Handmade Music

Programme Notes

Cameron Clarke – Critters

Critters is a spatial interventionist sound installation consisting of 16 micro sound emitters playing a textural layered composition outside the venue.  The audience is invited to walk around the piece listening closely to single speakers whilst background elements blend in and out of auditory perception.

Christos Michalakos – AEAEA

AEAEA is a performance work for electronically augmented drum-kit and game engine, exploring the intersection of improvisation, procedural world-building, and interactive game environments. Utilizing a custom-built engine governed by a set of internal game rules, the drum-kit operates as both musical instrument and interface. The performer’s gestures such as velocity, articulation and rhythmic complexity, act as inputs to a physics-based system in which sound actively shapes visual and spatial responses.

Percussive gestures are mapped to discrete rule-based functions within a reactive 3D environment: snare hits may generate projectiles, kick drums induce force fields, and cymbals trigger light-based events. These mappings follow a consistent internal logic, allowing the performer to learn and exploit systemic behaviours over time. Rhythmic activity engages with simulated physics, particle systems, collisions and environmental transformations, enabling a form of instrumental gameplay where sonic decisions yield spatial consequences.

AEAEA foregrounds a hybrid performance mode in which musical expression is modulated by the underlying game structure. The system reacts differently to regularity versus irregularity, and rewards certain input patterns with emergent behaviours, encouraging exploration within a bounded rule-space. In this way, the piece becomes a negotiation between creative intuition and systemic constraint.

Penelope Bekiari & Aggeliki Giannopoulou – Permeable Signal

Permeable Signal for trumpet, electronics, and bio-electronics

Permeable Signal explores the boundaries between the human body, the instrument, and the technological environment through a live performance. The trumpet acts as a sonic core, with breath, articulation, and its metallic resonance serving as the primary material. This material passes through a network of electronic processing and bio-signals (EEG, heart rate, electrodermal activity), which erode, amplify, or transform the sound.

The notion of permeability forms the axis of the composition: the natural and the artificial do not stand in opposition but infiltrate one another, exchanging energy and continuously transforming. In this way, an organic, abstract form emerges in real time: the sound of the trumpet becomes an electronic signal; the signals of the body become music; and the boundaries between the organic and the mechanical remain fluid.

The work proposes a listening experience in which body and instrument are not distinct entities, but rather parts of a wider sonic ecosystem. A signal that, instead of excluding, remains permeable.

Masha Kashyna & Cristobal Pinto Santana – Between Us: Fragments of a Closeness

The audio-visual performance is a personal and intimate portrait of our most valuable memories. It is a vulnerability portrait made out of a series of analogue photos and videos that apparently don’t have a connection between them. These projected media are the motor and center of our musical improvisations on stage. Charged with spoken word, extended techniques and minimalistic sequences that unfold deep emotions and unexpected reflections about the past and the current.

Lusine Kirakosyan – LEZU

LEZU is an interactive performance that transforms the Armenian alphabet into sound and visuals. Using custom-built controllers, each letter becomes a musical tone that generates real-time visuals. The projections unfold across eight layered textile screens, making the letters float in the air and creating an immersive, improvised experience where language comes alive as a blend of music and image.

Niloufar Shiri, Jonas Engel, Matthew Ryals, Fan-Qi Wu – Assemblage / Rewoven Fragments

This performance marks the beginning of a collaboration that was sparked at Art Omi: Music 2025, where the musicians met for the first time and quickly found a shared sonic language. The chemistry was immediate – an intuitive recognition that their diverse instruments and practices could form a new collective voice.

The quartet unites pipa, kamancheh, saxophone, and modular synthesizer, blending diverse musical languages with experimental sound practices. Their improvisations focus on the microscopic and the fragile: tiny noises, subtle resonances, the grain of breath, the crackle of cassette tape. These microsounds are expanded into shifting textures, where noise and silence are not opposites but active elements within the music.

Textures emerge as layered soundscapes – sometimes dense and noisy, sometimes sparse and delicate. The acoustic instruments stretch beyond their conventional roles, while the modular synthesizer introduces unstable currents that reshape the group’s trajectory in real time.

At its core, the project is about listening deeply, embracing risk, and discovering how noise, texture, and microsound can form bridges across cultural and aesthetic traditions. For the audience, the result is an unpredictable 20-minute journey that invites close attention to detail, and reveals beauty within the smallest cracks of sound.

gabubabu (Gabriela Waclawska and James Ho) – gabubabu talks nonsense

quirky, bubbly, chaotic, ai, glitchy, stupid, nonsensesical, digital, blooooooopy sounds for machines, acoustic instruments, body and pure chaos from overstimulated brains for overstimulated brains

Kerry Hagan and John Bowers – Fault Condition [REDACTED]

Bowers and Hagan have shared interests in live performance, improvisation, interaction design, feedback, non-linearity, chaos, and new synthesis methods. Individually, each brings to the duo their own practices in synthesizers, analog/digital hybridity, generative processes, gestural control and more. Bowers and Hagan will stick their dirty hands into the very midst of unruly behaviour and non-obvious interaction design. Using synthesis algorithms with extreme sensitivity to gesture, they steer rather than control a complex solfège of pulses, noises, crackles and drones, negotiating a link between chaotic dynamics and improvisation. All relationships are tricky, especially the love polyhedron between Bowers, Hagan, their interfaces, their algorithms and their many noises. But we hope for the best.

Cath Roberts & Tullis Rennie – Composite Mashworks

Composite Mashworks (Tullis Rennie and Cath Roberts) create temporary art habitats in which to improvise with instruments, objects, electronics and activated structures. This ongoing process takes on new forms with every iteration, as we co-create with our surroundings and interact with each other anew. Our live sets are one-off microcosms of our practice in that moment, where cardboard structures are activated by a shifting cast of acoustic and electronic instruments and objects, creating a living improvised audio/visual encounter with space and audience. For Handmade Music at Sonorities 2026, the performance responds directly to its environment and the audiencing inhabiting the temporary improvised environment with us; so both the form and resulting sound become an entirely unique to this festival event.

Vital Organs (Lia Mice, Sarah Angliss and Karina Townsend) + Stephen Hiscock

In a performance rich in sonic detail and visual delight, three adventurous, independent 
maker-musicians extemporise, bringing their disparate styles and DIY instruments together for the first time ever. Their self-made artefacts include a portative organ, assembled from the detritus of the fossil fuel age; an automatic carillon that plays beyond the envelope of human performance; and DIY modular bagpipes that bring thrilling beat frequencies and an extraordinary form of jeopardy into the mix. Otherworldly sounds are layered, stretched and pushed to the edge through extended performance and electronics, then ultimately mangled through DIY effects.

Yeah You

YEAH YOU is the Welsh /father/daughter duo Elvin Brandhi and Gustav Thomas. Their spontaneous sonic outpouring spews unfiltered human into jagged pop requiems made from a variety of tools in endlessly shifting contexts.

They have released on Alter, Slip Imprint and Opal Tapes among other labels.

‘… an absurd pairing of the Rilkean sublime [with] knackered EDM… Wildly inventive and genuinely weird… underground music at its best.’ Stewart Smith, Wire (413)

This event has been co-curated by Sonorities and Moving On Music.