Special projects for festive anniversary edition in 2019

Under the heading Hereafter Sonic Acts celebrates its 25 year history in 2019 with a festive anniversary edition. Since 1994, Sonic Acts has been a platform for research in art, technology, music and culture, a gathering place for artists, theorists, scientists and philosophers, and a festival for forward-looking projects, ideas and works​.As we count down to our upcoming celebratory festival edition, we are proud to reveal a few of the special large-scale projects and performances we have been working on. 

One of the most original composers and vocalists, Jennifer Walshe, a student of Tony Conrad, is preparing a real spectacle for the festival. Having previously ​‘faked’ a history of the musical avant-garde in Ireland, Walshe now teams up with philosopher Timothy Morton and a host of collaborators to explore the multiplicity of temporalities at the heart of being human. In their new opera, Time Time Time, which premieres on 24 February at Muziekgebouw aan ​‘t IJ, everyone in the room is important – the fast-paced digital time of M.C. Schmidt and Walshe; the deep geological rhythms of Lee Patterson; the liminal eternal drones of Áine O’Dwyer; the shifting tectonic plates of Streifenjunko and Vilde&Inga; and the audience, whose entropy demonstrates that time is indeed passing. The opera is commissioned with Borealis – en festival for eksperimentell musikk, MaerzMusik – Festival for Time Issues, Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival, and London Contemporary Music Festival /​Serpentine Galleries.

The Oslo-based artist collective Verdensteatret have been working for the past 30 years on staged pieces that combine a wide range of genres and practices, ranging from performance, installation, film, shadow-play, and animation. They are a hybrid performance group whose peculiarly captivating works evade established notions of form or style. Their new work, HANNAH, is an elaborate large-scale orchestral work and immersive composition inspired by the vast span and gradual unfolding of geological time. It will be presented multiple times throughout the festival at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

We further continue our explorations into expanded audiovisual experiences with new commissioned works for the legendary 80-speaker orchestra from Ina GRM in Paris, Acousmonium, and the state-of-the-art Pentacle speaker system from Amsterdam, in collaboration with STEIM. Exactly eleven years since we had the honour of hosting the radical sound diffusion system in Paradiso, we welcome the Acousmonium back with performances by some of the most important contemporary sound artists. The Pentacle will be presented at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, also featuring specially commissioned works for the festival.