DARES & INVITATIONS

by Emily DeDakis

re: SURROUND SOUND by Cameron Clarke

Albert Clock subway·6 December 2024·6-9 p.m.

KEY

Emily says

Cameron says

SHADY BEHAVIOUR

The moment it started, it sounded like something was arriving, the end of a journey we saw & heard nothing of, just there it was, blending utterly or intruding rudely, coming from below or above or from inside your chest or faraway all at once, repelling us & drawing us in.

This is using a space for exactly the wrong thing. It wants to be a curving public urban subterranean hallway, a pass-through place, a road-avoidance tool, a surreptitious toilet, a place to hurry through & be unseen while you do it. Nope. Tonight it’s gallery & installation, it’s confusion & marveling & conversation & stopping & listening. Tonight it’s an amplifier.

Surround Sound is, in essence, a deconstructed DIY surround-sound hi-fi system that can be brought to any location & it doesn’t really conform to the traditional layout of a hi-fi system (y’know, a bit like circling around & encompassing the user) — they can kinda be positioned anywhere & they’re completely independent speakers. It’s designed to be brought into all sorts of public spaces & used to animate those spaces with sound.

Are there barriers to making this kind of public work? Do you always go guerrilla? 

I kinda try to not be too outlandish or take the piss. I generally do things in pedestrian areas; I always find it’s better to not mess with traffic too much. There’s all these amazing tunnels that are all for cars or vehicles but I wouldn’t just go down there cause… it’s not the audience, it’s kind of against what I’m about. I’m interested in gauging people who are walking around places. & also in pedestrian areas you’re kind of out of the way of the prying eyes of any sort of state entity that would want to stop what you’re doing. What we did under the Albert Clock, we didn’t get any bother with that, which is great.

I’m interested in the idea of trying to have some permanence. The thing about leaving speakers in places is… things just get stolen or broken pretty quickly like. But you kinda go into it with this idea that if you’re going to leave something in the space it’s probably not gonna be there for much longer, or people are gonna take it down. & a lot of the time that’s not the powers that be, that’s just people who are bored & in town looking for something to mess around with.

We’re halted in a place designed for hustle, reading the layered graffiti like somewhere between ancient history & this week’s tabloid: WHAT DOES YOUR KEY SMELL LIKE TODAY? / I HEAR THE BIRDS IN THE SUMMER BREEZE / I DRIVE ★FAST★.

Random conversations duck below & above the audio blanket. It’s better than standing in the bitter wind & rain (which we forget about totally the longer we’re down here).

I keep saying ‘we’ because it’s something we’re all part of just by walking through it. It knits together the lingering presences & passers-by. Drones like a magnetic duvet, drawing us toward a space that we could otherwise avoid, wrapping us up, bundling us together, weirdly intimate (all hearing the same thing) but intensely individual (how do you react?). Giving an excuse to pull to a stop somewhere we’d typically rush through if we used it at all. It’s not somewhere everyone can go, or would go. You can’t make urban work like this without thinking about usability & access & avoidance & safety… 

I’m really interested in working in liminal spaces, parallel spaces, transitional spaces: the kind of spaces that people aren’t interested in spending much time in. There’s not like street furniture there that would inspire someone to sit down around it, or there’s not really like

shops there. It’s like [businesslike] “Right.” They’re designed to get someone from A to B, to get you from one side of the road to the other. I enjoy that uncomfortable tension of spending time in a place you’re meant to move through. It’s kinda like shady behaviour or whatever. Same thing as if you’ve ever stood at a bus stop for ages when buses are going past. It’s a strange thing — a nice tension to play with. It’s something I had to acknowledge a while ago, but I think I’m very lucky that I feel safe enough to go & work in these places because I’m a man. I don’t feet too scared most of the time in going alone to these places. It’s always better with other people, but yeah, that’s not something that everyone can do so I have to be aware that it’s a bit of a privilege to be able to go to these spaces & not be too scared. Although, I think that part of doing this installation down in those spaces is to populate them … so people can feel like they can go down & experience those spaces as well. 

