“Anyone who has ever played a piano,” Tom Waits declared in a recent interview, “would really like to hear how it sounds when dropped from a twelfth-floor window.”
Waits probably hasn’t heard of Raydale Dower, but if the gravel-voiced troubadour can bring his wonkily-inclined junkyard orchestra over to Tramway this week for the Glasgow-based artist and musician’s new three-dimensional audio-visual installation, he might just be able to find out. As its title suggests, Piano Drop is a Sensurround record of what happened when Dower let loose a winched-up keyboard from the venue’s ceiling, filming it as it smashed into a million match-stick size pieces.
The result, slowed down by up to forty times and relayed through a film loop and an ambisonic speaker arrangement, aims to enhance the hidden musicality of such a seemingly destructive action.
“It was a simple piece of musical curiosity,” Dower explains of Piano Drop’s roots, “just to explore the straightforward absurd and anarchic enjoyment of dropping a piano. It’s like a performance piece, but
without any performer, so it becomes this gesture. The only other way you could do something like this would be in a war-torn city, where you could push a piano off a building, but you’re not going to be able to document it in the same way. My sole interest was to find out what happened sonically if you dropped a piano. I just wanted to hear it.”
Enabled by a Creative Scotland Vital Spark award and with Tramway on board, Dower teamed up with Glasgow School of Art’s Digital Design Studio world renowned sonic consultants, ARUP Acoustics.
“That’s when it became a much bigger event,” Dower says. “Dropping a piano all happens in a few seconds, so you want to slow it down so you can witness it in full and explore the repercussions. So we brought in these really fast cameras that take a thousand frames a second. What’s funny is you start with an absurd proposition, and you end up with this near scientific documentation of what I think of as a sculptural composition.”
Both Waits’ comment and Dower’s action echo the words of proto Surrealist Tristan Tzara, who in 1918 grandly pronounced that ‘Musicians smash your instruments’. Other precedents come via Fluxus
artist Nam June Paik destroying a violin, Al Hansen’s similarly inclined Yoko Ono Piano Drop, and even Jimi Hendrix’s very public burning of his guitar. The Who’s Pete Townshend, meanwhile, had already looked to Gustav Metzger’s notions of auto-destructive art by reducing his own guitars to splinters.
Yet the smashed piano is also something of a slapstick staple. On more than one occasion in their prolific film career, iconic comedy double act Laurel and Hardy explored the perils of piano removal to hilarious effect. The appeal of watching buildings being demolished is another form of spectacle informing Piano Drop. Dower also mentions the power of dub reggae sound systems, the covers of classic Blue Note jazz albums and Samuel Beckett as influences on Piano Drop.
“Slowing sound down isn’t the same as slowing images down,” he says. “An image freezes, but with sound, you just get this kind of sub-atomic rumble. It’s like a catastrophe. You’re exploding the moment. Then when you see it at normal speed, it looks like a Charlie Chaplin film.”
Piano Drop isn’t Dower’s first artistic exploration of sound. His first solo show, On Memory and Chance, at Stirling’s Changing Room gallery in 2010, used chance compositions. Dower had also previously piled four pianos on top of each other at the Talbot Rice.
In terms of events, at last year’s Glasgow international Festival of Visual Art, Dower created Le Drapeau Noir, an ad hoc avant-garde social space that became the festival’s informal hub. Prior to this, Dower was bass player with Glasgow-based raw blues hollerers Uncle John & Whitelock, and currently provides clarinet and other noises for the more experimentally inclined Tut Vu Vu.
“I wanted to make a visual equivalent of music,” Dower says, “then I went to art school and came out with a bass guitar and started a band.”
Dower recently found out from his mother that, as a child, he couldn’t talk properly. To explain the world around him, he made noises, impersonating the sounds he heard around him. Dower may be
hyper-articulate today, but Piano Drop is a logical extension of his early behaviour.
“It should sound like an earthquake,” he says, “which is a fairly primitive thing to hear. I want it to have an impact.”
