SME Partner

Astrid Korporaal, Institute of Contemporary Arts

PhD Student/Early Career Researcher

Will Dutta, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance

Supervisor

Dominic Murcott, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance

Project Name

Sound Waves: Experimental music in the gallery

Project Description

Artist and curator Will Dutta was the ICA’s researcher in residency was timed to coincide with the reading room exhibition Shout Out! UK Pirate Radio in the 1980s. During his residency Dutta explored the institution’s archives searching for material relating to experimental music and sound projects from the 1980s, findings which he then incorporated into a special one-off event.

Resurrecting the ICA MusICA series, which ran between 1978-94, Dutta organised MusICA Now: Exploring Sound and Authorship which ran in July 2015. The curated evening opened with a screening of David Ryan’s film Via di San Teodoro 8 (2011) in one of the ICA’s cinema spaces, followed by a live event in the ICA bar. The live event included a sound installation by Chris Watson, two DJ sets by Dutta, and live sets by Giacinto Scelsi and Adrian Corker with Lucy Railton. The evening was conceived as a discourse on pure sound and the legacy Scelsi has had on the current generation of composers.

The MusICA now event received publicity via The Quietus and recommendations on BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction. In addition to the ICA event Dutta has also published an article on the ICA’s blog, From the Archive, which documents the musical arms race of Jamaican sound system culture, migration to the UK and the affect these influences have had on the sounds of the 1980s.