Sonica: Enlightened Sound @ The Whisky Bond, 16 Nov

Entering the almost-bare warehouse room containing the installation by Steev Livingstone (Errors), called The Last Pigeons, the viewer is faced with two square pillars, each with a reel-to-reel tape machine placed in front of it on a concrete plinth. The tape runs between the machines, playing field recordings sourced inside the Whisky Bond building before its renovation began (or at least, that is the impression that Livingstone is attempting to convey). The tape bisects the space – it looks like it has been left running in an empty room, and the noises – the fluttering of wings, soft cooing, the clanks and scrapes of distant movement, traffic sounds – echo eerily around the space. The tape reels give the impression of recording, rather than playing back – it is as though this one room of the six-storey industrial building has been set aside for posterity, trapped in time. As the rest of the building is converted into a plush, cross-platform multi-media centre, Livingstone chooses to invert the process, recreating a moment where the building was just dust, space and feathers. It's effective, if incredibly minimalistic.

The unwieldy title of Meta-Musique: Composition with Breeze Blocks, by Raydale Dower (Tut Vu Vu), promises more than it delivers, although the aforementioned concrete blocks are very much in evidence. On the first level of the installation, they are equidistant from one another, in equally-sized square piles, each pile bathed in a single, dim spotlight. A pipe, leading down from the upper floor, is intended to pump in 'found sounds' from the rest of the building – but these are inaudible, thanks to the three other sound exhibits on the same floor. This means that, unfortunately, Dower's first room does just look like a storage place for breeze blocks. Up on the floor above, the blocks are positioned in more interesting geometric patterns and shapes, almost like a game of IRL Tetris left abandoned by bored builders. At the far end of the wall, a mural depicts a figure in repose, next to a pile of similar-looking breeze blocks, painted as screens. Whether the mural is part of the installation or a remnant of the graffiti leftover from the building's abandoned phase is unclear – but it adds character to the otherwise cold and rather flat installation.

Moving into another large, rectangular warehouse room, you encounter a gentle cacophony of pre-recorded found sounds – clanking pipes; scraping white noise and static; a low bass hum; a xylophone-esque melodic note, repeated, and subtle, half-heard pops and clicks. These are issuing from six turntables, positioned in the centre of the room, almost like altars. The scene looks like an abandoned rave. To this reviewer's utter delight and joy, the turntables are playing locked grooves of 'musique concrete' recordings – industrial sounds recorded and looped, and lovingly cut to 180-gram vinyl. By circling the room and carefully placing the needle onto the next locked groove – each record contains six – you interact with the exhibit in a very real and thrilling way. Ambient soundscapes coalesce and decohere as the loops overlap and repeat, and from the noise emerge trace elements of avant-garde dance music – that metallic 'clink' paired with that particular wooden 'thunk' suddenly sounds like a nascent 2-step rhythm; switch grooves again and it becomes proto-techno. The most impressive and interactive of the four installations, this was a triumph of a piece, using both the space, the technology and the Whisky Bond's unique, echoing acoustics to intriguing effect. Top marks go to Richard McMaster (Silk Cut) and Tom Marshallsay (Dam Mantle) for this absolutely spellbinding work, Untitled Turntable Installation.

Finally, the smallest exhibit – a screen, projecting the delicate, beautifully-realised greyscale science fiction animations of Tom Scholefield (Konx-om-Pax). Drawing on the mellower, more ambient tracks from his excellent Planet Mu album Regional Surrealism, he has created a looped, animated space-scape which perfectly complements his sparse, beautiful music. We start on the edge of a futuristic city, the camera panning past sculpted, angular buildings and up into a starlit sky. There we join a spaceship, perhaps an alien, or perhaps both – its shape evoking 1950s flying saucers but trailing delicate, frond-like tentacles behind it. The ship-creature ascends into the sky and the camera follows behind, tracing its path across a rocky lunar landscape, and then to the edge of another impossible, futuristic city. This time, the vista of the city is stunningly backdropped by a rotating gas giant with wide, concentric rings. The music pulses and shimmers in sympathetic time with both the spinning planet and the gently undulating tentacles of the spaceship. It is, quite frankly, astonishing, and shows why Scholefield is so in-demand as a video director, animator and producer.  

An exhibit of two halves, then – despite some unrealised potential in Dower and Livingstone's pieces, Enlightened Sound is still a fitting testament to the strong relationship between art and music in Glasgow. [Bram E. Gieben]