SonUrban 01

The enquiry focused on how to develop new platforms as a research tool for interrogating current themes that typically explore post-industrial urban landscape and environment. The intention was to create an immediate and physical connection of live performance with a wider audience demographic as a platform for creating new metaphors for these themes. Wright has created the label SonUrban to develop new iterations of this ongoing process. The Klang 25 festival in Vienna celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Austrian Klanggalerie label. Wright had contributed to this label‘s catalogue in 2015 with the release of the cd Tenement Noise, a collaboration with Dr. Stephen Mallinder of Brighton University who is recognized as a seminal figure at the forefront of electronic music. For the performance, the process involved learning new techniques to explore a more abstracted style of editing and image manipulation that resulted in a continuous sequence of nine separate and synchronized vignettes that cross-referenced, critiqued and celebrated the vicissitudes of everyday urban experience as a sensory audio visual experience. The motif of a travelscape was used to link and interweave a sense of parallel agitation in the natural and urban environment. The visual and sonic information was gathered from a rich variety of sources captured in field trips mainly to Berlin, Dubrovnik, major Northern industrial cities and an organized shoot in the underground shafts of the National Mining Museum in Wakefield. The visual element also included hip hop dancers in Newcastle and live ad hoc street parties in Warschauer Strasse, Berlin as a projection back to the audience of social energy and celebration as the work also recognises the power of music and lyrics as a cross-cultural means of protest evident from the diy ethic of the punk era and the history of popular music.