Text by Joe Banks
Pulsing sub-bass audio suggests associations with the most primal anthropomorphic element in music – the rhythms of the human heart, with foetal and infant hypnagogic sense memories, with seismic activity, the rumble of thunder (Jimi Hendrix claimed that his earliest childhood memory was of a thunderstorm) and even with war. Disinformation’s National Grid is a sub-bass sound installation sourced either from the ambient VLF field radiated by electricity pylons and mains circuits, or, more recently, directly from the output cables of mains transformers. National Grid offers live physical evidence of environmental electromagnetic pollution, a demonstration of the intrinsic musical properties of alternating current, beat-frequency effects, the architectural acoustics of its own exhibition space, a formula for the realisation and suppression of Futurist sound art, a cathartic response to the pressures of urban life, a monolithic soundtrack for the genius of electrification, and for the bitter conflicts between government and organised labour for control over the nation’s electrical infrastructure – Disinformation “National Grid” 1996 to 2024 [1].
London was the capital of the electricity of the mind – Geoffrey Grigson, BBC Home Service, 1957 [2].
In one of the classic “Eureka Moments” that illustrates the symbiosis between art, science, creative intuition and hypothesis testing, in 1958, the guitarist Link Wray jammed a sharpened pencil into the speaker cone of a guitar amplifier, to create that iconic soundtrack for American street violence, the instrumental rock n’ roll track The Rumble [3, 4]. In 1962, The Who guitarist Pete Townshend attended artist Gustav Metzger’s lecture on Auto-Destructive Art (The Struggle for the Machine Arts of the Future) at Ealing Art College [5], destroying his guitar, for the first time, live on-stage at the Railway Hotel in Harrow Wealdstone in Sept 1964 [6]. In 1966, The Who managers Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp signed the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Jimi Hendrix, then resident in London’s Mayfair, and under the influence of both The Who and of contemporary science fiction, incorporated his work with electric guitar feedback into his first album Are You Experienced in 1967 [7].
In this way, deliberate “errors”, in terms of shattering the conventional norms of musicianship and recording studio technique, provided the initial spark and substance for whole new vistas of creative exploration and sonic art-forms.
In this spirit, sonic arts project Disinformation exhibited the “National Grid” sound installation in the basement of the Museum of Installation (art gallery) in Deptford, London, July 1997 [8, 9]. In the opening event, attended by Gustav Metzger, the pure musical note of live mains electricity – the raw mains hum that manifests in malfunctioning guitar amplifiers, guitar pick-ups and guitar leads, etc – was intercepted using a VLF-converted shortwave radio and transformed into a rhythmically pulsing, hypnotic and immersive low-frequency sound mass – a musical soundtrack for the creative genius of electrification.
With a nod to the Farsight Collective’s extreme proximity to the guitar shops in London’s Denmark Street, this latest iteration of “National Grid” sends the pure 50Hz note of live mains electricity, direct from a mains electrical transformer, into an audio mixer, electric guitar pedal, amplifier and sub-bass loudspeaker. Using a simple electronic version of the micro-tuning techniques devised by the 18th century composer Giuseppe Tartini, the guitar pedal transforms electromagnetic noise from live alternating current into a monolithic, ultra-minimalist rumble that also simulates the rhythms of that most anthropomorphic of all musical phenomena – the beating of the human heart.
Exhibited in the massive subterranean space beneath the Farsight Collective, the “National Grid” sound artwork articulates the architectural acoustics of its own exhibition space, creating both sympathetic resonances, and also standing waves, which visitors “play” by means of their own movements through and interactions with the acoustic space.
As Jimi Hendrix said after his performance at the legendary Woodstock Music & Art Fair in 1969, we play it the way the air is in America today – the air is slightly static [10]. As the science fiction author William F. Temple wrote in Woolwich in 1951, the air itself seemed to be oscillating with electricity [11]. As Gustav Metzger said in Deptford on July 5, 1997, this is a good piece.
The event runs on Friday, 11 Oct 2024, at 6 pm and on Saturday, 12, and Sunday, 13, by appointment at Farsight Collective, 4 Flitcroft Street, London WC2H 8DJ. NB: visitors will be escorted into the underground space by designated Farsight Collective employees only.
