Highlights from Sonica 2024: Glasgow’s biennial of sonic
& visual arts
Sonica is a biennial festival focussing on sonic &
visual arts, taking over venues & buildings across Glasgow for eleven days.
This year’s event saw over 100 artists explore sound, aesthetics & place
through performances & installations. In this roundup we pick out some of
the projects that used architecture & landscape in fascinating ways.
Every other year, Sonica Glasgow takes over the Scottish
city, transforming it into a kaleidoscope of noise, light, experiment, and
exploration. In 2022, recessed.space visited to report from Oscar van Heek’s
Iron Harvest (00040), Guillaume Cousin’s beguiling smoke machine (00023), and a
landscape-infused journey through a gleaming, glistening, glimmering glow with Sing
the Gloaming (00021).
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For 2024’s edition, Sonica’s 11 days was packed with over 100 international artists across 16 Glaswegian venues, many of which were presenting Cryptic Commissions, premiering new works made for the festival. Sonica is also an perfect excuse to explore Glasgow, not only opening up established venues including Tramway, CCA, and The Lighthouse, but bringing sonic idea to new venues such as Glasgow City Chambers, Mercat Cross, and Clock Tower.
It all comes about through a huge network of supporting organisations and collaborators assisting lead festival producers Cryptic. Established in 1994 by Cathie Boyd, the organisation has a global outlook and reach in its production of live music, visual and sonic arts, and performance. In that time, Cryptic have presented the work of over 2,000 artists to over 1.2million people in 32 countries, and since 2012 Sonica has been its home-town showcase.
This year’s edition has just ended and recessed.space brings you some of the highlights of projects that speak to place, landscape, and architecture:
For 2024’s edition, Sonica’s 11 days was packed with over 100 international artists across 16 Glaswegian venues, many of which were presenting Cryptic Commissions, premiering new works made for the festival. Sonica is also an perfect excuse to explore Glasgow, not only opening up established venues including Tramway, CCA, and The Lighthouse, but bringing sonic idea to new venues such as Glasgow City Chambers, Mercat Cross, and Clock Tower.
It all comes about through a huge network of supporting organisations and collaborators assisting lead festival producers Cryptic. Established in 1994 by Cathie Boyd, the organisation has a global outlook and reach in its production of live music, visual and sonic arts, and performance. In that time, Cryptic have presented the work of over 2,000 artists to over 1.2million people in 32 countries, and since 2012 Sonica has been its home-town showcase.
This year’s edition has just ended and recessed.space brings you some of the highlights of projects that speak to place, landscape, and architecture:
Ahmed
Saleh & Alba G. Corral
A ten year walk to the shore
Egyptian musician Ahmed Saleh explored his home city of Alexandria alongside Spanish “coder, visualist, and artivist” Alba G. Corral. Saleh’s music acted as a warning for rising sea levels and looked back to historic floodings in the 4th and 11th centuries. Corral’s live digital painting played with architectural and urban forms to the music, distorting and collapsing into liquidity.
Ahmed Saleh
Alba G. Corral
Supported by British Council Egypt & Institut Ramon
Llull, in partnership with B’sarya for Arts.
A ten year walk to the shore
Egyptian musician Ahmed Saleh explored his home city of Alexandria alongside Spanish “coder, visualist, and artivist” Alba G. Corral. Saleh’s music acted as a warning for rising sea levels and looked back to historic floodings in the 4th and 11th centuries. Corral’s live digital painting played with architectural and urban forms to the music, distorting and collapsing into liquidity.
Ahmed Saleh
Alba G. Corral
Supported by British Council Egypt & Institut Ramon
Llull, in partnership with B’sarya for Arts.
Celine Daemen
Songs for a passerby
Sonica hosted the UK premier of Celine Daemen’s Venice Immersive Grand Prize-winning film, Songs for a Passerby. Presented through a VR headset, the experience follows a 3D scanned avatar of the person experiencing the film, as it walks through an uncanny city to a choral score with a libretto from Olivier Herter. The work is a question on self and the city, asking who is performer and who is observed in a questioning reality.
Celine Daemen
Supported by Performing Arts Fund NL and The Embassy of the
Kingdom of the Netherlands in the UK.
Songs for a passerby
Sonica hosted the UK premier of Celine Daemen’s Venice Immersive Grand Prize-winning film, Songs for a Passerby. Presented through a VR headset, the experience follows a 3D scanned avatar of the person experiencing the film, as it walks through an uncanny city to a choral score with a libretto from Olivier Herter. The work is a question on self and the city, asking who is performer and who is observed in a questioning reality.
Celine Daemen
Supported by Performing Arts Fund NL and The Embassy of the
Kingdom of the Netherlands in the UK.
Ida Toninato & Pierre-Luc Lecours
Homeostasis
The golden ratio may be a staple ingredient in architecture and nature, but here it is a musical tool. Using a feedback system, musician and composer Ida Toninato, playing baritone saxophone, improvised to the Fibonacci sequence to explore the overlap of nature and the manmade. Montréal-based Piere-Luc Lecours was on modular synthesiser while galactic graphics swirl on the screen in real-time reflexive response.
Ida Toninato
Pierre-Luc Lecours
Homeostasis
The golden ratio may be a staple ingredient in architecture and nature, but here it is a musical tool. Using a feedback system, musician and composer Ida Toninato, playing baritone saxophone, improvised to the Fibonacci sequence to explore the overlap of nature and the manmade. Montréal-based Piere-Luc Lecours was on modular synthesiser while galactic graphics swirl on the screen in real-time reflexive response.
