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THE ARCHES UNVEIL NEW FESTIVAL
‘SOUND THOUGHT’
Thu 3rd – Sat 5th Feb 2011
The Arches, 253 Argyle Street, Glasgow, G2 8DL
Thurs-Fri: from 10am & Sat: from 12 noon
Festival Pass: £20/£15 & Day Pass: £8/£6
Tickets from the Arches Box Office on 0141 565 1000 or from www.thearches.co.uk
Sound Thought, which has been running since 2007, is the annual music composition, performance and research
conference run by music postgraduates at the University of Glasgow. This year, the festival comes to the Arches from
Thu 3rd – Sat 5th Feb 2011 and has broadened to include compositions and performance proposals from other
institutions as well as both academic and non-academic work.
A co-production between the University of Glasgow’s postgraduate music course and The Arches, Sound Thought 2011
is a three day music-focused multi-arts conference/festival, combining workshops, paper presentations and round table
discussion with a diverse programme of compositions, provocations and interdisciplinary performance. The festival
includes diverse and ground-breaking work from celebrated composers, visual artists, dancers, contemporary theatre
practitioners and filmmakers. The festival features everything from Leona Lewis dueting with a toilet, to piercing the
silence of the library, the most exciting new string quartet in the country and an installation using lasers to ‘play’
mushrooms. Artists include post graduate music students, Alex Rigg, Roz Masson, Yann Seznec, Iain Campbell and
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12/01/10
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Kathryn McCain amongst others. This festival will fuse disparate audiences, artists and disciplines in a celebration of
work which has innovative, provocative use of sound at its core.
A full programme with more information including times and dates will be available soon in print and also on the Arches
website at www.thearches.co.uk. In the meantime, here’s more information on some of the artists and industry
professionals performing and presenting work at the festival:
Just confirmed - Belle and Sebastian's manager John Williamson will be hosting a special workshop on working within
and without the music industry.
Richard McMaster and Tom Marshallsay present Oct 160, a psychoacoustic experiment involving stethoscopes,
speakers, and a group of hearts that are beating in unison. Reversing the accepted dialogue between the performance
of music and the listener, Oct 160 uses the biological body clocks of the audience to create an entirely different listening
experience, in which your own reaction to variables outwith your body dictate how the piece will play. Jan Hendrickse
and Rosalind Masson present Tape Piece, a large scale visual and sound installation piece created before the audience,
uniting process and product. Using adhesive tape as a static cultural presence, artists Jan Hendrickse and Rosalind
Masson explore the relationship between physical action, space and sound through movement and live processing and
sampling. Music For Flute by Thomas Arthur which is four minutes of music for unaccompanied flute.
Out Of the Dark by Berlin-based artist Leila Peacock (The Cannibal’s Cookbook, Dinner) explores the by turns isolating,
uncomfortable and exhilarating effect of being surrounded by strangers in total darkness. By severing the greediest of
all the senses - sight - this fascinating performance lecture, delivered in pitch black, uses voices, sound and silence to
find out what happens to our ears when the tyranny of our eyes is denied. Leila Peacock’s Sing. Speak. Sigh. Scream.
Filmed using state of the art medical technology at Gartnavel General, an artist’s voicebox is filmed as he recites a
riddle. Inspired by Samuel Beckett’s dramatic works, the artist is put under considerable physical distress as we visually
witness this intimate bodily organ - previously always to be heard, never to be seen - in action. Composer, performer
and co-founder of the Monosynth Orchestra Sean Williams looks at the dynamic possibilities of electronic music before
computers started getting in the way in Testing 1, 2. Inspired by the practices of John Cage, Pierre Schaeffer and other
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12/01/10
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1940s musicians, this solo piece transforms the sterile laboratory elements of early electronic equipment and the
modern notion of DJing to create a vivid new world of sound.
Amplified String Quartet and Electronics by Adam Campbell and Jodi Cave (Fur Hood) is a piece in which the music is
informed simply by the physical properties of the performance space. Like much of the duo’s collaborative work, the
score is stripped bare of technique and what might be called ‘musicality’, leaving a compelling dialogue between
ensemble and architecture. In Movement for Viola, Cello and Double Bass, composer and PhD student Euan Fulton,
intrigued by abrupt juxtapositions of highly dissimilar sections of music, examines the discrepancy between the
composer’s use of form and structure on a small and large scale, leading to the ultimate question: What lends such
music its sense of coherence? Inspired by the 1.3 second long Napalm Death track You Suffer, But Why? - and Xana
Marwick’s teenage reaction to it - the audience design, direct and perform their own 1.3 second play on the theme of
Western suffering in the playful, personal and inescapably thought-provoking one-on-one experience You Suffer, But
Why? Uniting mathematics and music, David Thomas Duncan uses L-systems to determine the harmonic, rhythmic and
structural patterns of this work in String Quartet. With harmonic material inspired by a symmetrical pitch series treated
as rotational arrays - a technique most famously associated with the late music of Stravinsky - the result is a texture
filled with subtle gradations of colour.
