Reflections on Sonic Acts Festival 2024
Sensorial ecologies, spatial listening and the thresholds of the body.
A naked man is swinging from a rope ladder made of bones. Tears weep from the eye of a giant t-shirt. The smell of fresh turf rises from the floor. Reverb and distortion echo from wall to wall. Food is served. Under the auspices of a twenty-foot inflatable tardigrade, Tianzhuo Chen’s marathon happening, TRANCE, is entering its witching hour and things have begun to feel a little strange.
It was only Friday night, but TRANCE already felt like the centrepiece of the festival weekend at the heart of the Sonic Acts Biennial, which celebrated its 30th anniversary across two months of programming in February and March 2024. The overarching theme for this year’s Biennial was drawn from David Abram’s 1996 book The Spell of the Sensuous, embracing “a multiplicity of ways of sensing and intuiting, engaging with the thresholds of the body”. At Paradiso in central Amsterdam where TRANCE unfolded, those thresholds were thoroughly transgressed. For weeks now, I have tried to explain what went on that night to anyone who will listen, and for weeks now I have failed to do so. But perhaps that’s the point. You can explain the body in terms of atoms and cells, but sensory experience is often very difficult to rationalise.
What makes Sonic Acts unique as a festival is its engagement in both the intellectual and the visceral expressions of sound and experimental music. Alongside two exhibitions in the city, the festival weekend in late February features club nights and listening spaces, an audio-visual concert series and a two-day symposium. Conceptual engagement with ideas sits alongside live programming, even if transitioning from a 12-hour rave into an 8-hour lecture series means you might need to sneak out for a nap every now and then.
When I last visited Sonic Acts in October 2022, the bulk of the festival weekend took place in Het HEM, a munitions factory-turned-art space on the edges of the city. I wrote about it here, and while the work was fascinating and the performances truly memorable, presenting the whole programme within the same post-industrial context gave it a sense of familiarity. We know what experimental sound feels like in vast concrete rooms. This time round, splitting the programme across different venues allowed the spaces themselves to play a role in how the work was received.
My introduction to this year’s Biennial is with the two exhibitions – at W139 gallery and Looiersgracht 60. I arrive at W139 in the rain on a dark and relentlessly damp evening. The kind of wet that creeps down your back and into your bones. I seek refuge at the far end of the main room and sink into a water bed adorned with day-glo foam and fluoro tassels to watch the 3D models of Pedro Matias’ two-channel video ‘Dépaysement’ twist and writhe. “Our bodies and its territories are as much a mystery as the bottom of the ocean,” the narrator muses.
I move over to the bean bags to watch Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner’s film ‘My Want of You Partakes of Me’ (sound design by Action Pyramid), which examines the “physiological, psychological, spiritual, literary and scientific dimensions of being consumed.” Concerned with the material and in part the metaphysical, I join the film as a body is passing through an MRI scanner, and learn that it is medically unethical to scan someone without just cause, should it reveal something negative that might otherwise not have been discovered. How little we want to know about our bodies, how scared we are of what we might find. If part of everything we eat stays within us, the film asks, what does that mean for the words and images we consume? Or the people whose love we devour? Surely some of them will remain within us too. “We exist to desire and be desired.”
If the work at W139 is concerned directly with knowing the body, then that at Looiersgracht 60 feels more concerned with the body as it exists within systems. The space is dominated by the work of Lukas Marxt, whose 11 pieces form the bulk of the show, and pull the themes towards the intersection of ecology and the military-industrial. Situated at the Salton Sea in southern California, his work explores legacies of nuclear testing and soil contamination and the mechanisation of agriculture. Watching labourers picking and packing iceberg lettuce never seemed more dystopian.
The echoes of imperial militarism are further explored in the ‘soil chromatography’ – the use of soils to chemically expose images – of Elena Khurtova and Anika Schwarzlose’s ‘Residue, colliding archives: Chapter 3’. Here, the artists interrogate the legacy of the Hembrug weapons facility on the outskirts of Amsterdam where Het HEM is located. How these spaces are understood formed a chunk of my review of Sonic Acts 2022, and it was interesting to see the site addressed 18 months later, particularly given that Schwarzlose performed there in 2022.
The following morning I make my way to Zone2Source, a glass box on the edges of Amstelpark for the opening of the weekend’s “Listening Room” programme, which presents a wide range of newly commissioned and classic sound works on an 8.2 channel sound system. I lie back and listen to Felicity Mangan’s ‘Pedospheric Vibes’, watching the wind rush silently through the leafless trees outside. Here again, it is the nature of the architecture which sets the tone of the experience. Listening spaces are often enclosed, self-consciously sealed from the bleed of the outside world, but at Zone2Source, you are reminded more of just how porous these boundaries are. What makes listening a fluid way of apprehending the world is not pure and focussed attention to one discrete thing, but the possibility for overlap, for relations emerging between objects and processes.
