Southeast/Northwest
1st – 3rd May 2025
University of Birmingham
BEAST FEaST 2025 will bring friends old and new – from both far flung parts of the world and close to home – together in Birmingham. Electroacoustic music in the twenty-first century is both a local and a global art form. It is at once capable of expressing the local knowledge and culture of the many geographical regions in which it has taken root, notably with the many important electronic music studios that were founded in Japan, Africa, India, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe; and of bringing together different cultures, genres, forms, and sounds, whether through practices of deliberate hybridisation and fusion, or via juxtaposition and contrast. For the 10th Anniversary of BEAST FEaST, our goal is to make a festival which gathers that diversity together in celebration!
Featured Artists
Indonesian electroacoustic pioneer Otto Sidharta’s work will be featured in the U.K. for the first time, presenting a new work composed especially for the 90+ loudspeaker hyper-immersive BEAST system. Bangkok-based composer and multimedia artist Jean-David Caillouët will return to Birmingham for the premiere of his documentary on Sidharta’s work, and to present a new audio-visual work, developed as a 2024 BEAST artist in residence.
French-Canadian artist and multimedia guru Myriam Boucher brings her innovative interdisciplinary work combining composition vidéomusicale with live performance.
And finally, revered composer, author, vocalist, programmer, and longstanding friend of BEAST Trevor Wishart returns to present his comic opera, The Garden of Earthly Delights: an ambitious work which, drawing its title from Hieronymus Bosch’s infamous depiction of hell and damnation, traverses an audio-maze of modern human predicaments to offer a mulitchannel satire of our contemporary situation.