Four cars are backed up opposite each other in an underground car park, the heavy techno-donk-skronk music pummelling the walls as a gang of youths dance sullenly in the neon. Wait, one of them is a mid-sixties rave casualty in spangly trousers. And, more to the point, wasn’t this a nice little exhibition at the Barbican five minutes ago? How did this happen, and why aren’t I on drugs? Or at least, better drugs than antihistamines.
The Barbican is always a joy for its retro-future chic, and this extends winningly into the Feel the Sound exhibition, which is part of a broader season called Frequencies: The Sounds That Shape Us. Yes, everything they do has echoes of school lecture films from the 1970s about the coming computer age, or a Marshall McLuhan theory. The whole building is like an early David Cronenberg film set — you half expect to be attacked by a mutant woman with a talking venereal disease. So Feel the Sound is pleasingly on brand, with its retro font, and determination to meld analogue fun with AI tech as it seeks to make noise physical.
Touchy, feely, trippy…
The idea is that we feel sound as much as we hear it, and indeed have our own sounds as humans, which can shape the environments we’re in. While Resonant Frequencies by Evan Ifekoya was a little woo-woo for my tastes — pledging that by sitting in its rumble and committing to “intentional listening” we can heal ourselves (it’s going to need a lot more than that methinks) — it quickly establishes itself as good exhibition for kids: very tactile, with platforms to stand on which send music vibrating through your body, CGI dance moves to copy on a giant screen, and small instruments to play which activate with motion sensors.
Although I was told off for touching a grey rope-lantern thing to active one device. “But the diagram says I should,” I whined, pointing to the illustration on the wall of a hand reaching for the grey rope-lantern thing. “You’re supposed to just hover your hand over it,” retorted the Barbican guy and fair enough, it did say that underneath. But come on, if we can touch one thing, we can touch them all, surely?
One part particularly hard not to touch was Forever Frequencies by a collective called Domestic Data Streamers, in which little mechanical music boxes played tunes that had been created by generative AI from the direction of different artists. So the artists would answer questions about their favourite musical memory and a musical moment that would complete their life story, and the answers would be fed into an AI program, which would then translate that into a melody. Potentially annoying but the tunes were lovely and eerily fit the memories described.
But all of this is a precursor to a winning finale set in the underground car park. You have to leave the Barbican, cross a road and enter the dingy parking spaces, and its here that the art really starts. Firstly, with an installation called Reflections of Being by electro musician and visual artist Max Cooper, which brings the inner thoughts of anonymous people to life. This is one of those occasions when you really have to sit on the exhibition benches for the full benefit. One in place, you feel the music pulse in time to a hyper-trippy film of end-of-2001 alien landscapes, quantum-level evolving blobs and cities torn apart by streams of random words, from which you start to pick out odd phrases: “sucker”, “breakdown”, “kill”. Or was this just my own conscience talking to me? Hard to decipher when it’s accompanied by a vibrating bassline which quakes and grabs your spine to rattle the tiny brain around in your skull.
The experience was like being trapped The Manchurian Candidate. Twenty minutes more of it and I’d have gone off to kill the President had the words told me to.
Rumble in the concrete jungle
After this serious feeling of the sound came the final car-rave. Joyride by Temporary Pleasure, another one of these collectives, who have put together a Y2K boy racer exhibit from the time when Max Power magazine was a thing. Basically it’s a scene from a Prodigy video where retro cars with sound systems in their boots pump out heavy dance music into the subterranean murk as pensioners and pimply kids bob and weave in the striplight glow. It’d be dangerously great if it wasn’t 11.40am on a Tuesday.
But these two final exhibits remain a fine ending to a fun exhibition, and in fact almost negate what preceded it by getting to the heart of what the exhibition is all about. Dancing. Feel the sound? Mate, been feeling it since Fantazia at Donnington, ’92.
Feel the Sound is at the Barbican until August 31
