On the floor of the Turbine Hall, there are wide water basins and huge flattish rough-hewn rocks you might see on moorland or in a desert. You can sit or stand or climb on them. But if you look up, you won’t be able to stop looking up – because it’s raining musical instruments.
Immense elongated brass trumpets and giant glowing drums seem to float in the air, suspended from the girders of the former power station’s roof. If Lebanese artist Tarek Atoui had just left it at that, it would be an impressive, intriguing installation, but this is Tate Modern, honey, and Atoui hasn’t been asked to occupy its grandest space with mere physical objects. Instead, his sculptural creations and found stuff resonate and echo with an ever-changing, invisible art of noises.
An earth-shaking bass note throbs from a hanging trumpet – or is it from that translucent cone rising out of the ground like an ethereal minaret? Then a drumbeat booms through the space and a woman’s plangent, achingly lovely voice sings notes of infinite nostalgia and melancholy. The music has you hooked.
It is music, I think, though abstract, non-melodic, a rising and falling of sounds that lead you around and through the installation’s forest of solid things. But then – is music ever not sculptural? Listening to the scything percussive notes of Stravinsky certainly is; and the desire to crystallise sound waves into something visible has haunted everyone from the inventors of opera to designers of psychedelic lightshows.
Yet Tarek Atoui still manages to do something new and beautiful with sound and vision. He teases you and boggles your mind with how his musical instruments relate to the sounds you hear, how the stones and water basins, pipes and strings have produced this sonic outpouring. The entire installation is an interconnected musical machine.
There’s a warm, generous if absurdist humour to it all. In the past, a crazy mechanical contraption like this would be called “Heath Robinsonish”, after the early 20th-century British cartoonist who came up with such things. A better comparison is Leonardo da Vinci, who invented wild musical instruments among his other real and impossible machines: organs worked by water, a string instrument shaped like a fantastic beast.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
