In a dizzying cacophony of notes and tones, The Vinyl Factory is loudly announcing that it’s back to its best.
In a warren of concrete bunkers deep beneath the strand, the masters of high end immersive AV art have pulled together some big hits. ‘Reverb’ is a celebration of speakers, drums, beats, songs and noises, of the links between music and art.
It starts familiarly for anyone who saw ‘The Infinite Mix’ with Stan Douglas’s incredible ‘Luanda Kinshasa’, an endlessly looping jazz funk jam that never seems to repeat, locking you forever in a 1970s time warp with musicians communing across endless divides.
Four Technics turntables allow you to play looped records by German artist Carsten Nicolai; glitches and clicks that bounce and stutter, but you shape how they interact, you dictate the sound, you create.
Jeremy Deller lectures kids on the history of rave, Jenn Nkiru’s traces the history of Detroit techno with industrial rhythms and socio-economic ire, Cecilia Bengolea films the convulsive body-popping joy of Jamaican dancehall, Gabriel Moses dramatically and religiously captures young ballet dancers in Lagos. It’s heady, it makes sense, it’s good.
But some works barely fit the theme. Julianknxx, Hito Steyerl, Kahlil Joseph, Es Devlin; there’s nothing wrong with the work necessarily, it just barely has anything to do with sound. Especially that Steyerl piece which has already been shown three or four times in London in the past 5 years.
It’s also obviously a little self-aggrandising, self-congratulatory, with its display of Vinyl Factory records and restaging of past Vinyl Factory hits, but they’ve done some incredible things, helped define the course of installation art in this country, so they merit a bit of back patting.
It ends with the return of Devon Turnbull’s ‘Hi-Fi Listening Room’, a brilliant exercise in ultra-meditative close listening and sound geekery that encapsulates what this show’s about. Because at its best, this exhibition functions as a love letter to the power of music, an ear-rattling testament to how sound shapes society, shapes emotion, shapes history. How sound shapes absolutely everything.