Description of the Venue
A large granite space. Dark. Wet. Water drips from holes high up on the walls; some runs in streams down the gray-green rocks; pooling on the floor. There is some light, distant, filtered through many reflections of sunlight from rock to rock along the passageway that leads inside here.
In the centre of the floor there is a box, also made of granite, but lined with wood; red cherry compartments; there are felt bags in each compartment. The box contains a collection of hand-made microphones - each one the size of a large outstretched hand. They are all fashioned of wood and aluminium with gold and brass wire grates where the air moves through.
Beside the box is a sound-board, old fashioned, with large rotary knobs for faders and big transformer cages on the inputs. I take the microphones out of the box, one by one and lay them on the damp floor. Then I hook them to the sound-board with cable. There's a speaker system; difficult to see in the gloom; each speaker is tuned to resonate in different frequency ranges - some low and basey, others high.
The sound is feedback. I turn up the knobs one by one, just to the threshold of feedback, so that any small noise - the shuffling of someone's feet, a cough, a nervous laugh - will trigger wandering tones that resonate in the space. |
