A Sensation Never Yet Known

A Sensation Never Yet Known is a new film work by Luke Fowler exploring the ongoing history of electronic music in Scotland. Fowler’s film combines footage of recent workshops led by Glasgow Library of Synthesised Sound (GLOSS) with explorations of the practice of UK composer Janet Beat, an electronic and electro-acoustic music pioneer.

In material sourced from an interview with Fowler, Janet vividly recalls her earliest memories of sound and her experiences of being doubly marginalised as a woman musician in a then-male-dominated field and a composer of electronic music at a time when it was viewed with suspicion by the musical establishment, including the Musicians’ Union.

The project is informed by Fowler’s collaboration with GLOSS and with University of Glasgow musician-researchers Louise Harris and Kevin Leomo. Drawing on their respective practices, Fowler traces aesthetic and historical resonances between music made today and Janet’s use of electronic instruments and experimentation with techniques such as visual scores. Extending Fowler’s long-standing interest in how cultural and political figures of the 1960s and 1970s are remembered, A Sensation Never Yet Known also reflects his own practice as a musician and an artist-filmmaker.


A Sensation Never Yet Known: Symposium & Screenings

Hunterian Art Gallery, 5.30pm,
Wed 17 June
FREE

This is to share details of an upcoming Thinking Culture event, exploring themes in Luke Fowler’s current exhibition at Glasgow Library of Synthesized Sound which is part of GI 2026. The event will include screenings of three works by Luke that focus on musicians, and contributions from speakers with expertise in histories of electronic music, technology and voice.

Booking and further info here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-sensation-never-yet-known-symposium-tickets-1991194821312

Louise Harris is an electronic and audiovisual composer, and Professor of Audiovisual Composition at The University of Glasgow. She specialises in the creation and exploration of audiovisual relationships utilising electronic music, recorded sound and computer-generated visual environments. Louise’s work encompasses fixed media, live performance and large-scale installation pieces, with a recent research strand specifically addressing Expanded Audiovisual Formats (EAF). Her work has been performed and exhibited nationally and internationally, including recent commissions from Cryptic and The Lighthouse, Sanctuary and the Plenty? Festival. Harris’s book Composing Audiovisually, a monograph on audiovisual composition, was published by Routledge in July 2021.

Claire M. Holdsworth is a writer, archivist and audio-maker. Specialising in sound theory, artists’ moving image (1960s to late 1980s), and technology-based art, her research considers the voice, investigating narration, historiography, archives, and social collectives, with a focus on feminist and queer subjects. Claire was an Early Career Research Fellow at Kingston School of Art (Kingston University London) and prior to that completed an AHRC-funded PhD at Central Saint Martins (UAL) based in the British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection in the CSM Museum.

Frances Morgan is a writer and researcher with a focus on auditory culture, instrument studies and histories of electronic sound and music. Their writing on music, film and art has appeared in The Wire, Sight & Sound and the London Review of Books. Frances's PhD at the Royal College of Art, supported by the Science Museum, addressed the historiography of electronic music through a study of the EMS Synthi 100 synthesizer. They are the former chair of the Daphne Oram Trust, a charitable trust set up to preserve and promote the legacy of the British composer and inventor Daphne Oram. Frances is currently a Research Fellow at University of Huddersfield working on the Amplification Project, a major research project focusing on amplification technologies and amplified sound.