Sonic Acts presents commissioned works by Anthea Caddy and Hugo Esquinca in Zagreb
Sonic Acts-commissioned works by Anthea Caddy and Hugo Esquinca will be presented at the upcoming Touch Me Festival in Zagreb, Croatia, organised by Sonic Acts' Re-Imagine Europe partner KONTEJNER. Hugo Esquinca’s live multichannel intervention On ‘A Psychedelic Becoming’, which premiered at Sonic Acts Academy 2020, confronts recursion and its openness to the necessity of contingency. The work follows that of his collaborator, philosopher Yuk Hui, who outlines these notions in his book Recursivity and Contingency (2019). The compositional framework involves modal amplification, spatial distribution and processual (dis)organisation. Long Throw: An Exploration of an Expanded Energetic System for Cello and Loud Speaker by Anthea Caddy is a live performance that expands the physical properties of projected sound energy via amplified cello. In the work, which also premiered at Sonic Acts Academy 2020, the cello signal is projected by a custom-built parabolic speaker – projecting a beam of sound up to 3 km long and 60 cm in circumference. Its unnatural quality is enhanced by the spatially synthetic behaviour of the controlled beam and the cello’s sound projection. The reflection or refraction nascent to the site lends an uncontrollable element to the signal in a project that harnesses energy to create large-scale bodies of spatial sound phenomena.