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Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2018
Festival
Calum Scott, Scare the Deer, installation view at Framewerk, Belfast; image courtesy of the artist
Sounding Out CHRISTOPHER STEENSON REPORTS ON SONORITIES FESTIVAL – AN EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC AND SOUND ART FESTIVAL THAT TOOK PLACE IN BELFAST FROM 17 TO 22 APRIL.
IF SOMEONE ASKED YOU where they might find a week-
long, international festival dedicated to the latest developments in experimental music and sound art, you might recommend somewhere like Berlin. But since 1981, when Sonorities was founded at Queen’s University (QUB) as a “festival of twentieth century music”, Belfast has been just the place for an exploration of all things sonic. This year’s Sonorities Festival, which featured artists from over 40 countries, made a conscious effort to be more inclusive and open to the general public. By partnering with Moving on Music, the Belfast Film Festival and the club nights and labels, RESIST and Touch Sensitive, Sonorities was more widely-publicised and integrated within the city than it has been before, reaching beyond the festival’s usual academic circles. Most of the programme revolved around music and performance, with emphasis on how new technologies can be used to augment the music-making process. This theme was variously explored through concerts in the Sonic Arts Research Centre's (SARC) world-renowned Sonic Lab and during a one-day symposium, which focused on “techno-human encounters” in sound production, performance and composition. The opening performance, Re-Breather, by Franziska Schroeder, Jules Rawlinson and Dara Etefalghi encapsulated the festival’s reputation for daring experimentalism, comprising computer-generated visuals and the choked sounds of an electronically-treated saxophone, played without its mouthpiece. Other performances took place in Accidental Theatre, where highlights included Jon Kipp’s and Stuart Bowditch’s sound-sculpture performance, Fogou, and the slow motion body movements displayed by Federico Visi for SloMo Study #1. In conjunction with Belfast Film Festival’s programme
of screenings and events, festivalgoers experienced a different kind of audiovisual delight with a new performance by People Like Us (aka Vicki Bennett), titled The Mirror (2018). Working for over two decades as a multimedia artist, Bennett weaves together audio and moving image material to create collage-based works. The piece began with a chimeric soundtrack formed from cover versions of the song The Windmills of Your Mind (first made famous by the English crooner Noel Harrison). The lyrics to the song – which reference circles in spirals, wheels within wheels, turning carousels and tunnels – act as a roadmap for the recurrent imagery in the 40-minute performance. As the audience entered a hauntological world of Hollywood films and radio hits, a fractal and circular narrative was formed, whilst all the while being propelled forward by Bennett’s accomplished methods of live audio mixing. Other noteworthy video works included Fergal Dowling and Mihai Cucu’s surround-sound, fixed media piece, Ground and Background. Sonorities also included an array of exhibitions and installations. In SARC’s basement-level Broadcast Room, the sound art collective Umbrella presented newly created multimedia works. Titled ‘Same Place’, the exhibition featured work by 11 members of the collective, who each explored different locations around Belfast and their related soundscapes. John D’Arcy’s North Street, for example, acted as a commentary on the Royal Exchange development that will see parts of Belfast’s historic North Street demolished to make way for a new retail area. In the video, D’Arcy walks along North Street with a virtual reality headset, intercutting his vantage point with simulations of a shopping centre. The open soundscape of North Street is contrasted with clinically-produced pop music, reverberating within the shopping
