INTERFACE

REVIEW

Silent Sound

St. George’s Hall, Liverpool
14 September
Greenland St, Liverpool
16 September – 26 November

Reviewed by: Rachel Lois Clapham

In 1865, Victorian spiritualists the Davenport Brothers performed a public séance in Liverpool’s spectacular St George’s Hall in front of an audience eager to commune with the dead. Fast-forward 141 years and artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard are centre stage enclosed in a custom-made metallic soundproof booth, aka ‘spirit cabinet’, in the very same concert hall which, although closed for over twenty years, has been re-opened for their performance of Silent Sound.

The artists’ aim in the elaborate re-staging of the séance, in collaboration with musician J Spaceman and audio consultants Charles Poulet and ARUP Acoustics, is to channel the spooky performance of the Davenport Brothers into the imagination of those present through music, subliminal audio and extreme bass infrasound in order to embed a subliminal message that emotively and psychologically impacts members of the audience.

Each participant is forewarned of Silent Sound’s potentially upsetting supernatural content and the use of infrasound, which can create pulsing of the internal organs, light-headedness and anxiety! In addition to these clear health and safety concerns the audience seating was deliberately choreographed to keep friends and family separated so that each individual would receive the spiritual and subliminal content without distraction. Despite this, people seemed only too happy to submit themselves to Silent Sound’s experiment and the hall was filled to capacity.

From within the soundproof spirit cabinet Iain and Jane mouth seemingly noiseless words. Their voices are translated into a subliminal audio message then embedded within J Spaceman’s musical composition. Spaceman’s melody is repetitive, the sound becomes visceral and gives credence to the artists’ suggestion that the spirit realm might exist ‘within the ether’ of such a frequency. Meanwhile the audience is seated, waiting anxiously for something to happen, unsure of exactly what that ‘something’ might be. Then suddenly one audience member stands up, strides across the front of the stage, collects his young son and promptly exits stage left. Was he was affected by subliminal messages or just plain scared?

Together with Spaceman’s evocative composition, the imposing venue and enforced segregation of the audience, there was a definite creepiness to Silent Sound. However, Iain and Jane’s experiment is less a sincere investigation into the spirit world and more about how we are affected by their re-enactment. Unfortunately, aside from the early exit of one potentially frightened man and his child it is difficult to know if anyone was truly impacted upon by Silent Sound. Moreover, we are unlikely to find out, since the content of Iain and Jane’s subliminal message is never revealed. Maybe it is as the artists say: “The signal needs to be carried. The truth doesn’t matter.” Meanwhile, Iain and Jane didn’t succeed in raising the dead but their live re-enactment was potent. Those who were there know and they have the badge to prove it.

To win a copy of Silent Sound see Subscriber prize

Writer detail:
Rachel Lois Clapham is a writer with ‘Writing From Live Art’, a Live Art UK initiative.

rachelloisclapham@gmail.com | www.opendialogues.com

Venue detail:
A Foundation
67 Greenland Street, LIVERPOOL L1 0BY

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