Sound Junction
Information about the main USSS event programme, Sound Junction.
For all venue and ticketing information, visit the Performance Venues website.
Upcoming events
Composing (with) Systems: 26-28 March 2025
USSS invites contributions exploring the active role of systems in composition and sonic practice. We invite contributions that explore a wide range of systems including not only digital and electronic systems (e.g. modular, algorithmic, generative and AI based systems) but also conceptual systems, instrument design and adaptation, performance ecologies, assemblages and games. We welcome practical and theoretical contributions concerned with any area or period of music and sonic practice wherein systems have an active role in shaping, mediating, refracting or otherwise transforming the creative will.
- Performances
- Demonstrations
- Research papers
- Practical workshops
- Themed discussions
A mini conference with plenty of time for networking and socialising. We look forward to seeing you in Sheffield.
Previous events
Sound Junction: Thursday 28 November 2024, 19:30-21:00
- Adrian Moore: wt_metals - stereo, 10:12 (2024)
- Mario Cáceres: Deception - quadraphonic + live, 7:15 (2024)
- Interval
- Special guest: Nik Colk Void
- Nik Colk Void is an electronic musician and artist with a vast reputation in experimental shapeshifting and collaboration. Void’s interests lie in the unconventional encounters with her tools, both analogue and digital, as a means of expression. Her key instruments are voice, guitar, and modular euro-rack systems engaging in a new language using extended technique and cut-up sampling through synthesis. As a result, the blends of her compositional tracks lean towards techno, club,experimental and noise. UK based, Void has produced eight acclaimed studio albums with her musical groups Factory Floor, Carter Tutti Void and NPVR with the late Peter Rehberg, releasing via Mute, DFA, Blast First, Editions Mego and Industrial.
Sound Junction: Friday 29 November 2024, 19:30-21:00
- Julia Schauerman: Take Flight - stereo, 12:00 (2020)
- Adrian Moore: wt_ceramics - stereo, 7:35 (2024)
- Nikos Stavropoulos: Khemenu - multichannel, 8:19 (2022)
- Interval
- Special guest: SOTE
- Ata ‘Sote’ Ebtekar is an electronic music composer, sound artist, and recording engineer currently based in Tehran, Iran, whose work reconstructs traditional or regional tonal systems and rhythmic structures through synthesis and modular electronics. His current work approaches techno from a maximalist perspective, creating structural groove through programmed, pitched sounds rather than orthodox beats. Also active in the sphere of sound art and academia, Ebtekar’s compositions and multi-channel installations decode and re-generate patterns of thought (both folkloric and contemporary) using electro-acoustic techniques, microtonal systems, and polyrhythmic motifs.
Sound Junction and No Bounds Festival: Thursday 10 October 2024, 18:00-19:30
- John Chowning: Guest lecture
Sound Junction and No Bounds Festival: Thursday 10 October 2024, 20:00-21:00
- John Chowning: Solo concert
- Phonē (1981) 12:00
- SABELITHE (1971) 6:00
- Turenas (1972) 10:00
- Stria (1977) 16:00
- Voices (2011) 13:00
Sound Junction: Friday 19 April 2024, 19:30-21:30
In memory of Francis Dhomont
Francis Dhomont died on December 28, 2023 aged 97. I would like to celebrate his life and work in this Sound Junction event. The electroacoustic community is perhaps a small world but it is incredibly close, warm and welcoming. I was fortunate enough to meet Francis Dhomont in the early 90s when I was given the opportunity to use the studios of the University of Montreal for three weeks.
He was a major influence for many electroacoustic composers in the UK and he performed in Sheffield on numerous occasions. His music is delicate but intense and there is, for me, an underlying sense of tradition in his music. No more so than in his Cycle du son which we perform complete tonight. And no more so than in the third piece of the cycle; Novars. A play on the phrase Ars Nova, associated with 14th century composers such as Machaut, Dhomont realised electroacoustic music was going to be the new art of the 1980s. Dhomont draws upon small samples from Machaut and the great music concrète pioneer Pierre Schaeffer to weave the four pieces of the cycle. The soundworlds are subtle and immersive, fleeting but at times full on. They are wonderful works to play.
I hope you can join us on Friday and enjoy listening to the performers shaping Dhomont's stereo sounds over the full 32 loudspeaker system of Sound Junction.
Set 1:
- Francis Dhomont: Cycle du son (learn more about this amazing sequence of works)
- Francis Dhomont: Objets retrouvés (1996), 5:20. Sound diffusion and interpretation: Jonty Harrison
- Yi Cai: Opera dream (2024), 8:00. Sound diffusion and interpretation: Yi Cai
- Weichen Wang: Paradise, Beasts, Nature and Birds (2024), 8:00. Sound diffusion and interpretation: Weichen Wang
- Neal Farwell: Study in Steel (2022), 4:30. Sound diffusion and interpretation: Adrian Moore
- Francis Dhomont: AvatArsSon (1998), 18:11. Sound diffusion and interpretation: Louise Rossiter
Set 2:
- Mario Cáceres: Deception (2024), 8:00. Live performance
- Francis Dhomont: Novars (1989), 19:07. Sound diffusion and interpretation: Adrian Moore
- Boyi Bai: Exploring Silence: Japan (2024), 12:00. Sound diffusion and interpretation: Boyi Bai
- Francis Dhomont: Phonurgie (1998), 12:43. Sound diffusion and interpretation: Pete Stollery
Sound Junction: Saturday 20 April 2024, 19:30-21:30 – featuring Marta Domingues and Félicia Atkinson
Saturday's Sound Junction continues the theme of acousmatic music but adds new and dynamic live elements. It is a huge honour to welcome Marta Domingues and Félicia Atkinson.
Set 1: Marta Domingues
- -grafia (2023) 12:00 [solo percussion, Francisco Cipriano]
- Yliathim (2018) 6:57 [stereo]
- Brincar de Pensar (2020) 8:54 [stereo]
- Instantes (2022) 12:18 [stereo]
All works performed by Marta Domingues.
Set 2: Félicia Atkinson (personal website)
The Thinking Iceberg (solo version 40 min)
Inspired by diverse writings such as The Sea Around Us by the environmentalist Rachel Carson and Thinking Like An Iceberg by the philosopher Oliver Remaud, in which he paints a web of reciprocal connections between icebergs and human life, the electroacoustic composer Félicia Atkinson will play The Thinking Iceberg, a solo and shorter version of her new piece Through The Thinking Iceberg that she premiered at Volkbuhne theatre during CTM festival last February in Berlin with the collaboration of Jules Reidy and crys cole.
Here, the scenography is the development of the music itself, unfurling an open reflection about what it takes to care about an environment and each other, and what also links solitude to togetherness, a poetic argument between written elements and improvised words, movements and sounds, a meditation on vulnerability. For Atkinson, human voices inhabit an ecology alongside and within many other things that don’t speak; her artistic work imagines possibilities of animating and entering into dialogue with such entities.
A performance that will drift and melt slowly, Through the Thinking Iceberg combines grand piano, field recordings, voices, and whispers into an abstract minimal 'grunge', full of small details, metaphors, abstractions, revealing a complex and fragile interconnectedness even in places where there seems to be no life at all.