From the opening event with Young British Artist wunderkind Dinos Chapman, to a history-making closing show featuring Buchla synthesiser legend Suzanne Ciani in her Scottish debut performance, the ninth edition of the biennial festival for curious minds and adventurous spirits reflects Sonica’s world class reputation as a leading agent in audiovisual art and experimental music.

Showcasing over 170 artists and musicians from 21 countries across the globe, this year’s 11-day festival will transform historic mansions, churches, galleries, and hidden spaces across the city with international premieres, UK premieres and landmark live performances from internationally acclaimed artists working at the intersection of music, technology and visual art.

At the heart of Sonica 2026 is The Listening House at Pollok House, a unique festival-within-a-festival taking over the grand 18th-century mansion, prior to its reopening following major restoration works since 2023. Across three floors of rooms and into the gardens, audiences will encounter singing sculptures, wandering sonic experiments, mechanical birds, audiovisual environments and immersive installations.

In another first for Sonica Festival, installations will take over spaces in the city centre’s Buchanan Galleries shopping centre, including Rachel Maclean’s major new AI-driven commission They’ve Got Your Eyes, surprise robotic sculptures that follow shoppers, and meditative experiences. These four artworks will take shoppers out of their expected reality, asking them to pause, consider or listen.

This year’s festival marks a milestone for Sonica, featuring its first-ever commissioned works: Rachel Maclean’s They’ve Got Your Eyes, co-commissioned by FACT Liverpool, and Martin Green’s Folding Songs, co-produced by Cryptic and Perth Theatre and Concert Hall. In Folding Songs, acclaimed accordionist and sonic innovator Martin Green collaborates with Svetlana Spajić, one of Serbia’s most revered traditional singers and a guardian of ancient Balkan song, for a powerful meeting of contemporary composition and deep-rooted tradition.

Other highlights across the eleven-day festival include Paraorchestra and Charles Hazlewood performing Steve Reich’s iconic Music for 18 Musicians in Glasgow for the first time in over a decade; Lyra Pramuk’s visionary choral-electronic performance Hymnal; a transcendent live performance from experimental drone choir NYX inside St Ninian’s Church; globally renowned collective AES+F transforming mediaeval imagery of the “world turned upside down” into grotesque contemporary tableaux; Konx-om-Pax creating an environment where visitors can see sound through colour and light; and sound artist Brian d’Souza turning plants and fungi into collaborators in ambient electronic music. Plus, for 2026, Cryptic Artist Su Shaw, AKA SHHE, joins as a guest programmer.

This year’s edition places a particular emphasis on listening itself: to hidden systems, to fragile ecologies, to overlooked voices and to sounds generated from unexpected sources. Throughout the programme, artists transform plants, trees, underwater life, discarded technologies and invisible cosmic phenomena into instruments, collaborators and performers, asking audiences to reconsider where sound comes from and who or what gets heard.

As the festival’s Listening House, Pollok House has stood for nearly three centuries, but never before has it hosted anything like this: a living environment of sonic experiments, interactive artworks and uncanny encounters unfolding across every floor and into the gardens. Among the artists occupying Pollok House are internationally celebrated collective AES+F, whose monumental video installation Mundus Inversus updates mediaeval imagery of the world turned upside down for an age of grotesque inequality and social collapse. To an eerie classical soundtrack, riot police embrace protesters, pigs slaughter butchers and the wealthy receive alms from the poor, in a stately and darkly comic meditation on power and submission.

Also inside Pollok House, Cryptic Artist and musician Konx-om-Pax – aka Tom Scholefield – presents Colour Sound, an immersive installation shaped by his experience of synaesthesia. Inspired by the experiments of early modernist artists who sought visual equivalents for music, visitors enter a shifting landscape of reactive colour, sound and light which changes according to movement, interaction and digital manipulation. 

The Listening House also includes Plants Can Dance by sound artist and DJ Brian d’Souza, also known as Auntie Flo, where plants and fungi become co-composers through biosonification technologies translating environmental signals into slowly evolving modular synth compositions. Visitors might also discover sculptural works in the gardens responding to movement, or flocks of hanging birds activated into improvised composition by audience interaction.

