Matthew Herbert's One Pig at Tramway was more successful, not least due to the sight of a lab-coated boffin bouncing about in a musical cage but for all the live remixing, fancy trickery and performance play - One Pig was recast as a performance for laptops, electric fence, boffins and chef - electronic music thrives on the sterility of the studio rather than the grubby confines of the gig.
While Sonica is going some way to present enough sound art to sketch out the boundaries of modern musical performance, Glasgow City Halls is beavering away with PULSE: Touch 30. Pulse is a new strand of programming - kicked off by Frost last month - and Touch 30 is a celebration of the London experimental audio-visual company.
While Sonica is going some way to present enough sound art to sketch out the boundaries of modern musical performance, Glasgow City Halls is beavering away with PULSE: Touch 30. Pulse is a new strand of programming - kicked off by Frost last month - and Touch 30 is a celebration of the London experimental audio-visual company.
The gig is a three way mash-up of talents: like a Scottish Ballet triple bill, it has something for different crowds. Philip Jeck gets busy on the decks; BJ Nilsen examines how sound hits humans and composes for film and theatre; Thomas Köner would fit nicely under Sonica's "sonic art for the visually minded" rubric, and has been known to mess about with a bit of dub-techno
Philip Jeck is a rare turntablist who, like Janek Shaefer, is less a hero of the dance floor than a determined sound artist. He brought his Vinyl Requiem up to Tramway in the 1990s: this immense piece is both a nostalgic tribute to the record-player, made at the point when CDs were still looking viable as a replacement, and a reminder of how the turntable has a versatility that makes it an instrument in its own right.
Jeck is also worth seeing perform. His music may come from a secure intellectual foundation - he learnt his skills at Dartington College, not at the block party, and so shares a tradition with live artists or theatre companies like Fish and Game rather than Terminator X - but he has a presence that is unexpected from the man who won The Paul Hamlyn Foundation Composers Award.
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