Run by postgraduate students from Glasgow University, Sound Thought is an annual festival. Its focus is on music and sound composition and live performance. This year it interrogates ideas around communication, technological advances, cultural shifts/trends and human interactions.
Ian Harvie and Lea Shaw’s Mother, Father, Sister, Brother is a kind of sonic litany. Shaw’s extraordinary mezzo soprano voice wraps around text from Confessions Of A Justified Sinner, generated by algorithms. The effect is almost like an elegy to ghosts. As Shaw sings, sighs, yelps and speaks softly, a screen shows her face bleached out, distorted and splintering in saturated colour. It is both disorientating and exquisite.
Composer Martin Disley’s Le Combat is inspired by avant-garde composers like La Monte Young, and blurs the lines between the musicians present making improvised work (analogue) and their manipulation via a laptop (digital).
Alocas by Louise Harris is an audiovisual piece, fusing blissed out beats and post-psychedelic imagery pulsing in response to the rhythmic shifts. It’s lovely, but would perhaps work better as an installation in a large gallery space.
Jeremi Korhonen’s On A Frozen Lake is a fusion of field recordings from Finland and old crackly vinyl records. It is meditative and warm, ambient music without the attendant clichés of post-rave comedowns and dated neon hedonism.
Paul Michael Henry and Jacob Elkin’s Different Signals is absolutely bewitching. Henry moves with the grace of a silent film star to Elkin’s beautiful glitchy soundscape, then is seemingly buffeted around by an electrical current. He’s mesmerising to watch, and everyone in the room is transfixed. As the beats transform into field recordings, Henry stalks gazelle-like around the audience, and pulls strangers together by grabbing their hands and linking them. It’s a reminder of connectivity and shared spaces, just momentarily, in a world populated by those who constantly seek to divide.