From Kill Your Timid Notion to GI, sound and vision have become
increasingly promiscuous bed-fellows over the last decade. Throw in an
increased sense of theatricality to sound-based art, and all the
elements are in place for Sonica, a brand-new feast for the senses that
forms the latest addition to an ever-expanding Glasgow-based left-field
arts diaspora.
Produced by Cryptic, the music-theatre company who have bridged
art-forms and worked internationally for almost twenty years, Sonica's
inaugural ten-day city-wide programme of 'sonic art for the visually
minded' brings together already existing works by the likes of Janek
Schaefer, whose turntable-based work featured several years ago in a
major show at the CCA, alongside new commissions from home and abroad.
These include Remember Me, an opera by Claudia Molitor's opera
performed inside a desk in Scotland Street School Museum. Elsewhere,
Turner Prize nominee Luke Fowler will collaborate with Jean-Luc
Guionnet based on their relationship with electronic music.
“There's a real demand for this sort of work,” according to Cryptic
director Cathie Boyd, who instigated the Cryptic Nights showcases of
sound-based work at CCA. “As well as the major international work,
Cryptic has always been about showing off some of the more significant
developing artists coming up, and we're keen to do both of those things
here.”
Co-curated with former CCA director and current head of Huddersfield
Contemporary Music Festival, Graham McKenzie, and former producer of
Almeida Opera an currently in charge of Norwich Festival, Patrick
Dickie, Sonica will be a shape-shifting enterprise, promoting one-offs
rather than fixing themselves to one format.
“It's important as well that some of the works get another life,” says
McKenzie, “because some of them have only ever been seen once.”
As far as the ongoing renaissance of interest in cross-art
adventurousness,“Intellectually and emotionally,” Dickie explains,
“both artists and audiences want to explore all five of their senses.
That's the journey they're prepared to make.”
Sonica, various venues, Glasgow, November 8th-18th
http://sonic-a.co.uk/2012/
The List, October 2012
Comments