ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR SOUND? by Transart Advisor Sandeep Bhagwati

From 2017-2019, Sandeep Bhagwati led an artistic research project called "Ecstasies of Influence" in three cities - Montréal, Berlin and Pune. The core question of the project was: can the creative strategies and methods of another art form be applied to inventing music? In each city, an ensemble and some non-musician artists worked together on a concert programme, exploring this question in long rehearsal processes. In December 2017, the programme "Zungenmusiken" with the poets Monika Rinck and Christian Filips and Ensemble Extrakte could be experienced at Radialsystem Berlin. Then, in December 2018, three Un-Concerts took place at Gésu and Hexagram Black Box in Montréal, with Ensemble Extasis and artists Transart Alumna Deborah Carruthers and David Szanto and choreographer Angelique Willkie as partners. Finally, in August 2019, this project culminated in a concert at Flame University Pune dedicated to the monsoon and to bird conferences, with Ensemble Sangeet Prayog and architect Rahul Rawat and traditional choreographer Priya Joshi - and again with Deborah Carruthers.

For the Musee d'Art Contemporain, my matralab team and I have now worked on an unusual presentation of this complex project - an online blog as my contribution to an exhibition there. Videos, texts and sound recordings bring the interwoven history of this unusual musical project to life again - in rehearsal clips, concert trailers, poems and reports.

The first contribution to this blog, which will be online until the end of April and will grow more and more, has just been published. https://macm.org/sandeep-bhagwati/
New short videos will continue to be posted until the end of April.

I wish you a lot of fun discovering this curious world of sound between music and non-music, which is why we named it: ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR SOUND?