Elsewhere, Dutch artist Thomas Ankersmit presents the UK premiere of The Tcherepnin Series, a live performance and homage to legendary synthesiser designer Serge Tcherepnin using rare archival Serge Modular systems whose sonic possibilities still seem radically futuristic half a century after their invention.

In the city centre, the Buchanan Galleries become home to four interactive artworks, including CREW’s The Unheard, whose wandering robotic bullhorns tag along with passersby, join crowds, or park up near individuals through the shopping centre. Also within the bustling centre, shoppers can find a moment of calm through Transvision, from artists ‘delatere’, where audiences are invited to lie down with eye masks to experience the meditative sensory installation. In adjacent shop units, audiences can watch Rachel Maclean’s They’ve Got Your Eyes, a film that looks at both today’s fascination with AI and the Victorian era’s love of invention; and participate in Esther Kehinde Ajayi’s installation Sonic units “Rehumanise me” Collection, where audience members influence a series of loudhailers as they emit unexpectedly soothing ambient tones and murmurs.

In Offline, Glasgow, another highlight of the festival takes place: Ceci est Mon Coeur (This is My Heart) from artists BLIESBRO, where audience members wear illuminating capes and headsets that light up progressively as a narrative of love and self-acceptance is told amid a swirl of healing, energising light projections.

Throughout Sonica 2026 audiences will also encounter participatory works that challenge conventional distinctions between spectator and performer. In Ceci est Mon Coeur, audience members wear illuminated capes and headsets as they move through a shared narrative of healing and self-acceptance surrounded by immersive projections. Transvision invites participants to lie blindfolded in a circle while hypnotic sound environments unfold around them. Elsewhere, visitors can activate sculptural birds into collective composition, influence responsive loudspeaker installations, or wander freely through live performances where sound shifts according to movement and proximity.

From modular synthesisers and AI-generated worlds to singing plants, submerged ecosystems and cosmic radiation translated into sound, Sonica 2026 presents a city alive with hidden signals, strange voices and transformed ways of listening.

Cryptic’s founding Artistic Director Cathie Boyd said: “We are thrilled for audiences to discover this year’s Sonica Glasgow festival. From Paraorchestra’s extraordinary performance of Reich’s monumental Music for 18 Musicians, to the transformative experience of BLIESBRO’s Ceci est Mon Coeur, this year’s programme is filled with powerful and unforgettable experiences. A thrilling first for Sonica, we are proud to present two major commissions from the visionary Rachel Maclean and the remarkable Martin Green. Sonica continues to transform the city through sound and vision, and we are especially excited to collaborate with Buchanan Galleries for the first time, alongside the privilege of creating our Listening House within the beautiful surroundings of Pollok House. Above all, we are proud to present the highest quality audiovisual work from exceptional artists from both Scotland and around the globe whose work challenges perceptions, sparks imagination and truly ravishes the senses.”

Baillie Annette Christie, Chair of Glasgow Life and City Convener for Culture, Sport and International Relations said: “The programme reveal for Sonica 2026 will help build the growing sense of anticipation for the festival’s return in September. Tramway will once again be one of the core venues for the 11 day festival that includes the most exciting homegrown and global audio-visual and experimental music artists for unforgettable performances, premieres and unique collaboration. Sonica continues to support and help develop artistic practice and bring it to appreciative audiences and I can’t wait to see some of the programme when the festival gets underway.”

Sonica 2026 venues include: Pollok House (The Listening House), Buchanan Galleries, Tramway, St Ninian’s church, 25PES,  Glad Cafe, Rutherglen Old Parish, Offline Glasgow, The Hunterian, with more to be announced soon. The festival will showcase a breadth of Scottish talent as well as hosting exceptional international artists from Belgium, France, Germany, Georgia, Iran, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malta, Morocco, Myanmar, Netherlands, Philippines, Poland, Québec, Serbia, Switzerland, Turkey, USA and more.

Festival passes will be available offering discounted tickets to Tramway performances, and access to free tickets for all other venue performances. Festival passes and general tickets will go on sale in the early summer, with news coming soon. All installations are free.