'Playing the Building', The Roundhouse

[major_clanger]

Last week tamaranth and I went to the Roundhouse to see David Byrne's 'Playing the Building' installation. An old organ was connected to a variety of servos placed so as to variously hit, vibrate or blow air whistles attached to bits of the Roundhouse - so, when you pressed a key on the organ, you were quite literally 'playing the building'. Although, as we were to find out, it wasn't quite as simple as that.

(Most of these pictures you can click on to see a larger version.)



Mid-afternoon on a Wednesday there wasn't too much of a queue, stretching only from the organ in the middle of the hall to the arena edge. Marshalling was very light, and it seemed that most people were content to play around for a couple of minutes and then hand over to the next person or group. This, plus the extremely atonal cacophony of taps, rattles and whistles filling the Roundhouse, should have been a hint that 'playing' the installation was perhaps less straightforward than one might think.









Certainly, as we waited it was noticeable that trying to work out what sort of noises where coming from where was a large part of the experience of trying to play - as well as a source of interest to everyone else!



As was the opportunity to photograph the Roundhouse itself.



After about half an hour we got to the front of the queue. The instructions were clear and simple, if not terribly helpful.



tamaranth sits down to perform...



The keyboard isn't much help, other than simple instructions such as 'Hit These Quickly'. It soon becomes clear when playing that there is no particular mapping of the keyboard to where the noises come from, or what they sound like. Actually 'playing' in terms of trying to produce something that sounds anything like music is a non-starter!



Nonetheless it's undeniable fun to sit at your steampunk organ console and produce an amazing cascade of noise. Mind you, as I said to T afterwards, I'm not convinced that it would have sounded much different if an army of carefully-hidden assistants had just watched us and hit the nearest bit of framework with a hammer every time we touched a key. I'm glad we went though - I'll certainly never look at the Roundhouse in the same way again.





All the pictures as a set.

Comments

[ms-cataclysm.livejournal.com]

squee !

I think that is the mot juste

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting this. I'm a big Byrne fan but I am still undecided as to whether to see this.

(The only time I have been to the roundhouse J was performing there!)