Fort Process
Fort Process is an expansive multidisciplinary music and arts festival that takes place in the evocative spaces of Newhaven Fort in East Sussex. After an acclaimed, soldout debut in 2014 the festival is back for a second edition, with an extensive programme (in excess of 100 artists) featuring sitespecific sound installations, international musicians, talks, films, poetry and workshops.
The Fort Process experience is quite unlike any other: half the festivalgoers are hidden underground, making their way through a warren of tunnels to listen to performances in eerie chambers and bolt holes. Meanwhile, above ground the other half are roaming in and out of gun emplacements, radio shacks and laboratories on the fort’s ramparts.
Organisers Lost Property Arts Collective have aimed high with this year’s lineup they have worked with the Sasakawa Foundation to bring two renowned Japanese musicians Toshimaru Nakamura and Seijiro Murayama over to the UK especially for the festival.
In the fort’s Grand Magazine, a very resonant bunker where the armaments were once kept, the German composer and percussionist Limpe Fuchs will hold court. Now in her mid70s, Limpe is a veteran of the nomadic experimental counterculture arts group Anima; she will be bringing to the fort the handbuilt largescale instruments she crafts from granite, scrap metal and found objects.
In the corrugated steelclad Romney Hut the French inventor and trumpeter Pierre Bastien will perform with his musicmaking kinetic sculptures. Musical automata will also feature in Sarah Angliss’ performance and a space housing the Mechanical Techno alchemist Graham Dunning, creating an event populated, in part, by sentient machines.
Movement is explored as a significant theme of this year’s Fort Process. Alongside the contraptions mentioned above, emphasis has been placed on the curation of ‘sound and moving image’ the festival will be presenting Sculpture’s zoetropic turntablism, the expanded 16mm horrorcinema of Sally Golding, and an installation by Dutch artist Mariska de Groot that explores optophonics with her analog ‘lighttosound’ instruments.
