Clang Boom Steam

By: Team Buzzine

July 24, 2008

David Byrne has done it again. The maverick polymath who has filled his life post-Talking Heads with a varied solo career, a record label, writing a disco opera about Imelda Marcos, and making works of visual art on PowerPoint has created something unique for the New York City summer. Thanks to some help from the good people at Creative Time, Byrne has transformed an abandoned municipal terminal next to the Governor’s Island Ferry into a colossal Steampunk musical instrument. Welcome, pilgrim, to Playing The Building.

Playing the Building takes up a 9,000-square-foot room on the second floor of the terminal. In the front of the room is an antique pump organ. Pump organs were precursors to the electric organs of the mid-20th century, in which the air to blow through the reeds was pumped with one’s feet instead of electrically. If you’ve listened to late-period Tom Waits, you’ve almost certainly heard a pump organ.

This pump organ is a little bit different. The pedals don’t work and its guts have been removed. In their place is a series of cables that extend out of the back of the organ, hovering into the air and running all over the room – a cluster of nerve cells with dendrites flowing to the muscle tissue of the installation. The pump organ functions as the controller for Playing the Building, and each of the keyboard’s three octaves produce a different sound. The bottom octave causes motors to vibrate against the building, producing very low rumbling tones. The middle octave activates compressed air that blows across pipes, making a haunting, flute-like wail. The top octave controls little motorized hammers that smack against the pillars of the space, creating a series of percussive clangs.

In order to explain why Playing the Building is so extraordinary, it is necessary to break it up into its different components. Most immediate of these is its presentation. Perhaps it is because I live in a city where real estate is so out of control, but I have a certain romantic attachment to abandoned and disused spaces, and the building Byrne and Creative Time chose is an event in itself. Paint peels and flakes off of detailed metalwork on the ceiling, while out of rusty windows the viewer can spy a motorized catwalk that hasn’t been used in decades, extending out into a dock where boats will never stop again. Any device could have been used to control the various components of Playing the Building - a more conventional keyboard, a computer, or even a whack-a-mole machine. The pump organ is the perfect choice. It reinforces the antique aspect of the installation, reminds you that what you are seeing is unique, and reinforces that Playing the Building is a giant musical instrument, despite the fact that the word “music” does not appear once in the description of the work.

This is curious, because Playing the Building is as much a musical instrument as anything else, and it’s one that you can play. This choice is such a fundamental aspect of the work that it is difficult to see that it is a choice, but Byrne could have easily made the organ a player piano (or a computer program) and reduced the audience to listener status. This would have turned the work into just an installation sculpture with musical components, a comment on the dehumanization of industrialization. Instead, there’s an element of audience control worked into it by design, turning it into a piece that explores how we sonically interact with our environments. Oh, and it’s fun too. As a kid, my parents would routinely set out pots and pans on the floor that I would bang on with spoons, creating an enormous racket and most likely testing their patience (it would be further tested when I bought a drum set in seventh grade). Pressing a key and having a pillar of the space you’re sitting in respond with an audible clang provides a similar thrill. We the viewers are also the producers. Playing the Building would not be the work of art it is without someone to play it.

When you are not busy being that someone, you get to listen.. I asked a volunteer guard if the sound gets to her after awhile. She responded that she had sat and listened to other people play for four hours once, and that it was the over-95-degree heat that bugged her, not the music. Wandering through the space, listening to two four-year-olds’ duet, I was struck by how physical the sounds were – how they were distributed throughout the space so that the clanging, rumbling, and whistling came from a specific somewhere as opposed to my earphones or a stereo.

It has been said many times by many people that the process of making art is the process of reduction and expansion. First the artist selects, reducing the multifaceted craziness of the world into the core of what they want to explore. The artist then bores into that core to create their work, expands on what they’ve selected, and elevates it to the level of art. Good dialogue, for example, never mimics everyday speech. Instead, it boils down speech to its essence and then elevates that essence, making it cleverer, truer, more entertaining, more poetic, more expressive, more thematically integrated, and so on, until you have The Wire or August: Osage County. In Playing The Building, David Byrne has selected forgotten, everyday sounds and, by creating a space where we can listen and focus on them, has transformed them into music. Through that music, he has transformed us into more active listeners.

By doing this, and by setting Playing the Building in a large, industrial space, Byrne has made room for a multiplicity of experiences. Each new guest plays the organ in a distinct way, from the tentative (and very bored) teenage girl there with her parents, to the stoner creating lengthy drones, to myself trying to see if I could coax a melody out of it. Wandering the space, the listener will find him or herself in a somber, contemplative state for one moment, and the next feel the glee of two four-year-olds banging away and laughing at what they’ve wrought. Music is the most powerful art form, and even industrial-grade noise, when treated musically, has the power to affect and transport us.

We live in a world that constantly wraps us in manufactured sound. Walking to Playing the Building from the South Street Seaport, I noticed that even our outdoor spaces have been colonized by recorded music, as the entire shopping area was dominated by a PA system blaring indie rock. The end result is that we live our lives either completely distracted or in a state of willful ignorance of the major sensory input that’s being sent our way. In this context, there’s something rebellious about Playing the Building. By creating a space where the only sounds you hear are ones that you and your compatriots create, Byrne is allowing us to take responsibility for our music and for our reception of it. We made this, he’s telling us, don’t just hear it, listen to it.

(Your mouse will make a satisfying clicking sound if you click on this link to read more from Isaac Butler’s blog, Parabasis.)

Playing the Building continues at the Battery Maritime Biulding in New York City until August 24th. For more information on Playing the Building, including schedule and directions, please visit Creative Time’s Website.