The future sounds of Scotland

OF THE Scottish arts success stories in recent years, experimental music is one of the most unlikely. Indeed, as the Kill Your Timid Notion festival prepares for its second year of pairing avant-garde musicians with leftfield filmmakers at Dundee Contemporary Arts, organisers remain surprised by the original’s sell-out appeal.

Curator Barry Esson, who also programmed October’s massively popular Instal festival at the Arches in Glasgow, maintains that despite continued problems of perception, it’s all a matter of balancing the demands for the innovative and radically unfamiliar with accessibility.

"That first year was a big gamble for us, a leap of faith," he admits. "We had no idea whether people would come. The words ‘experimental’ and ‘avant-garde’ can be very off-putting, making your average music-lover think, ‘Oh God, some kind of bore-fest’. Often you go to these events, the door locks behind you, you’re sat in pews and it’s like you’re sitting in church. But what we’re trying to create with Kill Your Timid Notion is a relaxed atmosphere. It’s as cheap as we can possibly make it and you come and go as you please."

Spread over three days and incorporating nine evening performances, a film selection of six programmes spanning 50 years of vastly varying moving images, a supplementary online art exhibition and a sculpture incorporating both sound and objects by the Finnish duo Tommi Grnlund and Petteri Nisunen, what makes KYTN unique in the UK is its confrontational collusions between the aural and the visual.

Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo may have been fted by the likes of Nirvana for his influence on alternative music, but as part of Text of Light, who take their name from an abstract work by the late American filmmaker Stan Brakhage, he has courted controversy among Brakhage’s fanbase for his improvised sonicscapes over the artist’s silent meditations on light and colour. Elsewhere, and appearing for the first time in the UK, are long-time collaborators German Jrgen Reble, who projects kaleidoscopic shards of film treated with dye, and Dutchman Thomas Kner, who plays electronic techno responses to the projectors’ whirring. Other collaborations, such as English-born, New York-based Anthony McCall and Japanese performer Sachiko M, have been brought together specifically for the festival.

"We’re trying to trace a historical overview of experimental sound and film with really hardcore filmmakers that you’re never going to see again in Scotland," says Esson. "Some of these people are massively influential, but just because it’s theoretically rigorous and there’s a great lineage of artists who’ve led to those we’re working with, doesn’t mean it’s not simply enjoyable. It doesn’t mean you can’t come along and enjoy it as a live spectacle, as pure theatre."

KYTN is part of Scotland’s Experimental Music Partnership, which also includes Glasgow’s Instal and Free RadiCCAls, and Stirling’s Le Weekend, ensuring a strategic commitment to experimental music but a diversity of programming. All feed off each other, and if KYTN looks set to continue gathering momentum this weekend, the other three festivals must take some credit for this too.

"We’ve seen a real boost in the last three or four years," observes Esson. "For sheer diversity and just incredible musicians, there’s a growing audience in Scotland that the performers really appreciate.

"If you lived in London you wouldn’t see as much as you do living in Glasgow, and being prepared to take a couple of hours’ drive now and again."

Kill Your Timid Notion is at Dundee Contemporary Arts, 10-12 December, tel: [phone].