Faster Than Sound :: Bentwaters Airbase :: June 9, 2007 :: 6 pm - midnight.

Faster Than Sound is a sound experiment joining the dots between musical genres and digital art forms. Following its launch in June 2006, FTS returns to the cold war environment of Bentwaters airbase for more sonic exploration. Artists from a wide variety of backgrounds will collaborate and explore the worlds of electronic music genres, contemporary classical practice and interactive visual arts. A range of immersive installations, musical collaborations, a wireless walk in the woods, illuminated cold war military buildings and a large dome filled with inspiring sounds will make this a day you won’t forget. Allow yourself to be transported and experience the unexpected.

Since its inception in 1948, the Aldeburgh Festival has been recognised as at the forefront of contemporary music, providing an international platform for both new music and new artistic ideas.

“In 1971 the pacifists Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears purchased the Chapel House in Horham, Suffolk because the noise from US fighters flying from the RAF Bentwaters base near Aldeburgh was disturbing Britten’s composing. It was in Horham he wrote his late works, Death in Venice, Phaedra and the Third String Quartet. Britten died in 1976, and RAF Bentwaters closed in 1993 at the end of the Cold War, after 43 years with a US presence on the base.

Now, in an inspiring example of ‘we have overcome’, Britten’s Aldeburgh Festival is reclaiming RAF Bentwater, and on Saturday the former Cold War base joins Snape Maltings, the Jubillee Hall, and Orford Church as a festival venue.” — On An Overgrown Path

The addition of Faster than Sound to the festival programme is a further example of this commitment, and of Aldeburgh’s ability not only to commission new work but to use its unique setting to present it in a different light. The Festival has always used a wide range of Suffolk venues, the latest being Bentwaters Airbase, which is close the Snape Maltings Concert Hall, the Festival’s main venue.