Festival of experimental music and cross-cultural collaborations between Ukrainian and UK artists. Curated and produced by Time Based and Arts & Parts around the theme of sonic intervention, the festival invites you to listen, reflect, and engage with the beauty and danger of sounds beyond your control.
Time Based: Sonic Interventions
Comissioned works
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Genevieve Murphy combines performance art and visual art with contemporary classical music. Frequently exploring psychology and disability, and often creating a domestic setting, she addresses the everyday — speaking to the individual through sound, text, physical performance and imagery. Her works — “Something In This Universe” (2018), “I Don’t Want To Be An Individual All On My Own” (2020) and “At The Spot Where I Find Myself” (2022) — give insight into her world and her perspective on empathy, obsessive compulsive disorder and indecision. Genevieve collaborates with visual artists, free improvisers, choreographers and producers, and has toured internationally with Turner Prize winning visual artist Martin Creed. Her innovative compositions and often durational performance pieces have been performed in concert halls and art galleries across Europe.
alice haspyd is an experimental audiovisual artist from Odesa, Ukraine. Her musical practice is focused on combining deconstructed visual and music influences, coupled with academic techniques. Her works have been showcased at Berlin’s CTM Festival, Paris’s cultural centre La Gaîté Lyrique, Tbilisi as as part of the Mutant Radio & SHAPE collaboration, and Kyiv’s Concert Hall during the STDEV Showcase.
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Celebrated Ukrainian electroacoustic composer Alla Zahaikevych makes her UK debut at the Glasgow Women’s Library with a solo performance, built around field recordings of bells of St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery, St. Sophia Cathedral and other churches in Kyiv.
Saturday 14 June 2025, 2.30pm – 3.30pm, Glasgow Women’s Library, 23 Landressy St, Glasgow G40 1BP
Watch a video of this live performance at this link.
Alla Zahaikevych is a Ukrainian composer and performance artist with an international practice that spans music for dance, theatre and film, symphonic and chamber music, chamber opera, as well as electroacoustic and multimedia installation works. Her work has been presented in contemporary music festivals in Ukraine, France, Sweden, Japan, China, Czechia, Lithuania, Canada, Germany and Poland. Alla is the curator of several international electroacoustic projects including ‘Electroacoustics Ensemble’ and ‘EM-vision’, is head of the Association of Electroacoustic Music at the Union of Composers of Ukraine (Kyiv branch) and was a member of the band ‘Drevo’ led by Yevhen Yefremov.
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Yuriy Seredin — pianist, composer and producer Yuriy Seredin is one of the leading lights of the Ukrainian jazz scene. His deeply personal approach to composition often references lived experience and people in his life, his work is cinematic and combines contemporary jazz, minimalism and polyphonic forms, constantly moving on the edge of human drama and meditation. He has recorded and played with many of the world’s foremost experimental musicians including Nasheet Waits, Ben van Gelder, Seamus Blake and Satoko Fuji. He is a fellow of the Italian Ministry of Culture (Teatro Massimo, Palermo), the German Music Council (Babylon Orchestra) and the Berlin Senate.
Raymond MacDonald is a saxophonist, composer and psychologist with an extensive career in music, cross-disciplinary arts and academia. Much of his work explores the boundaries and ambiguities between what is conventionally seen as improvisation and composition. He has released over 80 CDs, toured and broadcast worldwide and has composed music for film, television, theatre, radio and art installations. Raymond is a founding member of the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra (GIO) and his repertoire includes many collaborative projects that span the spectrum of international contemporary experimental music, with artists including David Byrne, Jim O’Rourke, Evan Parker and Nurse with Wound
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Zoë Irvine is an artist primarily working with sound, exploring voice, conversation, sound recording and the relationship between sound, image and text. Her artworks range from carefully crafted individual pieces for broadcast and installation, to participative events. Zoë also is a sound designer specialising in artist film, experimental documentaries and radio works, and lectures in Sound for Film at Edinburgh Napier/ Screen Academy Scotland. She lives and works in Edinburgh.
