THE walls of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland are to be turned into a huge outdoor screen for a playful street art opera as part of an award-winning festival.
Six giant upturned gramophones will also be installed in the gardens of Pollok House and a concert will be held at Hamilton Mausoleum during this year’s Sonica Glasgow.
The festival, which begins on Halloween, will also see four world premieres, 13 UK premieres and seven Scottish premieres over 11 days. More than half the events will be free to experience.
International artists from Argentina, Belgium, Catalonia, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Québec, Slovenia and Sweden along with more than 30 UK artists will present over 180 events and performances city-wide during the extravaganza.
Musician, scientist and producer Max Cooper, in collaboration with design collective Architecture Social Club, will open the festival in spectacular style with Aether – a “mind-blowing”, one-off event illuminating Tramway with thousands of pulsing, moving points of light which will respond to Cooper’s electronic soundtrack. The audience will be able to move around beneath the lattice of hanging lights to view the patterns from every angle as they form a surreal swirling vortex one moment followed the next by a series of interlocking geometric grids or a hail of heavenly meteorites.
Other highlights include the world premiere of Scottish musician Ela Orleans’s Night Voyager, inspired by her research in NASA’s film archives, and a one-night takeover of Greenock’s Tobacco Warehouse which will be transformed by live music from the Scottish Alternative Music Awards.
Hamilton Mausoleum will host a live performance from Turner Prize nominee Luke Fowler while the walls of the Royal Conservatoire Scotland will be turned into a giant outdoor projection screen for He Did What? from November 7-9.
Dumfries and Galloway artist and composer Katie J. Anderson’s Sound Horn will see six giant upturned gramophones cluster like alien flowers in the immaculate gardens of Pollok House. Each will play a hypnotic soundtrack drawn from field recordings, choral notes and spoken word.
There will also be the UK Premiere of Foxconn Frequency (no. 3) which is inspired by the poetry of Xu Lizhi, a former worker at Taiwan’s notorious Foxconn Factories used by Apple, which experienced a rush of worker suicides.
Formerly a storehouse for whisky and tobacco and a barracks for American GIs during WWII, Greenock’s Tobacco Warehouse will be transformed by light sculptures from Jack Wrigley and music from Luke Sutherland’s Rev Magnetic, multi-instrumentalist Callum Easter, experimental musician SUE ZUKI and queer feminist provocateur Kleft.
Barcelona-based creative coder Alba G. Corral – renowned for her stunning live audiovisual performances fusing real-time coding and drawing – will collaborate with both France’s Alex Augier and Glasgow-based Scottish Alternative Music Awards winner, Lo Kindre (aka Daniel Magee) at Tramway.
Alongside the live events will be a visual and sonic art installation programme of free exhibitions running across the city from October 31 to November 10.
The festival produced by Cryptic, the Glasgow-based
art house.
Why are you making commenting on The National only available to subscribers?
We know there are thousands of National readers who want to debate, argue and go back and forth in the comments section of our stories. We’ve got the most informed readers in Scotland, asking each other the big questions about the future of our country.
Unfortunately, though, these important debates are being spoiled by a vocal minority of trolls who aren’t really interested in the issues, try to derail the conversations, register under fake names, and post vile abuse.
So that’s why we’ve decided to make the ability to comment only available to our paying subscribers. That way, all the trolls who post abuse on our website will have to pay if they want to join the debate – and risk a permanent ban from the account that they subscribe with.
The conversation will go back to what it should be about – people who care passionately about the issues, but disagree constructively on what we should do about them. Let’s get that debate started!
Callum Baird, Editor of The National
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules here