Sonica Double Bill: Ten Year Walk to Shore // La Nuit Dorée

The low-lying city of Alexandria is under threat from rising sea levels; sound artist and composer Ahmed Saleh’s work for voice and musical instruments is not only warning of future catastrophe but telling the story of two previous floods that devastated the city in the fourth and eleventh centuries. In musical movements, by turns soothing and frantic, Saleh’s work blends the sounds of the metropolis into a remembered and imagined soundscape where rushing tides swamp bustling streets, and drowned cities slowly resurface, transfigured, time and again. 

Inspired by her parents’ record collection and a temperamental record player that used to mangle the LPs it played, Ela Orleans presents a suite of deconstructed, reimagined French pop music of the 1960s and ’70s. At times familiar, at others transformed, these torch songs and dance tunes are set to a visual collage that summons up and subverts the fashion, film and style of bygone times. 

La Nuit Dorée is a vision of a Paris that could have been, and a golden age that never was. 

ACCESS
Suitable for Subpacs (Tramway has 3 available)
Highly Visual / No Text

Audience notes
Ten Years Walk to Shore contains high pitched electronic sounds.

Running time 90 mins (including interval)
(30mins/20mins interval/40mins)

Ten Years Walk to Shore: Ahmed Saleh is supported by British Council Egypt and in partnership with B’sarya for Arts 

La Nuit Dorée: Ela Orleans is a Cryptic Commission 2024