Sound and the city

(Julien Sirjacq)

From late August to mid October, Brussels, Mons, Huy, and Valenciennes will host a multidisciplinary, often playful festival devoted to sound in the city, which goes by the name of City Sonic. This year sees the organisation responsible celebrate its tenth birthday.

Here in Brussels, the August leg of City Sonic will be a fairly quiet affair. Iselp is hosting an exhibition devoted to Julien Sirjacq, a young French sound artist whose works often pay homage to “forgotten” figures of the sound avant-garde. L’Oreille Interne is in that vein too: it is a multimedia installation that takes as its starting point the archives and works of Boris de Vinogradov, a French conductor who worked with the Orchestre National de Radio-France back in the 1950s. More adventurous music-lovers know Vinogradov, who died suddenly in 2008, for his pioneering role in what is called “spectral” music, a genre that explores the characteristics of sound itself. Rhythm and melody were set aside: what mattered were the gradations of tone and the timbre of the notes. Sirjacq’s installation combines Vinogradov’s archive – a collection of impressive electronic instruments, annotations, and fanzines – with his own kinetic painting and a resounding soundscape, so as to create a powerful total experience. One you can later repeat at home, as City Sonic is marking the exhibition with the release of a cassette, a sound recording medium that may have somewhat fallen into disuse but is in keeping with the spirit of Vinogradov’s archive. In the autumn there will be a number of other City Sonic events in Brussels (at Flagey and Les Ateliers Claus, for example). We are looking forward to the Sonic Cinema exhibition (27 September > 14 November) at Galeries, which will include music videos, sound poetry, and multimedia installations by artists such as Chris Marker and Christian Rizzo. The works in question were among the highlights of earlier editions of the festival, but have never been seen in Brussels.

City Sonic #10 23/8 > 14/10, Verschillende locaties/Divers lieux/Various locations, www.citysonic.be