REVIEW: Lost Communications, Sheffield Playhouse
LOST Communications is an extraordinary techno music and video experience.
Described as an ongoing project that explores the communication and cognition amongst non-human living creatures, it certainly challenges your senses.
Creators An-Ting and Ian Gallagher say there is a light and darkness in nature that civilisation has made people numb to, and that's what they want to explore.
Ian and An-Ting started by travelling to various locations on foot, recording sounds, and investigating how people could co-exist with nature in a world seemingly dominated by globalisation.
Their journey led them to experience the mystery of consciousness triggered by Ayahuasca in Iquitos, Peru, and they were struck by the Mongolian nomads' ability to blend traditional lifestyles with modern adaptations, while maintaining harmony with nature.
"In the reindeer mountains, the forest inhabited by Mongolia's indigenous people was the most untouched place we had ever encountered, " they say on their website.
"Several different places in China still retain the ways to live closely intertwined with nature and people there can capture the communication with nature and spirits.”
It may sound pretentious but it's other-worldly qualities suck you in and makes you think.
And they've created some banging music, too.
Bird song and animal calls abound alongside AI images as they try to get the audience to communicate with themselves.
They say the project this is “just the beginning.
“The project holds boundless potential for exploration, and we have much more to share.”
Sound as data and information, sound as music and meaning, is all intertwined.
A fascinating, almost addictive, night in the theatre.