Sound Hoppers workshop

Sono-Electro and XMTR Audio Festival

Sound festivals for St Leonards-on-Sea and Hastings combine their strengths and work together to bring performances and workshops to be held in different venues across the town. Jude Montague explains what’s on offer from the two initiatives.

XMTR celebrates sonic storytelling as part of the Sono-Electro Sound Arts Festival taking place 17-29 September at Electro Studios in St Leonards-on-Sea. The programme includes: live performances, listening sessions, talks, installations and workshops.

Lucia Scazzocchio from Social Broadcasts has been combining community-led co-creation, participatory art practice and radio-making to produce place-based audio projects all across the UK. In 2021 she launched the sonic storytelling platform XMTR.FM to showcase work from both emerging and seasoned independent audio makers from across the globe.

“Joining forces with Sono-Electro for this inaugural XMTR Audio Arts festival has been a brilliant way to showcase the diversity of sound art and sonic storytelling, connecting local musicians and artists with people from further afield and making the most of the excellent plethora of spaces and venues that St Leonards and Hastings have to offer. My hope is to create a destination for audio makers and experimenters to come together, share their work with both the initiated and uninitiated and hopefully embark on future collaborations!” LUCIA SCAZZOCHIO

Invisible Threads

XMTR AUDIO ARTS FESTIVAL 27-29 September 2024

Sono-Electro is a 10-day festival dedicated to spotlighting  local, national and international sonic artists, and inspiring the people of St Leonards and Hastings to explore and experience the joy and profundity of sound art. 2024 sees the event return to Electro Studios in West St Leonards.

In one year, the festival has skyrocketed from a crowd-funded, four-day festival that brought together a handful of talented local artists into a two-week event supported locally by the likes of Hastings Commons and funded on a national level by the Arts Council.

Activities include a stylophone workshop, children’s storytelling and performance.

Saturday night offers a special performance with Ed Baxter and Anthony Moore. In The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837), the Victorian polymath Charles Babbage suggested that, “The air itself is one vast library. One, on whose pages are forever written all that woman or man has ever said or whispered.”

This thought is the basis of Anthony Moore’s composition Hello, this is a sentence on a live performance of which this digressive and deconstructionist broadcast by Anthony and Ed Baxter is in turn based. Life Sentence explores the way in which words both enter the memory of the hearer and continue into the air, and addresses the mode of half listening that applies to the medium of radio.

SONO ELECTRO FESTIVAL 17-30 September 2024

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