When Robert Moog (it rhymes with “vogue”) unveiled the Moog synthesiser to the world in 1964, he not only radically changed music, but culture itself.’
The greatest pioneer of electronic music wasn’t a musician, but an eccentric physicist with a longstanding love of taking things apart and putting them back together again. ‘The butterflies-inducing bassline on Donna Summer’s I Feel Love, the unmistakable melody wiggling through New Order’s Blue Monday, the sound of the Millennium Falcon taking off in Star Wars, the sounds of the guns in the new Star Trek movies, most of Kraftwerk’s seminal 1974 album Autobahn and a pretty much endless list of other game changing songs and records from the last four decades all share one thing. The Moog Sound Lab is focused on organic experimentation and is a unique opportunity for artists to explore analog sound-scaping, synthesis and effects. Supersonic Festival is delighted to be partnering with the internationally renowned Moog Sound Lab and Birmingham City University to create a four week artist residents programme, which will be based at the Parkside campus. The piece is impressive, says Coates, because El-Dabh “was alone in his pursuits and without the surrounding support system of a pervading international art scene”.Hosted at Birmingham City University, in partnership with the Supersonic Festival and Moog Music Inc. He then re-recorded it and added effects, reversed it and generally exploited the malleability of the recorded sound. The Symphony of Factory Sirens is a reproduction of an original performance by the Russian composer Arseny Avraamov, who is considered to be the first person to conceive that music did not have to come from a traditional orchestra and could, in fact, come from the sounds of factories, warships or cannons.Įl-Dabh’s piece is the manipulated recording of a za’ar (religious possession) ceremony in Cairo on a wire recorder (a precursor to the tape recorder). It is pieces such as this, Coates continues, as well as the intriguing Symphony of Factory Sirens and Halim El-Dabh’s The Expression of Za’ar that make this exhibition an introduction to sound art and an attempt to explain its function as a genre. I didn’t think there was any way of getting it in the show, but at the last minute, he replied to my emails and so we included it.” “For sound art, I Am Sitting in a Room is equivalent to Picasso’s Weeping Woman in the history of painting,” he says. Simon Coates, the curator and the gallery manager at Ductac, says as much in his introductory essay for the show and then further explains its significance. Lucier, who stutters and is attempting a kind of speech therapy as well as art, is considered a pioneer for this groundbreaking piece – and the effect of the aural decay is slow but compelling. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.” He explains the purpose of it within the piece: “What you will hear, then,” he says, “are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. Lucier is an American composer who, in 1969, conducted an experiment with his speaking voice, repeating the same sentence continually in a room until the resonant frequencies of that room completely distorted his voice.
The longest, most compelling piece is Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room.
There are pieces of vintage furniture from J+A design gallery placed in the space to allow you comfort while listening. The works vary in length from four to 45 minutes, meaning this is not an exhibition you can rush. Most of the pieces are on a tablet device that you pick up upon entering and can select at will. This is Peace in an Open Space, the first exhibition dedicated solely to sound art in the UAE and it runs at the Gallery of Light in Dubai’s Community Theatre & Arts Centre (Ductac) in Mall of the Emirates until the end of the weekend. It is part history lesson, part art exhibition and a fully immersive experience for the senses. Finally, you can travel to 2006 and listen to an eerily hypnotic piece of musical art made from the electronic pulses of the billboards in New York’s Times Square. In the space of two hours, you can go from the sounds of an alternative orchestra made from the sirens of factories in Moscow, played during the sixth anniversary celebrations of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Red Square, to religious ritual music recorded in Cairo in the 1940s.