|
|
 |
| |
Now everyone is playing the Roundhouse |
An ear for the everyday music
VICTORIAN steampunk” is how Talking Heads’ founder David Byrne describes his latest musical project at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm. A flute-twiddling Beelzebub snake-charming an elephant, as conducted by David Lynch, might be more on the money.
The cast-iron pillars, water pipes and other structural effects of the converted engine shed have been hooked up to an old pump organ via a spaghetti junction jumble of wires and tubes.
Aspiring players queue to “play the building” and produce the clacks, whirrs, groans, hoots and rattles that swirl around the auditorium space. The sounds evoked do not reveal any skill or intent: they might be dashing off a Rachmaninov concerto or blindly bashing the keys.
Is this a truly egalitarian approach to music or is it too arbitrary to deserve the title “music” at all? When people talk about “feeling the music” here they are usually hugging pillars.
Perhaps more impressive than the results are the methods Byrne employs: blowers (wind), oscillating motors (vibration) and solenoids (striking) produce the strange cacophony.
Those musicians who yearn for a little more control over this creative process can bring their own instruments and “jam with the building” any Thursday evening until the end of August.
After a while, the atonal morass starts to overwhelm. Madness seems a possibility.
But on the tube at Chalk Farm, the roars and beeps of the underground sound somehow different. All of a sudden, in the whine of an elevator and the rumble of a train, you can hear music.
SIMON WROE
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
