Taking place June 14 through June 16, this years Barcelona based Sónar festival will mark 25 years of the event, and they are celebrating in a big way.
Following a first transmission which sent music from Nina Kraviz, Laurent Garnier, Ólafur Arnalds and Kode 9, Sónar will send a second transmission with another 20 pieces of music to Luytens Star b, a potentially habitable exoplanet that is 12.4 light years from Earth (120,000,000,000 km).
The 20 recordings will be made up of 17 known artists as well as three competition winners which were chosen from around 400 entries.
The project is titled ‘Sónar Calling GJ273b Control Room by Absolut’ and is in collaboration with the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia and the EISCAT antenna in Tromsø, Norway, which is where the transmission will be broadcast from.
Split across three separate transmissions, which will be sent 14, 15 and 16th May 2018, one month before the Sónar festival.
Artists:
Agoria
Ah! Kosmos
Alva Noto
Choi Sai Ho
Cora Novoa
Daedelus
Daito Manabe
Desert
Juana Molina
Kate Tempest
LCC
Lorenzo Senni
Niño de Elche
Ryoji Ikeda
Squarepusher
Yuzo Koshiro
Zora Jones
Competition Winners:
Nisa Pujol Masiá
Pavel Apisov
Dark Keteleš
Sónar said: “To celebrate its 25th year, Sónar has decided to reverse its role, switching from radar to antenna. This is how the Sonar Calling project GJ273b was born in which a quarter of a century of musical exploration will be condensed and sent it into space, specifically to the exoplanet Luyten Star b, with the objective of making first human contact with an extra-terrestrial intelligence.”
You can find more information on the project and on Sónar by visiting their website HERE.