In the Shelter of the Noise of Glasgow’s Night

Glasgow is tough. Near the art venue Tramway, a former streetcar depot, in the South Side neighborhood is both Asian Wedding Events and P. Lipton Memorial Centre with the city's largest stock clearance sale of tombstones. Extremes are also what an enthusiastic spectator heard during the concert with France Jobin and Markus Heckmann: »What kind of brutal reality was that?« 

Heckmann, or the Wüstenarchitekten, as he goes by the name when he makes techno, created a black-and-white cave of graphic, coarse-grained images of tissue and stray threads that met in an opaque pattern. A secret immersive space that Quebecois soundmaker Jobin kept expanding with sounds that were, yes, brutal, but also delicate and just sense-expanding and space-shaking. We traveled into this huge space with our tiny human bodies. It could be physically felt that the project Entanglement is inspired by quantum physics and the multiverse. 

Even at the rustic The Star Bar, ordinary Scots sing karaoke and let heritage be heritage

Less harsh realities opened Sonica Glasgow. While Alessandro Corsini produced his atmospheric electronic elegies, Marco Ciceri put tiny minerals in front of his cameras, which on the big screen were blown up into very physical miniature landscapes – lush and bubbling with life. Every time Corsini turned from his desk, new landscapes appeared on the screen. Like mushrooms in the shelter of the noise of the night. 

Corsini/Ciceri's new project bears the name Nati Infiniti. It means »born infinite«. Then the Scottish festival could sort of take it on from here.

Pop to the future

In cities and countries with complex pasts, there is never a shortage of music. The Scots have eagerly reported their changing realities through songs. Glasgow is officially a UNESCO City of Music. The folk musicians still play in the bars, on equal footing with Dj Jaimie and the other DJs, and even at the rustic The Star Bar, ordinary Scots sing karaoke and let heritage be heritage. Pop can do something too. The posters around the city advertise a new album from the city kids Franz Ferdinand. The debut album Franz Ferdinand put  – exactly 20 years ago – Scotland on the indie rock map. Like The Jesus and Mary Chain and Belle and Sebastian did it before in other genres. People are proud of the music here, and even the grizzled owner of Glasgow's oldest Fish & Chips pub from 1875 knows Sonica, an audiovisual festival which saw the light of day in 2012.

Deneuve, Gainsbourg and Aznavour detach themselves from the French golden age and smile at us in our flickering present

At Tramway, Ela Orleans digs into other pasts. »Glasgow is also a city of cinema-goers,« says the Scottish artist with a Mireille Mathieu/Juliette Binoche hairdo, starting her crime jazz tribute to French 60s films. The songs have been given a makeover; electronic fillers between the notes splinter nostalgia, and Deneuve, Gainsbourg and Aznavour detach themselves from the French golden age and smile at us in our flickering present. It sounds like cigarettes apres sex.

The Danish trio NEKO3's premiere of German Alexander Schubert's Angel Death Traps also seduces the audience with a so-called »techno-romantic song cycle«. Or pop to the future. The majestic synthesizer grooves make some ask if this is what you call hyperpop. 

There are also dogs in this melancholy town. Should you pat them?

Dead horses in the subway

A dead white horse lies at my feet. I have entered Celine Daemen's VR opera Songs for a Passerby with VR glasses and move around in a very gray city. People walk on a street, I walk into a crowded subway, people talk to me. They are so real that you consider answering again. There are also dogs in this melancholy town. Should you pat them? Suddenly I see that the man standing at the subway station looks like me. The horse from earlier lies in a square. The man standing next to the horse is also me, earlier. Hildegard von Bingen's music heightens the melancholy. The author Paul Auster has created similar crazy labyrinths of sadness. 

