Leona Jones: babblesnatch

Leona Jones brings babblesnatch to the Attic Shop Unit at 87 Union Street from Thursday 22 to Saturday 24 October, as part of the Sound Scotland Festival. It's an eight-channel sonic installation, which she describes as a 'sonic snowglobe' — a space of cascading sound where voices dart and fly, and recognisable words erupt from a hubbub of sonic colour. The whole thing is built from recordings of two voices performing an original script, some left as they were and some digitally manipulated, and it's designed to crack open conventional language and let your imagination do the heavy lifting.

There's a clear starting point to the work: Jones says it grew out of her experience of the online world during the Covid lockdown. It looks at everyday social media life and the tensions that come with it — things like surveillance, mental health, and the overload of the digital infostorm. It's a piece that sits right in that overlap between the personal and the digital, and it won the international Karl Sczuka Grant Prize 2023 for experimental Soundart.

Jones is a sound artist whose work explores listening, the sea, and change, and babblesnatch fits into that broader interest in how we hear and what we pay attention to. Rather than a performance you sit through from start to finish, it's an installation you can step into and spend as much time with as you like.

The installation is open from 11am to 5pm on Thursday 22, Friday 23, and Saturday 24 October, so you've got three days to catch it at your own pace. Entry is free.