The Sonic Atelier #8 – A Conversation with Rafiq Bhatia (and Son Lux)
(2025)
Francesca Guccione
This exposition is part of the series The Sonic Atelier – Conversations with Contemporary Composers and Producers, dedicated to exploring the evolving role of the composer in the twenty-first century. Through a Q&A format, the project investigates how contemporary creators inhabit hybrid identities at the intersection of composition, performance, production, and technology.
This interview features Rafiq Bhatia, American guitarist, composer, and producer, and member of the experimental trio Son Lux. Bhatia’s work dissolves the boundaries between jazz, electronic, and contemporary classical music, exploring sound as a sculptural and spatial material. His practice embodies a deep integration of composition, production, and performance—where the studio becomes an instrument, and the act of shaping sound is inseparable from the act of composing.
In the conversation, Bhatia reflects on the interdependence between the roles of composer, performer, and producer, on the DAW as a generative and compositional environment, and on the emergence of sonic identity through timbre, space, and texture. He discusses collaboration within Son Lux, his process of scoring for film, and the relationship between abstraction and precision in communicating musical ideas to orchestras and ensembles.
Bhatia’s reflections reveal an artistic vision in which technology and human expression coexist symbiotically: music as a living, evolving ecosystem of gestures, resonances, and spaces—an art of listening, translation, and transformation.
Sett fra et sted, utviklet fra et punkt
(2025)
Annika Borg
A dice roll is the very image of randomness. Every day since September 1, 1994, I have rolled a set of six dice, written down the number combinations and collected the numerical material in an ever-growing physical archive. The project is entitled "one and one hundred dice rolls a day". I use this numerical material as a starting point for transformations by translating each number, 1 to 6, into one sign, shape, sound or word, and by creating rules for how these translations will be used further. This method shapes the concrete outcomes and results in series or other forms of progressions and connections. What unites the different sub-projects that stem from the dice roll project is an exploration of the inherent nature of this special material and its potential for form, expression, and visibility, as well as a fascination with the diversity and variations generated, and with results I cannot fully predict. In this exposition, I will describe, make visible, and reflect on the working method, process, and the development of the formal language and expressions that have emerged from this ongoing, and in many ways interconnected, artistic project. The project is seen from a place (that of me, the artist's perspective) and is developed from a point (the dice rolls with dots representing numbers).