Live Report: Sonica Festival 2024

A fantastic exhibition of left-field arts...

Sonica is an annual festival of experimental music and digital art held annually in Glasgow with an international reach, but strong connections to the city’s underground music scene. This year’s edition was one of the most expansive and successful ever, celebrating the 30th anniversary of Cryptic, the organisation behind the festival, in some style with a range of concerts and exhibitions across a range of locations, some very unconventional. The festival opened at Tramway, with one of the bigger names on the programme. If Alessandro Cortini initially came to fame as the bassist and keyboard player for Nine Inch Nails, he’s struck out a more sedate, contemplative path of his own as a minimalist composer. ‘Nati Infinti’ is a roughly 40-minute piece of ambient music, broken down into five movements, which Cortini has been preforming in various iterations since its original performance at Sónar Lisboa in 2022. A set of drifting drones and tones performed on analogue synths, it’s a mesmeric piece, occasionally breaking down into syncopated burbles, which worked well here coupled with Marco Ciceri’s live video mixing.

The second concert of the evening came from Egypt’s Ahmed Saleh, supporting the peripatetic Pole Ela Orleans, back in her old hometown after relocating to Paris. Saleh explored the history of Alexandria and the city’s catastrophic floods, with premonitions of another to come via climate change, with rather generic digital visuals by Alba G. Corral. Musically, he started off in post-minimalist terrain with Philip-Glass like vocal loops and glissandos, but really took off when he incorporated middle Eastern musical motifs into the mix, which proved as danceable as it was cerebral.

Ela Orleans premiered a new piece, ‘La Nuit Dorée’, which not only lived up to her tagline, ‘Movies For Ears’, but actually was a score for a supercut of classic images from French ‘60s cinema, with interruptions from Jean Renoir complaining about the state of things, which Orleans told the audience to keep quiet throughout and treat as a film. Musically it was classic Orleans terrain, all haunted torch sings (one based on Paul Verlaine) and twisted takes on ye-ye, though this time delivered in French, coming on in the shadows like a Gallic Nico, while iconic images of French cinema zipped by, lovers from Godard’s Pierrot le Fou spilling into Tati’s Playtime, undercut by images of rioting in Paris from the Algerian War to May ’68 always threatening to break through the grand illusion. Bookended by field recordings she made in Paris of the Olympic opening ceremony with echoes of Piaf being sung (by Celine Dion in one instance) I’d say Orleans is fitting into her new Parisian lifestyle very well.

Tony Morris at the Rum Shack was definitely a gig, not a film, and indeed had no visuals at all. Morris has become a cult sensation on Instagram with videos of him performing short absurdist songs in the style of what I’ve previously described as ‘a 72 year old Minimal Wave Ivor Cutler’, which Morris took objection to, self-identifying as a ‘petit bourgeois Suicide’. Which might be better. However we define him, he’s a unique talent, and if opener ‘Big German’ leant into Cutleresque whimsy, ‘Decaffeinated Coffee’ really is like a petit bourgeois Suicide, with a detached vignette on contemporary manners spinning into absurdity, alongside its mad guitar riff.  I don’t know how he keeps a straight face in his smart suit during his impeccably deadpan delivery of ‘I Have a Strong Streak of the Bourgeois in Me’, until he wipes away fake tears recounting an epiphany in a local shopping centre, that is. Yet, there’s also real sincerity here. When he sings that he’s excited about going to the ‘House of God’, I believe he does love going to church, so has written a techno track about it. As you do. Morris is riding a very fine line between satirising everyday life and self-parody, and doing it beautifully.

The most thrilling conjunction of visuals and performance came via the English singer/sound artist Gazelle Twin, presenting her most recent album ‘Black Dog’. Opening with a projection of an idealised house, the lights revealed a stage set of a retro – eighties? – living room, Elizaberh Bergholz seated in a comfy chair, but, of course, the Black Dog is a symbol of depression, and all the homely stuff took on a sinister edge, a touch of the unheimlich (unhomely/uncanny), as Freud would say. Taking to the stage in an electric blue jump suit, she could have been an avatar of Bowie, commanding the stage while her image was strobed into multiples behind her, her gorgeous pristine vocals being morphed by electronics over shuddering beats. When she sat back down and the house lights went up for her to sing ‘A Door To Open’, some audience members escaped, not I think because they thought it was over, but because they couldn’t take anymore. It was a performance as fearless as it was frightening.

A prominent figure in the Scottish audio visual environment is Tom Scholefield, aka Konx-on-Pax, back from Berlin and playing on the large canvas of an IMAX cinema with his ‘Uaxuctum’, a free from sensory free for all which resolved into technoid beats and cartoony graphics, then saw the largest Palestine flag you’ve ever seen projected as an encore.

Politically, climate change was the prevailing them of the festival, most wittily dealt with by digital artist John Butler in his animated musical ‘The Fourth Planet’. This film, with its slightly retro aesthetic, making full use of uncanny valley effects to go for a slightly inhuman, fully synthetic, parodied bro tech capitalists and their dreams of escaping a dying Earth to colonise Mars, a Utopian impulse which inevitably leads to more misery. Apparently, Butler made it on being jokingly misinformed that there was cultural funding for opera. Despite not being a musician, he’s written one, purely using AI software, a literal space opera. Despite all the fears around AI, musicians need not fear – the music is perfectly, gloriously crap, bland, generic and perfectly in tune with his parodying of corporate aesthetics. What he does to Beethoven’s Seventh isn’t so much a case of ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ as Spin In Your Grave, Ludwig. Ultimately, the film finds faith in humanity, and should give hope to musicians that they’re not going to lose their jobs. A double win. 

Words: Brian Beadie