»The dog is a Podenco,« says the artist Celine Daemens, when I take off my VR glasses and suddenly face a real person:  

»We tried to create this moment that exists outside of time. The little girl in the subway tells you that even though we say goodbye, we are still here together. So all moments pass by – but in our minds we can travel in time, be in many places at once, we are spectators to our own body. The play is about identity. Am I this body passing by for a moment or am I a mind looking at the body? The mind can travel through time. It is also about the question of a home. We are always stuck in between, divided. I want people to recognize this sense of melancholy. Bits of Hildegard von Bingen and Ukrainian folk music had a great influence on Asa Horvitz's composition. Both types of music feel very close to the soul. People say it doesn't feel like an opera because there are no loud voices. It is instead something intimate and spiritual. I hope that the piece reflects yourself, just like music, so that people can experience something about themselves.«  

Daemens checks her phone to see when Songs for a Passerby is going to Denmark. But that email seems lost forever. Since she won the Venice Film Festival's Immersive Grand Prize in 2023, everyone wants to experience her immersive opera.

The robots are at spas, they listen to a soundscape made of pacemakers and near-human sighs. 

In the middle of the Govanhill Baths, a public bathhouse, which is undergoing renovation, the Scottish composer Alex Smoke sits in front of a gong. The gong, which has a speaker driver attached to it, symbolizes the sun in his work Wind of the Sun, which explores rising temperatures and melting ice and is based on a dream. Smoke dreamed, he saw the sun tearing up the fabric of reality, the earth bending and being pulled up into the air. There is sonic ingenuity in the slowly flowing ambient tones. It sounds like a trip to the Alps.  

Climate change is also a theme of Ahmed Saleh, but the electronic heartbeats are more frenetic, groovy as he conveys the city of Alexandria's experiences with floods to Alba G. Corral's live visuals. »Climate scientists, look and learn,« one whispers in the dark.  

Brutal eye level

Behind Sonica is the organization Cryptic, who has been organizing cultural events in Glasgow for 30 years. »Ravishing the senses« is their motto. The festival has hired Scottish Harry Górski-Brown and French Annabelle Playe to blow the bagpipe instrument into the present with electroacoustic manipulations, while Queen of Harps will shake up the tradition with her hip-hop harp.

In this small shed, you can clearly hear the brutal reality that whispers in your ear

It's a joke when someone from the audience shouts: »One more tune!« after a concert. There aren't many traditional songs at Sonica. The music is new, but not detached from tradition. And it's never a joke, but bloody serious when a festival speech ends like this: »Music has a force that can transcend our troubles«. You understand that when Gazelle Twin aka the singer and composer Elizabeth Bernholz in her mint green suit stands in the middle of her dark synthesizer drones; the album Black Dog sounds like animalistic nocturnes from the not-too-distant future. Grand River aka Aimée Portioli belongs to the same »songwriting school«, and there are also almost songs in Martin Messier's Cycles at Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA), where eight beams of light swing out from the wall like restless cords – the festival's simplest, most delicate and loneliest exclamation.

Bill Vorn's robots are being installed nearby I.C.U. (Intensive Care Unit). The robots are at spas, they listen to a soundscape made of pacemakers and near-human sighs.  

No one shouts in the hall of the Central Chambers. At the lamp, which burns for the fallen nurses during the 1st and 2nd World Wars, Amble Skuse has installed her sound work Sonic Lamp. Heartbeats are heard between voices recounting events during the wars. The rhythm changes because a computer-based algorithm changes the heartbeats so that they follow the number of deaths in a certain year.

No one shouts in Ukrainian Kseniia Shcherbakova's installation (You) Let the Sky Fall. A festival volunteer has followed me from the Goethe Institute's imposing building to a small outbuilding in the yard.

I have to look after the arrows hanging from the ceiling, he instructs in a heavy Scottish accent. Sharp pieces of glass are mounted on the tips of the arrows. At the end of the arrow is a feather. The arrows do not hang from strings, but from human hair. In the house there are sounds of birds, children and electronic sounds. The sounds are constantly interrupted. The soundscape is perforated. There are 3000 kilometers as the crow flies from Glasgow to Kyiv. These are not regrets, not sadcore songs, just sounds from a country where people's reality is shattered every day. In this small shed, you can clearly hear the brutal reality that whispers in your ear, while you constantly watch out for the arrows that hang at brutal eye level.   

Sonica Glasgow took place 19-29 September. 

English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek