Everyday life with a twist of city trance is brought by ‘Buffet of Sounds: A Sonic and Visual Feast in Honor of Lirio Salvador’ to the NCCA Gallery from February 12 to March 2, 2018.

As sound art occurs in different kinds of spaces and often takes time to immerse yourself in, it is also active everywhere else: in our stomachs, on the roads, in compost heaps, through the old school fax machine, even in spaces that exist in the mind. This new strand serves as the starting point for the exhibition –‘Buffet of Sounds: A Sonic and Visual Feast in Honor of Lirio Salvador,’ a gastrosonic event that will showcase selected works of Lirio in a buffet, eat-all-you-can setting set in an aural-sculptural, omnium-gatherum, sound installation environment. The show is an interesting proof of the complex sounds and noises resembling a picturesque association of the human situation in which we find ourselves at a given time. Everyday life with a twist of city trance is brought to the NCCA Gallery from February 12 to March 2, 2018, space where urban-dwellers could come and have a taste of all the sound menus available. It’s like eating with your ears, treating hearing as another form of seeing. Whether you are familiar with sound art or not, music/sound is still in the ear of the beholder. Sounds delicious? This is sound art on food trip.

The special artist’s reception-cum-thanksgiving show on February 12, at 4:00 in the afternoon coincides with Lirio Salvador’s birthdate, a fitting tribute to the man behind the ingenious ethno-industrial noise assault/ensemble Elemento and founder of the independent art space EspasyoSiningdikato, a creative venue located in Dasmariñas, Cavite. As a key figure in the experimental and sound art scene in the country, Lirio is considered as the modern-punk native with primal tendencies. By instinct, a struggling artist-alchemist who deconstructs banal objects into new forms (sandata), Lirio fuses sonic aspects of our technological environment to ordinary objects and commodities deeply embedded in our contemporary setting. 

As a homage to Lirio Salvador and to render this reference as functional as possible, selected artists with a predilection for exploring sound in the contemporary sense are invited to cook up exciting interactive works that mix sound constructions, sonic sculptures, self-built instruments, found sounds and video. These are gathered together in a collective unfolding of creative potential while also enabling people to physically engage with the artworks. The selection (composed of Jon Romero, Tad Ermitanio, Chris Garcimo, Stanley Castelo and Seido Toshiyuki) is a banding together of sound artists who have worked or somehow collaborated with Lirio, sound artists who are active in the exploration of alternative/experimental art and expanding the way we view, feel, hear and engage with art. 

While the exhibition mediates between excursions/encounter/experience and contextual performativity, it also provides a redefinition of modalities, investigating the use of technology and machine in the context and idiom of the visual and the aural. These interjections that coalesce into a compelling bricolage of sonicscapes, in which all the strange forces we meet in modern life, seem to have undergone a degree of harmonization and humanization and are working together towards a world where things not only look and feel better, but also sound more fitting- as we become part of each piece: part human, part machine.

To Lirio, who from the beginning has been pushing boundaries, experiments and innovations in the arts after having studied and produced a great number of sound works but still despairing on the unimaginative direction it has been taking (The arts are not bad, it’s the overinflated way some people think about them that has made them unreal). History is only halfway to fulfill these dreams.

And most of all is Lirio’s vision, the most interesting and beautiful sound source, that can cut through almost any amount of electronic modifications.

In line with this, a collateral activity through informed discussions is scheduled on February 22. The objective is to present the educational aspects of improvisation and experimentation by using the exchange of knowledge through artistic related to the show.

For more information, please contact tel. no. (02)5272192 local 324 & 328; e-mail info@ncca.gov.ph / nccagallery09@gmail.com ;  facebook.com/NCCAOfficial

NCCA Gallery is located at 633 Gen. Luna St., Intramuros, Manila. Contact persons: Mimi Santos, Managing Curator, Bryan Llapitan , Coordinator.The Gallery is open Monday to Sunday 9:00AM-6:00PM