From the 29/30 September 2023, Glasgow’s Tramway and Hidden Gardens will play host to Sonica Surge, a concentrated burst of inspiring and innovative audiovisual art and experimentation.

Check out the full programme here: https://sonic-a.co.uk/line-up

Sonica 2023

We are thrilled to introduce our festival's 8th edition, pulsating with immersive audio-visual scenographies, hybrid rhythms, and oceanic and post-human imaginaries 🦠

From Myanmar to Ukraine, Australia to Luxembourg, Viêt Nam to Switzerland, and Canada to Scotland, Sonica 2024 gathers a vibrant line-up of more than 100 artists to Glasgow 👁

The countdown is on!

For the full lineup, visit https://sonic-a.co.uk/line-up

Sonica 2024

This year at Sonica, we hosted thought-provoking discussions with incredible artists and thinkers:
Robin Fox shared insights into his creative journey and unique processes;
Martin Messier explored the fascinating intersection of sensory experiences and technology;
In our final talk, Professor Suk-Jun Kim led a conversation on the ‘Futures of Listening’, joined by SHHE, Quoc Trung, Andrey Chugunov, Robin Fox, and Shadwa Ali.

Sonica Glasgow 2024 Talks

Aoife’s Only Son is a collection of new songs in Gàidhlig and English inspired by the story ‘Bàs Mac Chù Chulainn’ from the literary epic The Tain. Following Hammy Sgìth’s Sonic Bites in January, Aoife’s Only Soninvites you into the world of a wee boy who lived thousands of years ago. Fusing rap and dance music with traditional storytelling, Sgìth has created a playful performance that draws on his experiences of learning Gàidhlig and joining an online community of speakers during lockdown, making music for the craic.

Visuals: Lucid Raccoon & Hammy Sgìth
Music: Hammy Sgìth
Mastering: Konchis

Supported by: Young Scot & The Iron Theatre

Hammy Sgìth: Dafty

Hammy Sgìth: Sgadan

Sample recording courtesy of Kathy Hinde for her Earthquake Mass Re-imagined from 10-20 March 2022 at The Pipe Factory see https://sonic-a.co.uk/portfolio/2022-earthquake-mass-re-imagined-kathy-hinde/

Earthquake Mass, Kathy Hinde

LIVE at SonicaGlasgow 2022 at Tramway on Sat 19 March 2022 
Excerpt from Erratic Weather by Maotik's Mathieu Le Sourd and Maarten Vos process weather data live on stage to generate a bespoke hurricane

Maarten Vos, Maotik, Erratic Weather (excerpt)

11 March at Tramway L'apparition by Ela Orleans as part of Sonica Glasgow see https://sonic-a.co.uk/portfolio/2022-ela-orleans-auclair/

Ela Orleans, Childlike (excerpt)

Taken from HERETIK live at Tramway on 17 March: sonic-a.co.uk/portfolio/2022-lec…ut-myself-heretik/

"HERETIK is an audiovisual live show that draws on Nigerian storytelling traditions and explores the dichotomy of two extremes: technological singularity// global enlightenment.

Produced by Samm Anga
Processed by David Henderson"

muto major - 3nlight3n (HERETIK Act ii)

Harry Gorski-Brown, BADBOY

The Golden Filter live at The Rum Shack for Sonica Glasgow 12 March

The Golden Filter, Electric Light

Cryptic Artist Kathy Hinde discusses her piece 'Earthquake Mass Re-imagined at Sonica Glasgow 2022.

Kathy Hinde On Earthquake Mass Re-imagined  // Sonica Glasgow 2022

Four tracks recorded live from the premier of Situational Soundtracks at Jubilee Hall, Aldeburgh on 27th Jan 2023. 
Project developed during two week residency at Snape Maltings as Britten Pears Young Artists. All music composed and performed by Dopey Monkey and Adrian Ortman. 

"Situational Soundtrack has been our residency exploration into the sounds which form parts of daily life. Inspired by the likes of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports or Erik Satie’s Vexations, we’ve been considering what situational music is or could be as well as closer aspects of the everyday situations we often find ourselves in. The repetition of small routines that add up over the years, internal sporadic thoughts, feelings and monologues guiding us through the day and how our everyday consumption of music accompanies our activities and shapes our mood. Using these as a springboard for ideas, we’ve created a playlist of new music which we hope, in turn can be used as a soundtrack for someone else’s daily life."

