Kaffe Matthews has watched a lot of strangers jump into her bed during the past few years. In fact, the London-based musician and sound artist has built bunks in places as far afield as Shanghai and Quebec for curious bedfellows to snuggle into. Now, with Sonic Bed_Scotland, which forms part of Le Weekend festival of experimental music - and marks the tenth anniversary of The Tolbooth in Stirling - curious participants can hear and feel the reverberations generated through a series of eight speakers contained in Matthews' latest customised contraption for her ongoing initiative, Music For Bodies.
This began with Sonic Bed_London, a commission for Hernoise, a group exhibition of female artists in the South London Gallery in 2005.
"That was the first bed," says Matthews, pulling up a chair in The Tolbooth's meeting room while her bed is sanded down in the attic upstairs, "and I never thought it would go on in the way that it has. But it succeeded in doing exactly what I set out to do with it, which is to give people who wouldn't normally enjoy experimental music a way in. It's a very simple idea and I don't think it's a particularly unique idea, where the music is made, not just to listen to, but to feel."
Further commissions for beds in Shanghai, thanks to the British Council, as well as Quebec and Taipei, followed, and Sonic Bed_Scotland was developed in Bangor in Ireland. Crucial to each bed has been material drawn from the immediate location. More significantly, different environments have drawn different sonic responses from Matthews.
Sonic Bed_Scotland was commissioned by Le Weekend with support from the Performing Rights Society Foundation, the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation and Scottish Arts Council New Joint Commissions scheme. For this, Matthews has collaborated with artist Mandy McIntosh, while sounds have been generated by working with Uilleann piper Jarlath Henderson and Highland and Borders piper Chris Gibb. Matthews first worked with McIntosh, who will design the bed's upholstery, a decade ago on her first move into sonic furniture, when an armchair wired for a soundtrack culled from the inside of an aeroplane was installed in empty flats in Glasgow and Hackney for a project called PlaceMadeMobile. It was here Matthews first spotted the potential for the project.
"Old women and kids would queue for hours to sit and listen to something that was basically noise," Matthews points out. "It was stuff they would never tolerate through speakers. I'd got to the point where I didn't just want to perform in warehouses in front of people who were already into this stuff, but to reach people beyond all that."
With electronic composition and piping seemingly artistic poles apart, working with Henderson and Gibb, both precocious young stars on the international piping scene, has been an eye-opener for Matthews.
She says: "The pipes are like analogue synthesisers," she says. "You can't repeat. It's always going to be slightly different every time, because the pipes are all about tuning and pitch, which I don't normally work with. There are moments that come together that are so lush it's almost unbearable, then there are others that are really discordant."
Matthews's first musical endeavours were as a fiddler with Essex Youth Orchestra. After stints as a drummer and an engineer on early acid house records, both of which have clearly influenced the Sonic Bed project, she worked with Sonic Arts Network and London Musicians Collective.
At around the same time, Matthews was discovering the then burgeoning drum'n'bass scene developing in Hoxton's underground spaces. There, Matthews would go dancing on her own. Where such beat-driven vertical euphoria was one way of experiencing experimental music en masse, Sonic Bed project's static, horizontal stylings is similarly intense.
Long term, Matthews aims to make two or three beds a year across the globe, and has ambitions in 10 years' time for a large-scale retrospective bringing all the beds together to allow the public to move between them.
Sonic Bed_Scotland is at the Tolbooth, May 23-30, with a live performance of the music on May 26.
Music For Bodies
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