Late Night soundsession: Tom Macfadyen

Tom Macfadyen curates a late-night soundsession at The Anatomy Rooms on Saturday 31 October, the closing event of the Sound Festival (Cainnt nan Eun / The Language of the Birds). It's an electroacoustic night, which means the music is built from recorded sound rather than played on instruments in the traditional sense. The session brings together five new voices in Scottish electroacoustic music: Flynn Butler Fraser, Aidan Lochrin, Emily Rae, and Darlene Zarabozo, with Macfadyen himself.

The common thread is a simple one: each composer recorded everyday sounds in their own home across Scotland. They've taken those familiar, domestic noises and reshaped and layered them into immersive, multichannel sound worlds, broadcast over the venue's speaker system so that the recognisable becomes unfamiliar. It's a way of hearing the sounds we usually ignore—the hum of a fridge, the click of a door, the noise of a kitchen—turned into something else entirely.

The evening runs as a concert, with a 15-minute interval and a 45-minute Q&A afterwards, so you'll get to hear the work and then talk to the people who made it. The wider festival is staged by Aberdeen Performing Arts and leans towards the outdoors, including a soundwalk through Forvie. It draws on two of their ongoing projects: sound_creators, which supports new music creators with commissions, performances and visibility, and sound_curators, which gives early-career composers the chance to curate these late-night soundsessions. The festival is funded by Creative Scotland, Aberdeen City Council, the Hinrichsen Foundation, the William Syson Foundation and the PRS Foundation's Development Network fund, with sound_curators supported by the D'Oyly Carte Charitable Trust.

The session runs from 8:00pm to 10:00pm at The Anatomy Rooms, Anatomy Library, Marischal College, Aberdeen, AB25 2ZD. Tickets are £5 standard, with under 18s and essential companions free, and a Pay What You Can option available.