In Limbo Live

GABO- Fisherman Frog

Lucy Duncombe / Feronia Wennborg-  assembling.air

Robert Henke- 3Blocks, CBM 8032

SCHNITT / Gianluca Sibaldi- SCANAUDIENCE

In uno spazio immenso

Altrove, lontano

Heft - Life Force Energy (trailer)

Heft - Mensch (trailer)

Heft, Karen Vogt - Hive Mind And I (trailer)

The Glasgow Cenotaph has stood at the centre of George Square since 1924, an important symbol of the city’s history and its fallen. Behind it, in the beautifully ornate domed entryway to the City Chambers, stands the Lamp of Remembrance in memory of ex-service nurses in WWI and WWII. Here, composer Amble Skuse’s newly commissioned piece of music will play a work which, in contemplating the memorial in its centenary year, remembers the lives of those lost to conflict. Visitors are invited to pause, listen and reflect.

Sonica 2024: Sonic Lamp // Amble Skuse

This year at Sonica, we hosted thought-provoking discussions with incredible artists and thinkers. Highlights include:
Robin Fox shared insights into his creative journey and unique processes;
Martin Messier explored the fascinating intersection of sensory experiences and technology;
In our final talk, Professor Suk-Jun Kim led a conversation on the ‘Futures of Listening’, joined by SHHE, Quoc Trung, Andrey Chugunov, Robin Fox, and Shadwa Ali.

Robin Fox - Sound & Light - A Musical Continuum

Martin Messier - Placing the Body Front & Centre

Sonica 2024 Futures of Listening Q+A

ELEPHANT! You Shake Your Sheep is a dynamic collaboration between musician-composer Harry Górski-Brown (UK) and artist-composer Annabelle Playe (FR).  This unclassifiable performance pushes the bagpipes to new extremes, fusing them with electronica and voice.  Blending humour and surrealism, the duo challenges sonic boundaries, creating imaginary worlds both strange and playful, enhanced by their magnetic on-stage connection.
Rima Ben Brahim’s innovative lighting enhances this genre-blurring ‘sonic safari,’ immersing audiences in an experience that redefines traditional expectations. Górski-Brown’s iconic elephant-knitted headpiece adds a memorable touch, while the duo’s impeccable timing and memorised score make the performance both engaging and accessible.


ELEPHANT! You Shake Your Sheep

Remix from Fleshed Out by Gazelle Twin. Released on Anti-Ghost Moon Ray Records, 29 July 2016.

Bandcamp: https://gazelletwin.bandcamp.com/album/fleshed-out
Double Vinyl: http://gazelletwin.tmstor.es/cart/product.php?id=28946

Unflesh (Carter Tutti Remix)

Hobby HOrse

Hobby Horse

HOBBY HORSE

From Kathy Hinde for Below the Blanket, Cryptic's walking meditation through art inspired by one of Scotland's great wild landscapes.

Presented as part of The Peatland Partnership’s Flows to the Future Project (with RSPB Scotland as lead partner) in association with the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Below the Blanket is produced by Cryptic.

Bog Bean Soundscape

Two Cryptic artists come together for the first time, as visual artist Heather Lander and musician and composer Alex Smoke present Primordial Waters. Noting how advances in science and technology seem to be turning our attention ever further away from the natural world, the artists seek to remind audiences of our most fundamental history: our common origins in water. Beginning from an elevated perspective, Primordial Waters gradually draws audiences closer into its mesmerising weather-pattern swirl of mists and water, the pull of tides, the movement of water that’s sometimes calm and sometimes tempestuous. The effect is mesmerising and meditative – a reminder to slow down, remember our place in the world, and commemorate the natural laws that bind us to our planet.

Sonica: Primordial Waters

Journey into the unknown with a new work from Glasgow-based Polish singer and composer Ela Orleans. Set to soaring music that recalls the Cocteau Twins and classic science-fiction movie soundtracks, footage of the 1969 Apollo moon mission is repurposed to retell the narrative of Night Thoughts, a nine-poem cycle written by Edward Young in the 1740s. Orleans’ Night Voyager marries the footage of fearful but optimistic astronauts captured in the archive material with Young’s meditation on death – and speaks, too, of the possibility of cultural forgetting, as in Young’s poem, now scarcely remembered but called in its time ‘the grandest and richest poetry that human genius has ever produced’.