Photinus Studio is a Kyiv-based new media art collective founded in 2012 by artists and musicians Max Robotov, Liera Polianskova, Ivan Svitlychnyi and Georgiy Potopalskiy. The studio has grown into a community of artists and specialises in creating interactive light and sound installations, multimedia shows and working with virtual reality and digital technologies. Their work has been featured in international contexts, including the Venice Biennale, Transmediale Vorspiel Festival in Berlin, Digital Cultures in Warsaw, etc. In 2022, they adapted to wartime conditions, with members becoming defenders, fighters, and volunteers, while some continued their artistic endeavours abroad to support Ukraine.
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Anna Khvyl — With a background in cultural studies and anthropology, Anna Khvyl is a sound artist, composer, DJ, educator and researcher. Her work explores the relationship between sound and commemoration, focusing on how music creates spaces for social bonding and self-discovery. Working across sound installations, audiovisual compositions, multichannel live performances, audio walks, radio and podcasts, film and theatre, and sound design, Anna also leads workshops for adults and teenagers on electronic music, DJ-ing and acoustic ecology that are designed to help those who have suffered from the trauma of war and loss.
Piotr Armianovski is a Ukrainian artist, performer, director and co-founder of the ‘Pic Pic’ art group. His practice spans documentaries, theatre, and visual practices and addresses themes of memory, loss, and the ‘symbolic and social constructs of everyday life’. His works have been presented at the Venice Biennale 2019, the Topical Play Week, Manifesta 14, and the Kharkiv Biennale of Young Art (2019). Since 2021 he has been an industry expert for the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation and in 2020 was the recipient of the 2020 Gaude Polonia scholarship.
Talks & Engagement Programme
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One hour essay-like narration, illustrated by examples of sound practices and musical works that have emerged during the full-scale Russian war in Ukraine. Led by Olha Bekenshtein, music curator and founder of Time Based, this listening session uncovers documentary, memorial, resistive and live saving dimensions of listening in wartime and introduces recordings shaped by displacement, loss, urgency, and survival — but also moments of radical care, love, and aesthetic response.
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Speakers: Dmytro Tentiuk (UA), Daria Maiier (UA), Abie Soroño (PH), Raymond MacDonald (UK), moderated by Martel Ollerenshaw (UK)
In a world where focused listening is the biggest luxury, how do we attune to the sounds that escape human control – the murmur of forests, the deep time of landscapes, the thunder of a war? This panel brings together artists, curators, and thinkers working at the intersection of music, ecology and AI to explore sonic environments shaped by forces larger than ourselves. We ask: What does it mean to listen today? What does it mean to trust what we’ve heard? Can artificial intelligence capture that more objectively? And how might environments sound in the future – and who, or what, will be there to listen?
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Join Anna Khvyl as she discusses her creative process and inspiration for the Sound Walk, devised in collaboration with Piotr Armianovski. Emerging curator Stella Rafferty will moderate the session.
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To delve deeper into the works featured at David Dale Gallery, on Friday 13 June, A-J Reynolds & Eliza Coulson — the women behind experimental writing platform Gallery Bagging — will host a [synonym] session, a facilitated group writing session that will concentrate on the collaboration between the collective force that is Photinus Studios & Scottish composer and sound artist Zoë Irvine. If you are looking to enhance your experience, to meet some new like-minded people and to improve your writing skills, then this session will be for you!
The concept of the festival was conceived by Ukrainian curator Olha Bekenshtein as part of Time Based, a platform dedicated to advancing contemporary performance arts in Ukraine and providing international opportunities for live and electronic sound creators, as well as experimental performance artists. Time Based: Sonic Interventions expands on this vision and is curated and produced in partnership with Arts & Parts, led by curator and creative producer Martel Ollerenshaw.
Time Based: Sonic Interventions is funded by the British Council’s International Collaboration Grants, which are designed to support UK and overseas organisations to collaborate on international arts projects. More information, here.