A SCOTTISH music festival has unveiled its programme, promising "visionary performances, installations and immersive experiences across Glasgow".
More than 170 artists and musicians from 21 countries will present international and UK premieres, alongside landmark live shows at the intersection of music, technology and visual art at Sonica Festival this year.
The event programme will span historic buildings, churches and galleries from from Thursday September 24 to Sunday, October 4.
Across the programme, artists will use underwater ecosystems, trees, fungi, broken records and even subatomic particles as instruments, inviting audiences into blindfolded sonic rituals, wearable light works and participatory soundscapes.
Sonica 2026 venues include:
- Pollok House
- Buchanan Galleries
- Tramway
- St Ninian’s church
- 25PES,
- Glad Cafe
- Rutherglen Old Parish
- Offline Glasgow
- The Hunterian
Organisers have said The Listening House at Pollok House will be a “festival within a festival” that takes over the grand 18th‑century mansion before it reopens after major restoration.
Across three floors and out into the gardens, audiences will encounter "singing sculptures, wandering sonic experiments, mechanical birds, reactive audiovisual environments and immersive installations".
Works will include AES+F’s video Mundus Inversus that reimagines medieval “world turned upside down” imagery, and Konx‑om‑Pax’s Colour Sound, a synaesthesia‑inspired environment of shifting light and sound that responds to movement and digital manipulation.
Elsewhere, Brian d’Souza’s Plants Can Dance will turn plants and fungi into co‑composers via biosonification, translating environmental signals into evolving ambient electronics.
For the first time, Sonica will also inhabit the city centre’s Buchanan Galleries shopping centre with four interactive installations.
The four Sonica Festival exhibitions in Buchanan Galleries:
- CREW’s The Unheard sends robotic bullhorns roaming among shoppers.
- Delatere’s Transvision invites visitors to lie down with eye masks for a meditative sensory experience.
- Rachel Maclean’s new film They’ve Got Your Eyes looks at AI hype and Victorian invention.
- Esther Kehinde Ajayi’s Sonic units “Rehumanise me” Collection lets audiences shape tones and murmurs from sculptural loudhailers.
Maclean’s work, co‑commissioned with FACT Liverpool, and Martin Green’s Folding Songs, co‑produced with Perth Theatre and Concert Hall, are the festival’s first‑ever major commissions.
Folding Songs pairs Green with Serbian singer Svetlana Spajić for a contemporary composition with ancient Balkan song.
Live highlights are also set to include Paraorchestra and Charles Hazlewood performing Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians in Glasgow for the first time in over a decade, Lyra Pramuk’s choral‑electronic Hymnal, and a performance by drone choir NYX in St Ninian’s Church.
Festival passes will be available offering discounted tickets to Tramway performances, and access to free tickets for all other venue performances. Festival passes and general tickets will go on sale in the early summer an all installations are free.