Sonica: Night Voyager

A new collaboration between Glasgow-based artist-musicians Robbie Thomson and SUE ZUKI, Rottinghuis is a nightmarish creature-feature, an investigation into the dark side of the web, and an unnerving depiction of disintegration. An everyday living room is swallowed up by proliferating gaps in space, as though the code of the world is unravelling; a monstrous insect is glimpsed fleetingly, in flashes of light – is it inert or alive, hovering or scuttling directly towards the viewer? The ominous industrial-techno soundtrack uses samples taken from a livestreaming chatroom whose content, like the audio the artists make from it, is as compelling as it is disturbing.

Sonica: Rottinghuis

An award-winning text by French Canadian playwright, Daniel Danis, is brought to life by an international cast of actors, opera singers and musicians from Denmark, Canada and the UK. The intense and blood-red story of three individuals; a woman who was thirsty, her son who liked to laugh and an old man who watched them unable to say a word.

A Tramway Dark Lights Commission.

Directors: Cathie Boyd & Stéphane Theoret
Composers: Anthea Haddow & Jenny Scott
Set & Costume Designer: Alex Rigg
Lighting Designer: Stewart Steel
Cast: Stéphane Theoret, Kathryn Akin, Steven Beard, Richard Burkhard, Marianne Cotterill, Anthea Haddow & Jenny Scott

Celle-Là 01

A cutting-edge music theatre adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s glorious ode to lover Vita Sackville-West, featuring an original soundtrack by composers Craig Armstrong and AGF, adapted by Darryl Pickney, directed by Cryptic’s Cathie Boyd and performed by Judith Williams.

Orlando opens with the hero as a young man in Elizabethan England, and follows his transformations of fortune, love and even gender in this multi-faceted, century-spanning quest for ‘life and a lover’.

Virginia Woolf’s novel has been described as ‘the longest and most charming love letter in literature’, relishing an era where opulence and hedonism were savoured.

Original soundtrack by Craig Armstrong & AGF, commissioned by Cryptic with support from Creative Scotland.

Text: Virginia Woolf, adapted by Darryl Pinckney
Composers: Craig Armstrong & AGF 
Director: Cathie Boyd
Assistant Director/Choreographer: Josh Armstrong
Set Designer: James Johnson
Costume Designer: Theo Clinkard
Lighting Designer: Nich Smith
Visuals: James Houston & Angelica Kroeger
Cast: Judith Williams & AGF

Orlando

Writing Pitch & Depth

You Sleep On

A new feature broadcast for Subcity Radio.

Alex Smoke is a musician and composer; operating in various fields of sound including electronic production, sound installation and instrumental composition.

His main interest is in combining traditional forms of composition and musicianship with the more experimental approaches allowed by modern technology.

Initially trained in classical cello, drums and singing, then progressing to electronic production under a range of monikers including Wraetlic, he has since increasingly focussed on sound for picture, psycho-acoustics and collaborations with visual artists and orchestral musicians.

Recent work has included scoring BBC science programmes, Order & Disorder and Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams, composing a score for Scottish Ballet’s Sibilo and providing music for various other film projects. He also regularly collaborates with visual artist Florence To on installation performances under the name of CØV and Nagoya-based Vokoi on the audiovisual performance project Wraetlic.

Subcity Radio: Alex Smoke

Inspired by an interview with American actor Owen Wilson, Instruction Manual (Ollie Hawker & Scott Morrison) presents a meditative and hypnotic audiovisual work combining piano, harp, accordion, and electronics.  Moving and humourous, the artists have created distinct miniature soundworlds that are both soothing and unsettling in equal measure.

The Owen Wilson Elegies 1

CHIAROSCURO

Established in 1994, Cryptic is Scotland’s internationally renowned home of audiovisual art and experimentation. Founded by Cathie Boyd, and based in Glasgow but with a global reach, Cryptic presents and promotes the most dynamic talents of today and tomorrow as they explore new dimensions in live music, visual and sonic arts and performance, and the weird and wild areas where these disciplines intersect and cross over.

crypticglasgow

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