Following the debut electronic music concert series Sustain-Delay, artistic director KURT BUTTIGIEG sat down with James Cummings to discuss the importance of challenges, community and building a legacy.

This week saw the first concert of the Malta Society of Arts Sustain-Delay programme, a series of six innovative electronic music performances running until October.

From medieval instruments to cutting-edge synthesisers and even the transformation of organic components into sound, the programme presents an intriguing collection of unique concerts featuring pairings of local and international artists.

For artistic director Kurt Buttigieg, Sustain-Delay is about challenging not just audiences’ perspectives of music and how it is created, but also the artists themselves.

“We wanted to have a theme for each night to make sure there’s a curatorial direction for the sound, which is something that doesn’t often happen in Malta,” he explained.

“But we also wanted to provide a challenge, not a hostile challenge, but one which in many cases has been welcomed by artists as an opportunity to build something together on a particular theme.”

On Thursday, the series kicked off with a triple bill appropriately titled Music from Stones and Plants, headlined by Italian duo Molom.

The performance saw the pair create music while sculpting a familiar raw material, Maltese limestone, with each chisel strike and hammer blow sampled and terraformed in real-time into a musical landscape.

The concert also saw opening artist Alien Montesin drawing on sounds from nature in a live DJ mix and producer Naqara fusing plant-sourced sounds with ambient and intelligent dance music (IDM).

Buttigieg explained how, for this first outing, he wanted to “highlight the elements around us: the natural world − w which in some cases is under threat − and Maltese stone, which is ever-present here”.

Noting how the performance encapsulated the philosophy of the year’s programme, Buttigieg emphasised the importance of bringing together “visual, cultural and auditory aspects in one piece”, a concept that is familiar to the artistic director.

The panoply of the possibilities of sound is what I think is exciting about this programme- Kurt Buttigieg

After reading for a master’s degree in sound art from the University of Barcelona, Buttigieg moved to Brussels, where he curated exhibitions for the European Parliament in addition to organising concerts and workshops and running his own music label.

And over the past 20 years, he has released several works as an artist and musician, both on his own and collaboratively, as well as creating Malta’s first dedicated sound art installation.

However, it is a sense of community that really drives him, something he hopes Sustain-Delay will both strengthen and contribute to.

“The most important part of this programme is to create a legacy, because without a legacy of some form, art is useless,” he emphasised.

“This could mean translating artistic ideas into audiences, but more importantly creating a community of people who will attend these kinds of concerts and be inspired to give it a go.

“I want to help create, in the small capacity I can, the next generation of people who might have more open ideas in their approach to sound.”

This is an aim which is particularly relevant to electronic music, and part of a decades-long genre-wide mission to take the art form out of clubs and into the concert hall.

While electronic music has long been mainly associated with raves, Buttigieg is keen to emphasise there is a “huge spectrum of what electronic music can be.” 

And this year he hopes to demonstrate how the manipulation of sounds from a sculpture being made, for example, are as much a part of electronic music as the offerings played in clubs. 

“The panoply of the possibilities of sound is what I think is exciting about this programme,” he said.

Creating new possibilities is also behind Buttigieg’s decision to invite international artists to perform alongside local artists in the series, pairings he said, “sometimes create friction, but more often than not create more understanding”.

Describing the local scene as “quite particular”, he said he had encountered significant curiosity from foreign artists about the Maltese scene, adding it was “not particularly difficult to find someone who wants to play in Malta”.

This year will also see Buttigieg take part in another Malta Society of Arts concert series Con_Tempo taking place from March to December, but on that occasion as a performer.

And while Sustain-Delay focuses on electronic and experimental music, its sister programme explores more classical and contemporary music, with a focus on twentieth century chamber repertoire.

What does he think is one of the main differences when approaching electronic music when compared to learning a traditional instrument?

“When you have a classical instrument, there's a lot of learning how to do something in the correct manner, and there are traditional and well-established means of learning them. With electronic music, everyone comes from different directions,” Buttigieg explained.

“There’s more of a composing element with electronic musicians, and the assumption you're going to press a button and the computer is going to do everything for you is completely wrong,” he said.

“You have a wider range of possibilities, but you have to know how to use them, or they can very quickly become overwhelming.”

However, Buttigieg is keen to stress that the most important thing is how the music is interpreted by an audience.

“Even though we're using different techniques, visuals and ways of working, I think ultimately it's what you the listener manages to get out of it,” he said.

“It’s the space it creates in your head and in your heart.”