Underwater band makes music in a silent world
AARHUS ( Denmark): Talk about fluid tunes: A group of innovative Danish musicians submerged like fish in an aquarium have created an underwater concerto with instruments specially adapted to resonate in a silent world.
In the central Danish town of Aarhus, the Godsbanen centre concert hall looks more like a fish farm than a music set with its jumble of water tanks, canisters, tubes, pipes and retrofuturistic objects.
One after the other, the five members of the Between Music band – Laila Skovmand, Robert Karlsson, Morten Poulsen, Dea Maria Kjeldsen and Nanna Bech – descend into their own individual glass-paned water tanks for their latest project AquaSonic, where they play the violin, cymbals, bells, a crystallophone with a pedal, and a kind of hurdygurdy with a long neck.
Hydrophones – special microphones that pick up the sound of the music in the water – amplify the soundwaves, producing music that resembles the sounds whales make.
A pioneer in the field of aquatic music, Skovmand wears several hats with the ensemble: she is the artistic director, composer, lyricist and vocalist. She sings both underwater and at the water’s surface.
“I’m an educated singer and I wanted to explore new songs. I got the idea that if I sang into the surface of the water I might get some other timbre, some delays, so I tried that,” she explained.
The group collaborates with engineers and makers of musical instruments to develop water-resistant instruments whose sounds respect the harmonies composed by Skovmand.
“There are a lot of musical limita- tions. There are so many things we can’t play because of the struggle with the water, the struggle with the sound, but I think what the water gives is that special kind of timbre you can’t get in air,” Skovmand said.
The resulting effect is a sound closer to an accompaniment for Tibetan meditation than it is to chamber music.
While the water transports the sound, it also stifles it and slows it down considerably: the effect is a bit like playing Pink Floyd or JeanMichel Jarre in slow motion.
Musician and producer Karlsson plays the violin – made of carbon fibre – and the crystallophone, a distant relative of the glass harmonica invented by Benjamin Franklin.
Bech performs the rotacorda, an instrument inspired by a traditional Byzantine hurdy-gurdy. It has six stainless steel strings which can make sound with a sustained pulling of the string or when fingered.
Skovmand also plays the hydraulophone, a type of underwater organ.
“We want to show that the impossible is possible, to discover a new element with live music,” said Karlsson. — AFP