New Media Scotland

Drift: A Festival of Sound Art and Experimental Music Across Glasgow and Liverpool

(Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom)

Drift is a festival of sound art and experimental music organized by New Media Scotland. This group supports research and development in new media and new technologies by helping produce projects by artists and offering information to Scotland's media arts community.

The festival's first edition, Drift: Acoustic Ecology 1999 held in Glasgow in 1999, generated a catalogue of theoretical texts about acoustic ecology and a CD of music by participating artists, including David Toop, Justin Bennett and Dallas Simpson.

The Foundation partially funded Drift 2, which investigated the emerging "lowercase" movement in electronic music and sound art. Created by scientists, sound artists and experimental musicians, this movement has developed thanks to the Internet. Recordings in this movement are produced and processed by computers. Drift 2 explored the development of sound and music software that relies on open-source principles. The event also examined the birth of a new Web-based community of sound artists. Access to low-cost digital tools on the Internet for sound recording, amplification and mixing has spawned the lowercase movement. Drift 2 has provided a chance to study how more and more artists are using new digital techniques to record, archive and recycle different types of sounds (analogue, found, scientific or from daily life).

Like the 1999 edition, the program for Drift 2 featured sound projects for the Net as well as a program of sound art films.