Audio art festival Sonica to showcase works by Luke Fowler, Claudia Molitor and Janek Schaefer

Neil Cooper
18 October 2012

Photo: Kim Sunsoo

From Arika’s Kill Your Timid Notion to Glasgow International, sound and vision have become increasingly promiscuous bedfellows 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 artforms and worked internationally for almost 20 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 performed inside a desk in Scotland Street School Museum. Elsewhere, Turner Prize nominee Luke Fowler will collaborate with Jean-Luc Guionnet to create a piece 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 and 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.’

And as far as the ongoing renaissance of interest in cross-art adventurousness goes, ‘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.’

Various venues, Glasgow, Thu 8–Sun 18 Nov.