Sonic Shaman—TheCube Forum Music Festival

The first art-based music festival in Taiwan

TheCube Forum Music Festival－Sonic Shaman is the flagship program of TheCube’s three-year project A Madeleine Moment. The festival is not only an in-depth international exchange that resumes in the post-pandemic era but also the transdisciplinary creative practice that treats “art-based music festival” as its curatorial concept.

Orchestrated in a new hybrid form, this “music festival” features performances delivered by 27 artist groups from home and abroad (Egypt, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea). During the four-day event, the organizer will spare no effort to offer the visitors an unprecedented listening experience through wide collaborations in four highly heterogeneous venues in southern Taipei.

These venues will ignite the collective imagination about sound and performance. The venues include The Wall Live House (the best-known venue for indie music performance in Taipei), the 49.4-channel stereo space developed collaboratively by the IRCAM and C-LAB Taiwan Sound Lab, the AUSPIC PAPER (a plant oozing the industrial charm in a corner of Taipei City), and the Guling Street Avant-Garde Theatre (an important redoubt of avant-garde experiments in Taiwan based in a historic building of the Japanese colonial period).

The music festival as a curatorial concept

The first TheCube Forum Music Festival addresses the theme Sonic Shaman and treats the performers as the shamans who convey transcendental messages and engage in ritual-like exchange with the visitors through the mediation of sound wave/audio frequency. The curatorial team invites creators of experimental or electronic music, artists, and scholars to make bold use of sound, frequency, language, and lecture performance, insofar as to open up a spiritual space that renders the visitors amazed, delirious, and even lost in contemplation.