Moving fluidly through the intersectionality of sound, performance, and art, the duo invite writer Gervaise Alexis Savvias, whose ongoing work is particularly interested in (black) negativity, infrastructure, and poeticism as a form and pitch to navigate the fluctuating proclivities of desire.

On 21 October 2026, as part of ADE’s Arts & Culture programme, Crawler will premiere Your Death is a Lullaby during Nothing Here Now and The Rest is Noise showcase at Muziekgebouw. For this premiere, cellist Malou van der Veld and guitarist Rob Toal-Lennon join the group, with installation from Studio Basse Stitgen and visuals from Clint Soren. Inviting artists Rainy Miller, 2K88, Bianca Scout, and Nkisi to share the stage, the evening unfolds with a lineup of rhythmic deconstruction, dystopic folklore, and a cosmological pulse.

Through the entanglement of post-industrial dub, power electronics, and illbient, Crawler explores what it costs to insist on being otherwise, treating instability and refusal as a queer politic, gathering around what won't resolve rather than what's been smoothed for consumption. Within the absence of resolution, the trio weave a veil of ambiguity in form yet intentionality in substance, conforming neither as a dancefloor or listening experience. It is within this murky region that allows their practice to continuously shift towards a shadowed and undefined realm. What lurks within, Crawler are already in direct confrontation with, long before it is understood.

Tracing the peripheries of club culture, performance, and sound art, there is an informed urgency about the way Crawler engages with their practice. Through operating between pressure and vulnerability, their sound palette builds upon legacies of sonic histories inside the cavernous walls of sound systems, the occult mysticism of industrial, and the politics of bodies in space. By navigating a sonic prose of scapulating rhythms, haunting vocals, and contoured pressure weight, Crawler’s live experiment constructs performances from hardware-only signal chains, feedback systems, and physical synthesis. By developing a real-time response to their environment, it uncovers the beauty in the limitation of analogue and its ability to create unreplicable fragments - rejecting the refined and instead embracing raw polluted forms.

Through their collaboration with Gervaise Alexis Savvias, is where the language of Crawler allures the idea to resolve, building on dub techniques where the voice isn’t center stage, it becomes a rhythmic element within the music itself. Gervaise provides depth to the intersections of sound and language, asking us; “when poetry, sound, and the fragmentation of language meet, something really curious happens. Does one follow that curiosity, or observe it instead?”

Crawler invites you to enter inside the noise, rather than peer in from the edge. For it is inside the peripheries which Crawler traces, that encourage us to engage with our sensitivities towards the unknown, the otherwise, and those parts of us that remain distorted.