Můstek is an ongoing collaboration between Scottish/Greek composer/improvisers Lauren Sarah Hayes and Christos
Michalakos. The Edinburgh-based creative duo use prepared piano, percussion and found objects plucked, strummed,
hit and then sliced, layered and reassembled to create altogether new sonic forms, repurposing John Cage for the digital
era. Christopher Hoddinott’s The Piece Unnamed disposes with titles in an attempt to allow the listener to make their
own assumptions. Severing the music’s perception from the intention of the composer, the audience’s imagination
shapes their experience of this electroacoustic sound diffusion performance.
Jenny Soep and Gavin Fort’s
Drawing/Sounding or Call and Response V Audio/Visual Fusion looks at whether music can be drawn. Can a drawing be
musical Renowned visual artist Jenny Soep specialises in documenting live music performances using different mediums
and technologies, including iPad, iPod, mobile phone, Wacom tablet and good old-fashioned paper and watercolours.
Together with sound engineer and ‘audio wizard’ Gavin Fort, she explores the possibilities in this stimulating new
experiment.
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Treadmill Poets is a live performance from Oceanallover’s Alex Rigg, in which Guy Veal and Jamie Hall mix live samples
and music into spoken word which is read and replayed using hamster wheel technology. Rigg’s previous enigmatic live
art piece Feather Mammy was performed at the Edinburgh Fringe festival in 2009 to critical acclaim. The Secret Sounds
of Spores features a mushroom contained in a bell jar which silently drops thousands of tiny spores, visible to the naked
eye via a laser beam. Using digital technology, artist Yann Seznec and mycologist Patrick Hickey analyse the spores’ light
patterns in real time to create a stunning new composition revealing the depth, beauty and inherent artistry of fungi.
The physical properties of sound are translated into a visible media before the eyes - and ears - of the audience through
a kinetic sculpture made from ‘Father of Acoustics’ Ernst Chladni’s cymatic plates in Cymatic Sculpture by Calum Scott.
Using sheet metal, salt, a bow and vibrations of varying frequencies, Glasgow-based sound artist Calum Scott uses
sound as a catalyst for visual art to stunning effect. Mexican artist Carla Novi explores the bewildered instant in which
an individual arrives to a new place for the first time in Arrivals. A voice gradually guides the audience from the real to
the surreal and back to the real, creating a pause in time, generating an effect similar to meditation. This sound
installation explores the fraction of a second in which the body and mind is disorientated by an unfamiliar space.
Styrocymatic by Todd Braylor Pleasants is a Cymatics-inspired D.I.Y sculptural installation, in which reclaimed styrofoam
packaging is transformed into audio speakers using water. As the audience experiences both the visual patterns on the
water and the audible frequencies of the undulating speakers, conceptual artist Todd Braylor Pleasants attempts to
bridge the gap between seeing and hearing. An Unpleasant Vagueness uses two skeleton cassette mechanisms, one
recording, another playing; both, inevitably, victim of their own death drive. In a thought-provoking sound installation,
Canadian artist Katie McCain uses outdated technologies to examine our yearning for the past and what it represents,
(provoking) the concepts of nostalgia, luddism and existential crisis. In Love for the Dead Bag, composer Paul Henry
(Knocking Theatre) slips between the roles of performer, technician, audience member, confused bystander and barman
as he attempts to bend the conventional frame of performance in this refreshing, original work. Using live electronics,
lights and props, he forces the audience’s attention back to themselves to highlight the real main ingredient of any live
performance: people.
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publication)
253 ARGYLE ST, GLASGOW | 0141 565 1000 | www.thearches.co.uk
Sharon McHendry | 0141 565 1007 | [email protected] (not for
www.thearches.co.uk
12/01/10
FOR IMMEDIATE USE
With over 12 years experience exploring the creative possibilities of technology, Substratum is the first installment in a
series of collaborations between internationally acclaimed artists Alison Clifford and Graeme Truslove. Combining audio
(Truslove) and visuals (Clifford) to explore the space between abstract sound and image, computer algorithims,
sampling and digital montage processes are used to create an entirely immersive experience. The first time, ever I saw
your > POSTFACE is the installed recording of a process of making analogues of itself overwhelmed by investigation of
capture, repetition and stoppage. Iain Campbell is composer/superimposer and performer/clown. He is interested in
sound and consumption and considers audience to be a problem. ‘Dear Library, Fuck you and fuck the library’. Inspired
by a date sheet found torn from a book and attacked with a felt tip pen, Ben Knight’s ‘Dear Library…’ is part of an
ongoing collection of everyday detritus, marking a sporadic and anonymous correspondence within the community.
- ENDS For more information, images or interviews for Sound Thought 2011, please contact Sharon McHendry at the Arches
(contacts in footer).
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publication)
253 ARGYLE ST, GLASGOW | 0141 565 1000 | www.thearches.co.uk
Sharon McHendry | 0141 565 1007 | [email protected] (not for