Piano Drop, Tramway, Glasgow, November 3-6
www.tramway.org
The Herald, November 1 2011
ends
Waits probably hasn’t heard of Raydale Dower, but if the gravel-voiced troubadour can bring his wonkily-inclined junkyard orchestra over to Tramway this week for the Glasgow-based artist and musician’s new three-dimensional audio-visual installation, he might just be able to find out. As its title suggests, Piano Drop is a Sensurround record of what happened when Dower let loose a winched-up keyboard from the venue’s ceiling, filming it as it smashed into a million match-stick size pieces.
The result, slowed down by up to forty times and relayed through a film loop and an ambisonic speaker arrangement, aims to enhance the hidden musicality of such a seemingly destructive action.
“It was a simple piece of musical curiosity,” Dower explains of Piano Drop’s roots, “just to explore the straightforward absurd and anarchic enjoyment of dropping a piano. It’s like a performance piece, but
without any performer, so it becomes this gesture. The only other way you could do something like this would be in a war-torn city, where you could push a piano off a building, but you’re not going to be able to document it in the same way. My sole interest was to find out what happened sonically if you dropped a piano. I just wanted to hear it.”
Enabled by a Creative Scotland Vital Spark award and with Tramway on board, Dower teamed up with Glasgow School of Art’s Digital Design Studio world renowned sonic consultants, ARUP Acoustics.
“That’s when it became a much bigger event,” Dower says. “Dropping a piano all happens in a few seconds, so you want to slow it down so you can witness it in full and explore the repercussions. So we brought in these really fast cameras that take a thousand frames a second. What’s funny is you start with an absurd proposition, and you end up with this near scientific documentation of what I think of as a sculptural composition.”
Both Waits’ comment and Dower’s action echo the words of proto Surrealist Tristan Tzara, who in 1918 grandly pronounced that ‘Musicians smash your instruments’. Other precedents come via Fluxus
artist Nam June Paik destroying a violin, Al Hansen’s similarly inclined Yoko Ono Piano Drop, and even Jimi Hendrix’s very public burning of his guitar. The Who’s Pete Townshend, meanwhile, had already looked to Gustav Metzger’s notions of auto-destructive art by reducing his own guitars to splinters.
Yet the smashed piano is also something of a slapstick staple. On more than one occasion in their prolific film career, iconic comedy double act Laurel and Hardy explored the perils of piano removal to hilarious effect. The appeal of watching buildings being demolished is another form of spectacle informing Piano Drop. Dower also mentions the power of dub reggae sound systems, the covers of classic Blue Note jazz albums and Samuel Beckett as influences on Piano Drop.
“Slowing sound down isn’t the same as slowing images down,” he says. “An image freezes, but with sound, you just get this kind of sub-atomic rumble. It’s like a catastrophe. You’re exploding the moment. Then when you see it at normal speed, it looks like a Charlie Chaplin film.”
Piano Drop isn’t Dower’s first artistic exploration of sound. His first solo show, On Memory and Chance, at Stirling’s Changing Room gallery in 2010, used chance compositions. Dower had also previously piled four pianos on top of each other at the Talbot Rice.
In terms of events, at last year’s Glasgow international Festival of Visual Art, Dower created Le Drapeau Noir, an ad hoc avant-garde social space that became the festival’s informal hub. Prior to this, Dower was bass player with Glasgow-based raw blues hollerers Uncle John & Whitelock, and currently provides clarinet and other noises for the more experimentally inclined Tut Vu Vu.
“I wanted to make a visual equivalent of music,” Dower says, “then I went to art school and came out with a bass guitar and started a band.”
Dower recently found out from his mother that, as a child, he couldn’t talk properly. To explain the world around him, he made noises, impersonating the sounds he heard around him. Dower may be
hyper-articulate today, but Piano Drop is a logical extension of his early behaviour.
“It should sound like an earthquake,” he says, “which is a fairly primitive thing to hear. I want it to have an impact.”
Piano Drop, Tramway, Glasgow, November 3-6
www.tramway.org
The Herald, November 1 2011
ends
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