Edinburgh Fringe Fest - SAD

Propelled by personal experience of loss, SAD is a musically driven experience, blending poetry with recordings of real people’s stories to explore how grief affects the human condition, and how sound can be healing. Inspiration for the project came when artist Quiet Boy lost his mum, and the music he composed at the time to help process his grief.

We spoke to Quiet Boy about making the show

Tell us a bit about your show

SAD is a gig-theatre show about music, grief and healing. It’s a contemporary electronic classical composition with live music and performance, poignant, funny, insightful recorded voices exploring loss, journeying towards a crescendo of light, joy and hope.

Why do you think that sound can be healing?

When we listen to beautiful music, it can make us feel less alone. And there’s even been scientific studies that suggest that music regulates our emotions and releases anti-stress hormones. I feel that when we’re listening to music that we love, we’re relating to an emotional journey.

My mum died in 2018. Composing SAD helped me to access my emotions, instead of locking them away.

When I’m making music, I come up with a palette of sounds - a bit like how a painter has a palette of colours - and each has their own texture and tone. Whilst grieving my mum, every feeling in my body was made into a sound, and that’s what the composition of SAD is built on. Putting down this musical blueprint of grief became a route out of a dark place, and into something more hopeful.

The amazing thing about music is there is a beginning, middle and end, and it travels. I think it helps us because the emotions move instead of becoming stagnant and more painful. They move through you and you’ll know that by the end of the song, you’ll feel differently to how you felt at the start.

That’s what good music can do, especially live music. The shared union. It offers a window where you can pendulum between somebody else’s experience and your own. There’s time for you to reflect and for the audience to exist only in the music, and in that release there is transformation.

What would you like the audience to take away from your show?

Grief and cycles is something we all share. We all have to go through it, and it doesn’t mean that it has to be a lonely place.

How is the show immersive?

SAD is immersive because it’s a guided audio journey that offers the audience time to look inwards.

It’s a sound hug in gig-form. The audience will bathe in light and the music is designed to help us access the deeper feelings we might have towards big life events.

SAD is a magical experience for sure.

What are you most looking forward to about Edinburgh Fringe?

Having a pint after the show at Summerhall! Connecting with friends, old and new, and having beautiful, rich conversations with lovely people about human things. Eating amazing food at the iconic Mosque Kitchen. Hanging out at the Gallery bar at Summerhall - the coffee’s so good it makes you wiggle. And watching as much music and Fringe theatre as possible.

SAD will be performed at 3pm at Summerhall (Anatomy Lecutre Theatre) from 2 – 13 August. Book here https://festival23.summerhall.co.uk/events/sad/