There are cars honking & we’re drawn up top to see what’s happening — but it’s all here, we’re in the midst, exactly where we’re (& where we’re not) supposed to be.

UNDERGROUND MEDITATIONS

If you’ve already been in it before, you’ve read the signs above the stairs: NEVER NEVER / INFLUENCER-FREE ZONE.

You already know that you never know what you’ll find below the stairwell arch or around the curve — sudden images of city-life coming into view as you round the bends, the tiny gullies on either side that are for tiny rivers of piss as much as rainwater or spilled Fanta or anything else. Tonight it’s too cold to smell much of anything, or to drop trou. Anything might be at home here tonight. There are only two ways in, but the sound permeates upward & outward & wayward. It diffuses so much you feel the urge to look for it everywhere. You assume it’s landing from above or tunnelling up toward you.

C sharp is the resonance of the subway space (is something you almost for sure would not know, no matter how many times you’ve walked it).

I’ve done a lot of stuff in terms of bringing commercial speakers, little things called mini-rigs, out to locations like car parks, underground walkways & tunnels & making music in there, but now just I wanted to create my own speaker system — something that’s a bit more eye-catching & a bit more visual & sculptural than a bunch of pre- made mini-rig speakers in a space.

Surround Sound is tiny constructions, spaced out through the subway, red lights blinking in VHS boxes, speakers on wheels (full of personality, like R2D2 or the Brave Little Toaster), wooden A-frame racks for speakers like sawhorses, like tiny unyellow Harland & Wolff cranes.

We’re making things. Craftsmanship that communicates ideas. The sound shifts & travels: an orchestra tuning, a harmonious traffic jam honking in gentle alternating patterns, an air-raid siren & we’re hunkering in a bunker, the kick-off of a horror film scored by the Flaming Lips.

Sounds riding the curve of the architecture go through me like long ghost cars on an autobahn. The five separate pre-composed drone tracks seem sewn into the shape of the subway (subway means something different where I come from, & not only sandwich) — & sewn into each other too. I can only pick up the different tracks of the speakers when I’m quite close.

Sensory memories of places that envelope you in graffiti (public bathrooms in Philadelphia, absolutely anywhere in Athens) & below ground concrete places you hold your breath out of superstition while travelling through (tunnels under the Dublin port or dynamited through mountains in the Blue Ridge or Rockies)… Speeding-up beats like the car accelerating past those regular patterns that keep the rhythm of subterranean or subaquatic, under-sea, tunnel-dark roads: we count lights or ladders or the numbered access points as we hold our breaths & speed toward light that’s around the next bend, or the next. From outside, it seems to be coming from above & beyond - the walkway entry like a horn pointing to the heavens & shooting sound. Near Ulster Sports Club it fades, mixing into the beats you can hear from the smoking area, or the ones that blub out every time the front door opens.

At street level there’s laughter, people coming up the stairs asking what the fuck. It sounds like an air plane flyover coming from underground, an ambulance rounding the corner beneath our feet, a film score (we want to know what’s happening) on a screen we’ll never find — we’re the movie. Outside above the Albert Clock is striking alongside all this, off & between the beats of the inside-below soundscape. What’s below makes us look up too.

ALL RIGHT?

What is it for but to make people dance or listen or read each other’s graffiti in the company of other passers-by? To pave the way for random encounters (with all senses, because we had snacks & cigarettes too, we were wearing perfume too, we could tell it had been an unofficial urinal at some point too). To set off sweet little sparky conversations? To be a shelter from oh the wind & the rain? That’s all?

The disappearance leaves a mark, an invitation to refill what’s suddenly a vacuum only because of the apparition you saw & heard there — a perpetual dare to bring the next.

A lot of good sentiment — a lot of people being like ‘Why can’t we use this space for this all the time? This stuff never happens in Belfast. We need to do more of this,’ & people excited about the way public space was used. So that was really great. All right?

The cadences were resolving all around me as I walked back up the stairs. If you were there that night, you’ve probably been in again since. It’s always there anyway; & this time, there was…