so lucky so strange so persistent is one of five can’t-miss projects at this year’s Nocturne, a site-specific art festival that has things popping up all over Halifax from Oct. 13 to 15. Read more about the other Nocturne projects we’re most excited about here.
“It was a place that I would go to late at night with friends, sometimes—and just go and make silly sounds,” begins Hannah Guinan, a queer sound performer who makes work under the moniker duglessss. They’re talking about a place they call “the reverb dome” but you might know as the lighthouse-looking tower attached to Casino Nova Scotia. “When I started thinking about doing a project there, and just talking to casino staff that work there, some of them had shared with me like: ‘Oh, I go in there and I make funny sounds too.’ It feels like maybe I’m not supposed to be here, but it also is OK that I’m here.”
Their Nocturne project so lucky so strange so persistent is a sharing of their secret sound cave with the world, an opening of the unlocked doors of the type of public place that’s so often unattended it feels private. It’s also an invitation to play and make a racket on Oct. 15 from 6pm to midnight: Guinan is creating a soundscape that includes green noise (“a type of white noise but the colour green: Which to me, when I hear it, it’s a really encouraging sound”), electronic beats and distorted sounds from their past visits to the space. Visitors are then encouraged to go from viewer to participant by noise-making with the various props Guinan is supplying—like cans, gloves and garden rakes. (Also, if you’re worried about finding your way to the reverb dome, there will be Nocturne volunteers outside the Casino to guide you.)
“I was just really excited by the [Nocturne] theme this year of legacy: And just thinking about how sound is this continuous thing that we just contribute to,” Guinan adds. “And that just seems like reverb, and persistence. It just seemed to make sense.”
This article appears in Oct 1 – Nov 6, 2022.