Ida Toninato
Pierre-Luc Lecours
Supported by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and The Québec Government Office, London. Co-presented with MUTEK.
John Butler
The high frontier
Channelling the techno-utopian dreams of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezoz, Norman Foster, and Patrik Schumacher, John Butler’s animation and song cycle considers an imaginary Tech Titan founder of a new mars colony. Over the film’s duration the top-down-controlled neofeudal society evolves into a system of mutual kindness, cooperation, and working with a new nature against the plans of the hyperwealthy founder.
You can watch The Fourth Planet on the artist’s website HERE.
John Butler
The high frontier
Channelling the techno-utopian dreams of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezoz, Norman Foster, and Patrik Schumacher, John Butler’s animation and song cycle considers an imaginary Tech Titan founder of a new mars colony. Over the film’s duration the top-down-controlled neofeudal society evolves into a system of mutual kindness, cooperation, and working with a new nature against the plans of the hyperwealthy founder.
You can watch The Fourth Planet on the artist’s website HERE.
John Butler
Shadwa Ali
Resonance of the Gyre
Using sounds and footage recorded from everyday life during Covid lockdowns, Egyptian audio and visual artist Shadwa Ali’s video work explores what a pause to endless growth and urbanisation might mean. Looking for gaps from which new modes of being might develop, the 90-minute film explores landscapes and places which carry desertion and relative emptiness.
Shadwa Ali
Supported by British Council Egypt.
Resonance of the Gyre
Using sounds and footage recorded from everyday life during Covid lockdowns, Egyptian audio and visual artist Shadwa Ali’s video work explores what a pause to endless growth and urbanisation might mean. Looking for gaps from which new modes of being might develop, the 90-minute film explores landscapes and places which carry desertion and relative emptiness.
Shadwa Ali
Supported by British Council Egypt.
Alex Smoke
Wind of the sun
Also taking the audience into interplanetary places, Alex Smoke’s Cryptic commission began with a dream in which the artist imagined the sun tearing the fabric of reality. The work that evolved from this kernel developed first in Smoke’s subconscious and then over two weeks on a Cryptic residency where it began to evolve sonically with both digital and analogue instruments as well as field recordings of solar activity and the earth’s magnetic field. The performance took place in Govanhill Baths, a former swimming pool a Community Trust is now seeking to refurbish alongside artistic projects.
Alex Smoke
Wind of the sun
Also taking the audience into interplanetary places, Alex Smoke’s Cryptic commission began with a dream in which the artist imagined the sun tearing the fabric of reality. The work that evolved from this kernel developed first in Smoke’s subconscious and then over two weeks on a Cryptic residency where it began to evolve sonically with both digital and analogue instruments as well as field recordings of solar activity and the earth’s magnetic field. The performance took place in Govanhill Baths, a former swimming pool a Community Trust is now seeking to refurbish alongside artistic projects.
Alex Smoke
A Cryptic Commission 2024. Part of Doors Open Day 2024. Developed at Cove Park.
Isa Gordon
In a live performance comprising Isa Gordon’s two creative languages, music and 3D modelling, the artist considered the landscape of Ayreshire. The video work tweaked and twisted views of the Scottish spaces of former industry and work, superimposing utopian and architectural imaginaries over the top. As a provocation for new possibilities, the music over the top dances and dashes to the changing architectural ideas.
Isa Gordon
In a live performance comprising Isa Gordon’s two creative languages, music and 3D modelling, the artist considered the landscape of Ayreshire. The video work tweaked and twisted views of the Scottish spaces of former industry and work, superimposing utopian and architectural imaginaries over the top. As a provocation for new possibilities, the music over the top dances and dashes to the changing architectural ideas.
Isa Gordon
Scottish Ensemble
Echoes of The Burrell
Recently renovated by John McAslan & Partners, who dropped a new central atrium into the Pollack Park-located art gallery, the Scottish Ensemble presented a programme of music responding to the Burrell Collection and some of its 9,000 artworks. Violist Jane Atkins curated a programme including Ravel, Shostakovich, and Simone which was then performed in situ and around the refurbished galleries.
Scottish Ensemble
Echoes of The Burrell
Recently renovated by John McAslan & Partners, who dropped a new central atrium into the Pollack Park-located art gallery, the Scottish Ensemble presented a programme of music responding to the Burrell Collection and some of its 9,000 artworks. Violist Jane Atkins curated a programme including Ravel, Shostakovich, and Simone which was then performed in situ and around the refurbished galleries.
Scottish Ensemble
Riccardo
Giovinetto
Femina
Fracturing Renaissance paintings into digital splinters, Italian artist, physicist, composer, and professor Riccardo Giovinetto created a two-screen soundscape. Vocal polyphonies are sampled and synthesised into distant harmonies, while new imagery reforms in response to the electronic music. The golden section is used as a mathematical prompt to develop algorithms that distort, reshape, and create new forms of posthuman beauty.
Riccardo Giovinetto
Femina
Fracturing Renaissance paintings into digital splinters, Italian artist, physicist, composer, and professor Riccardo Giovinetto created a two-screen soundscape. Vocal polyphonies are sampled and synthesised into distant harmonies, while new imagery reforms in response to the electronic music. The golden section is used as a mathematical prompt to develop algorithms that distort, reshape, and create new forms of posthuman beauty.
Riccardo Giovinetto
