The Roundhouse has been host to many musical events, including David Byrne’s first UK gig with Talking Heads in 1976, but today a pump organ sits in the centre of the room. Coloured tubes, looking like veins, are attached to it. Each colour connects to a mechanical device fixed to different parts of the building. When the keys of the organ are pressed, the devices ‘play’ the room like a gigantic musical instrument.
The installation has previously been attached to a factory in Stockholm in 2005 and a disused ferry hall in New York last year. It invites a new way of exploring the built environment. David Byrne chose to use a pump organ rather than an electric keyboard to accentuate the mechanical nature of the installation, where speakers and amplification for the noise have not been used. The Roundhouse was redeveloped and reopened in 2006. The room lets light in through its skylights for the first time in many decades.
The pump organ has been gutted and fitted with a series of relays and switches in its back. Tubes spew out of this to adorn the room. The blue cables are attached to devices called Solenoids which incorporate little hammers to strike columns and girders in the building. The yellow tubes attach to motors which vibrate girders creating a low drone. Their combined sound is another reminder of my youth, but this time of bashing pots and pans with a wooden spoon in my Grandmother’s kitchen. I leant against one of these columns and felt the vibrations, feeling quite honoured, as if listening to the secrets the parts of the building have withheld for over 150 years.
Clear transparent tubes feed plumbing pipes with compressed air. These create a chorus of howls and moans. It is sort of like an out of tune harmony but isn’t displeasing, almost like the cry of a stream-train but not intrusive. This is apt for the Roundhouse, as it was built in 1846 as a Steam engine shed. The sounds become a reawakening of the haunts of its previous existence. It gives significance to the user of the building, as if our own experiences and lifetimes within that building become infused into the very make-up of it. This user-building relationship is highlighted by the operation of the installation, where the building only speaks when the user touches the keys of the pump organ to feed it.
If the large, round room is empty when you enter it, the installation is silent. One may feel timid walking to the pump organ, with its yellowy spotlight and the massive room to play to. The words ‘Please Play’ painted on the floor offer some encouragement. Most people are generally shy when playing musical instruments to an audience, but the pump organ cannot make a formal tune: the sound it generates is more like the clunking noises made by old, creaking heating systems in houses. The instrument itself is like an exaggerated version of the solitary church organ, usually played alone because it is only in tune with itself and not with other instruments.
Once you learn that there is no right way of playing the building, you start bashing out notes as a child would. You lose the formality and become free, like a child let loose on a piano, or a child given paint and a canvas. Something said by Pablo Picasso really sticks in my mind here, “It takes a long time to become young”. David Byrne turns the Roundhouse into a child venture; the whole building becomes an instrument of animalistic expression, of freedom, upgrading the pots and pans, to the columns, pipes and girders of a building.
Playing the Building is at The Roundhouse, London, NW1 until Monday 31 August
