Domus Mixtape #6: The Sound of London

Domus Mixtape Live #6: THE SOUND OF LONDON
by Scanner + Allard van Hoorn, Beatrice Galilee

Saturday, May 28th 2011, 9 pm–late
The Gopher Hole
350–354 Old Street
LONDON
Performances by: Allard van Hoorn, Icarus, DJ N-Ron + special guests

Mixtape series curated by: Daniel Perlin

Most Londoners will recognise that walking past four closed pubs on a Sunday lunchtime is a sure sign of impending apocalypse. So when I found myself walking through the antiseptic, empty, nerve-centre of banks and insurance brokers in London's square mile one weekend, the sheer quantity of unlit supermarkets, shopping centres, clothes shops, cafes, salad bars and pubs was terrifying. The sound of this city was a deafening, noisy, silence.

I was the only person on the pavement. What I heard from these undead buildings and paralysed streets was not the breezy quiet of good day's work done. Nor the satisfied sigh of a blazer slung over one shoulder and a suburban train ride home. This was sinister. It was the silence of an aftermath.

The square mile is disliked. Its ancient street pattern obliterated in favour of not-so-gleaming, somewhat squat glass office towers with bad public art, dreary receptions and vast quantities of un-let office space. In the far distance one might recognise the sirens of Tower Hamlets beyond or see between skyscrapers the cranes slowly moving, building more generic buy-to-let accommodation in Dalston.

Why did these deserted weekend streets sound so uneasy? So awkward and unplanned? The noise of Sunday afternoon in the city is a sterile entropy. This is the sound of segregation. Of failed plans. A selective centre. A blind eye. A square mile of nothing.
Beatrice Galilee

Tracklist
01 Softmain – Dream Crown
02 Scanner – Candles + Beatrice Galilee reading
03 We Are Grave – Permanent
04 Salwa Azar – Poseidon Sea
05 si-cut.db – Academic Hit
06 Scanner – Self Same Circuits
07 Bladzez Krome – Liquid
08 Neck Dust – Shrill
09 Brick Lane Buskers
10 Scanner – Night Haunts

Check out all of the Domus Mixtapes.

British artist Robin Rimbaud (Scanner) traverses the experimental terrain between sound, space, image and form, creating absorbing, multi-layered sound pieces that twist technology in unconventional ways. From his early controversial work using found mobile phone conversations, through to his focus on trawling the hidden noise of the modern metropolis as the symbol of the place where hidden meanings and missed contacts emerge, his restless explorations of the experimental terrain have won him international admiration from Bjork, Aphex Twin and Stockhausen, amongst others.

Scanner is committed to working with cutting edge practitioners and has collaborated with artists from every imaginable genre: musicians Bryan Ferry, Radiohead and Laurie Anderson, The Royal Ballet and Merce Cunningham, Wayne McGregor and Random Dance companies, fashion designers Hussein Chalayan and Shelley Fox, composers Michael Nyman and Luc Ferrari, and artists Steve McQueen, Mike Kelley, Derek Jarman, Carsten Nicolai and Douglas Gordon.

Allard van Hoorn was born on February 29th 1968 in Leiden, the Netherlands.

He is a visual artist collaborating across the disciplines of architecture, sound and design choreographing scripts and scenarios for urban structures and public space to research how we relate to our shared environment.

His work has been shown at institutions like Gasworks, London, the Stedelijk Museum CS in Amsterdam, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia, Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, The Moore Space in Miami, Museo de la Ciudad de México, the German Architectural Center (DAZ) in Berlin, the Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai, CCCB in Barcelona and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.