House for Sound

INTRODUCTION

As a House for Sound, STUK wants to tell a new and ambitious new story: a sound programme with two currents that naturally flow through one another.

We won’t change what was good already: STUK has been an interesting concert venue for years, offering a stage to young artists and household names in (experimental) pop music. A place where the adventurous concert goer can discover new trends and watch the first Belgian concerts of artists who will become major acts, like Nils Frahm, Jon Hopkins, Future Islands, ... Lucky you!

The second approach within the reform to a House for Dance, Image and Sound makes it even more exciting. We will examine the fluid borders between sound and music. French writer Victor Hugo once said: ‘La musique c’est du bruit qui pense’. Exactly ... what in fact turns sound into music?

Sound is ‘what we hear’, bound to a context and an experience. Music can be described as sound that is ‘organized’, listened to in a concert setting. That does not have to be standing or seated. You can listen to music while lying down, like during the Slaapwel Records/Dauwmorning labelnights, or during the yoga session/sound meditation with ambient pioneer Laraaji. By changing the setting, you change the way listeners experience a concert. Sound becomes more than listening, it turns into a sensorial experience. You can also feel sound, or even taste it.

Not only STUK focuses on the research of the borders between music and sound, the artists working within that second approach do so too. A number of them are part of the ‘pop scene’, but also look at music from an exploring and in-depth angle. Just like their music colleagues who start from sound art and new music, they find inspiration in avant-garde composers and pioneers of electro-acoustic music, as well as in contemporary scientific sound research. Through lectures and Q&As they want to introduce sound as a phenomenon to you, the music lover. For instance, Artefact presents the MusicMakers Hacklab, where sound artists Peter Kirn and Darsha Hewitt link music and technology through instrument building.

Next to the intersection of experimental pop music and sound art, there are interesting areas between sound and dance and between sound and image. With the extension of the sound programme, we anticipate the way these disciplines are related and inseparably connected. STUK as a House for Sound will become the place to be for the musical adventurer!

Gilke Vanuytsel