Salford’s festival of new music and art – 5th May 2024.
Sounds From the Other City celebrate Salford’s role in the creation and celebration of music. In 2024 the hub of will take place on campus for the first time with activity on the Heritage Lawn outside Salford Museum and Art Gallery and festival stages in Maxwell Hall and Peel Hall. The festival will continue across the Crescent with gigs being hosted by the Working Class Movement Library, Salford Museum and Art Gallery and The Old Fire Station Bakery. The festival will continue further down Chapel St and you can find a full list of venues here.
In September 2021 the festival’s parent company From The Other, brought their Fat Out Fest programme to Peel Hall with a unique collaboration between BBC Philharmonic and record label Erased Tapes which was recorded live and broadcast on BBC Radio 3.
Sounds from the Other City has held stages at the University of Salford several times over the last 20 years, previously hosting live stages at Peel Hall (2011 & 2014) and a one-off performance installation at Maxwell Hall for the festival’s tenth edition in 2014. The festival planned to return to the hallowed venue in 2020, but the event was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Read more about live music returning to Maxwell Hall for the first time in ten years here
In the summer 2023 the festival production team came to view some of the more unusual spaces on campus to think about how these could be activated for the festival. This included our Acoustics Lab, which will host Mishka Henner’s new commission ‘The Conductor’
The Conductor, a performance by Manchester-based artist Mishka Henner channels live lightning data from around the world through a single percussionist beating a drum each time a lightning strike occurs in the world.
Set in a reverb acoustic chamber at the University of Salford, The Conductor is the result of an 18-month artist residency by Henner at the University of Salford’s Energy House 2.0, a cutting-edge research facility that simulates extreme global climatic conditions under one roof to help design net zero and carbon neutral housing for the future.
Read more about this new commission here
The University has partnered with ‘Sounds’ for the last 10 years. Over the last year we have been looking at how we can strengthen this relationship with the ambition of expanding connections across the university to support more aspects of the festival in the future and exploring opportunities for staff and students to collaborate on the year round programme. Some of these conversations started at a networking event we ran back in March. We hope that the festival being on campus will allow more of our university staff and students to be inspired by the event and want to get involved. The partnership with the festival is fantastic for the university’s civic ambitions to bring more public onto campus and enjoy our facilities as part of the cities cultural development of the Crescent with Salford’s Culture & Place Partnership
Over 110 University of Salford students have gained valuable work experience at Sounds from the Other City through placements since 2017, with some going onto careers with BBC Music, Worldwide FM, London Sinfonietta and more.
Sounds from the Other City is made possible by funding from UK Shared Prosperity Fund, Salford City Council, Salford CVS, The University of Salford, Arts Council England and GMCA Culture Fund. It is supported by Salford’s Culture & Place Partnership, a cross-city collective delivering Salford’s strategy for culture and creativity.