In the 20 minutes of Jonáš Gruska’s ‘Zaburina’, I hear a dozen planes departing and arriving from Schiphol Airport overhead, their jets cutting sonic trails across the work. During Slikback’s ‘Collision’, it sounds like we’re inside the engine itself. The airport is such a definitive aspect of contemporary urban life that nothing which exists on the ground can be apprehended without it. If I had had more time, I would have stayed longer at Zone2Source, or returned again to hear the wide range of works selected. It was a rare moment where I felt like I could put both my body and my mind to rest and just let the listening take over.
Regardless of the nature of the work, festival weekends create a sense of urgency that is hard to resist, and the slow unfolding of the Listening Room felt like it existed on a slightly different bandwidth. In the 36 hours that follow, I hear lectures by Imani Jacqueline Brown on ecological diasporas, Margarida Mendes on sensing underwater, and belit sağ on the instability of archives. I spend an unknowable amount of time watching Dis Fig, Felix-Florian Tödtloff and ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U at TRANCE , and find a few hours in between to call in on Meredith Monk at Oude Kerk. Although not part of the festival itself, the retrospective of Monk’s extraordinary voice works feels like a fitting accompaniment, and the draughty hallows of the 13th century chapel offers a much needed pause amid the heightened senses of the weekend.
On Saturday evening, the main programming takes place at Muziekgebouw – a grand concert hall overlooking the river - where the line-up includes a new commission by Sarah Davachi, an a/v realisation of Kassel Jaeger’s Shifted In Dreams (who I interviewed for Sonic Acts’ Ecoes magazine) with Eléonore Huisse, and Aho Ssan re-engineering his 2023 album Rhizomes with Sevi Iko Dømochevsky. The sheer scale of the audio-visual array lives up to the title Expanded Experience. At this size, Tina Frank ∞ General Magic’s ‘Super Key’ is punishingly psychedelic. Sound as visceral, physical, for the body more than the mind. Maybe the lack of sleep was catching up with me but I felt somehow more capable of assimilating the gentler moments than those which pushed beyond.
The final act of the evening once again made use of a different environment to put the bodies of the audience in a new configuration. Downstairs in the loading dock of the Muziekgebouw, Russell Haswell & Hugo Esquinca are exhuming great chunks of sound from ‘CADÁVER EXQUISITO #4’ – close to an hour of crunching noise and punctuating rhythm emanating from the toxic green haze. People drift in and out of focus, some lost in the onslaught, others more concerned with the inflatable black balloons which float and bounce between the lasers, uncannily in tune with the sound. As the show draws to a close, the loading gate opens in a cloud of smoke, tipping the audience out into the cold, wet night.
“As we reacquaint ourselves with our breathing bodies, then the perceived world itself begins to shift and transform. When we begin to consciously frequent the wordless dimension of our sensory participations … hitherto unnoticed or overlooked presences begin to stand forth from the periphery and to engage our awareness.” Seen, or heard, or felt (or smelled and tasted??) through the lens of these words from David Abrams’ The Spell of the Sensuous, the intentions of Sonic Acts’ 2024 Biennial come into focus. How does the human experience take its place in wider sensorial ecologies, where sight – the sense we have always held dearest - plays just one part? The question it seems to ask mirrors that posed by Donna Haraway in 1988 essay ‘Situated Knowledges’: "What other sensory powers do we wish to cultivate besides vision?"
The problem - and the beauty - of the sensorial, I suppose, is that it is harder to summon than the rational. This is not to make an opposition of the two, but when it comes to art and music, it is often safer, stabler, and less elusive to communicate meaning over feeling. I am reminded of something François J. Bonnet said in our interview for Ecoes. True feeling - that ineffable, sensuous moment - is mysterious, almost magical. It can be encouraged but it can’t be engineered. “It emerges in relation,” Bonnet continued. “My job as a composer is to maximise the possibility of making this happen. It’s like finding the right sky and the right time of year to see shooting stars. To me, when a composer or musician tries too hard to achieve that, then it’s not music, it’s rhetoric. And to me rhetoric is language … As soon as it has re-encapsulated itself into a discursive, dialectic approach, it becomes something else.”
This was the challenge faced by many of the works at Sonic Acts, and I think ultimately this is what made TRANCE feel so special. You can talk about the sensuous all you want, evoke it in videos or build it into the architecture of your installations. You can create environments that are immersive, place the body in an unusual context or play with the extremes of light and sound. But to succeed in softening those edges between the audience and the idea requires a different sort of alchemy. TRANCE did not just evoke catharsis, it manifested it. Experiences such as these evade description. Atoms blurred, bodies dissolved.
You do a remarkable job of evoking and describing what you point out to be essentially indescribable. "Punishingly psychedelic" is probably a bit much for me, but Meredith Monk? I'm always there for her. I haven't heard of most of the others (because, apparently, I live in a cave) but I'll look out for them if they come to New York—it sounds like a "be there in person" experience more than anything.
Sounds incredible!! I wish I could have been there...