I travelled to Club Row in Shoreditch to experience what a London outpost of a French art gallery called ((le sOn 7)) had to offer.
Judging from The Wire Magazine’s weekly newsletter description, I would be a patron of a different kind of exhibit.
((le sOn 7)) is a sound art gallery, in which the exhibits are heard instead of looked at, and crafted out of field recordings from nature, and audio samples of the human voice, and even objects, in order to create a collage of sounds.
Each art piece was contained within an MP3 player on a stand. I could only listen to them on the headphones provided, and the only ‘visuals’ were a biography of each artist and a statement about what their piece was about, printed on an A4 piece of paper.
The first piece of audio art I listened to was by Argentinian-Spanish artist Jorge Haro. It is supposed to evoke the image of a hot summer’s day in Spain, and its most striking sound was the clanging of a large circular saw. The collages of sound in the gallery jump from subtle and ambient to percussion and beat-driven, and explore different facets of what sound art can be.
The show’s main feature is a room containing only chairs, lamps, white curtains, and a pair of black loudspeakers facing the chair I sat in. The speakers played a multitextured piece by Lesley Flanagan, a New York Based artist. It filled the room with excerpts of her voice looped and layered in a choir-like way. Some vocal lines dissapeared and then came back, in an apparently random way.
Having initially felt unsure of what sound art was supposed to be, I left ((le sOn 7)) feeling that these artists had composed and arranged the sonic version of a set of paintings. They had taken excerpts from sources both familiar and unfamiliar to create something new.
The ((le sOn 7)) show closes at 7pm on Sunday October 23rd.
Edited by Maxi Pfeiffer