Ela Orleans, Glasgow review: 'sheer Paris style'

Once again, the Sonica festival succeeded in conjuring a relaxed yet attentive environment for experimental audio-visual art and performance.

In the sultry black box space of Tramway 4, Egyptian composer Ahmed Saleh presented A Ten Year Walk to the Shore, an ambient meditation for his native Alexandria, perpetually at risk from rising sea levels, with symbiotic live digital painting by Spanish artist Alba G Corral.

Just as Saleh’s sworls of sound, gradually increasing in volume, introduced wordless, layered vocals like calling birds, so Corral’s murky images gradually resolved into deep blue frosted patterns. A cityscape took shape through the digital northern lights as bassier textures were felt through the floor and then a whole new rhythmic thrust as infectious drum sounds took hold before the piece climaxed as a colourful Rorschach test.

The visuals were even more crucial to La Nuit Dorée, a Cryptic commission by Polish composer and filmmaker Ela Orleans, who requested that attendees behave as a cinema audience rather than a bar crowd.

La Nuit Dorée (“the golden night”) was inspired by the sounds emanating from her parents’ rusty record player and manifested as a love letter to the French nouvelle vague and its cool Gallic pop soundtracks. Orleans created a suite of black and white footage of Sixties French icons, from Bardot to Belmondo, Delon to Deneuve. She herself could pass for a new wave ingenue and her own cool voice has just the right detached yet pretty tone for pop chanson.

Bed scenes and party scenes gave way to images of haute couture and sheer Paris style as Orleans built her chiming electronic soundtrack with samples of mute trumpet and pizzicato strings, tremulous woodwind texture, acid guitar spliced with funereal organ and just a sensation of Edith Piaf.