Siren by Ray Lee / Invisible Forces

should inspire confidence and sustainability into the unfairly questionable future of New Music and conceptual performance art

Article by Kelly Lovelady | 08 Sep 2007
The visual ingredients bespeak a powerfully sterile urban landscape reminiscent of the abandoned set of Short Circuit. Locked in essential darkness into an unexpected gold mine in the back streets of Leith, the strength of Ray Lee's Sirenis that it is honest, unpretentious and exactly what it professes to be: a "whirling, spinning spectacle" of mechanics, an intricately wired "forest" of tripods with motorised arms, an "extraordinary chorus of pulsing electronic drones." This is a truly wonderful sound and light installation. From cacophony to symphony, the 40 minute show runs the full gamut of sense experience and memory.

Set in the ordinarily sun-drenched greenhouse of the Out of the Blue Drill Hall, by night it takes on the sordid grandeur of a looming whale carcass. Two square-suited performers, one of whom is the piece's mastermind musical architect Ray Lee, move robotically within their three-dimensional checkerboard, one by one activating each siren pitch with screwdriver in hand, muttered scalic musings and a concentrated ear to the ground. The protagonists, the sirens themselves, take an array of variant shapes and sizes, hopefully scavenged from unwitting ambulances, police cars and security guards in an interesting sub-commentary on pain and emergency. They now find themselves strapped hostage to the extremities of each mill, waiting in anticipation for their inevitable orbit.

Siren fuses the urban sounds of musique concr'te with the motives and mannerisms of John Cage. It takes a simple concept and explodes its connotations into a dynamic mixed-media manifesto, equally powerful in its literal physical experience as in its profound ability to backfire into the observer's own rich web of associations. Whether one hears a fabulously kilted cacophony of pipers, the tune-up sequence for the Symphony of a Thousand or the comforting throb of the body as heard from inside the womb, this is surely an exercise in allowing the mind to wander free and enjoy an evolving musical experience in contrast to the analytical listening agenda of the concert hall.

Despite its visual allusion to a heartless laboratory experiment, Lee puppets his sirens into characterful existence, pitches wailing into sympathetic concord, subtle tapering by the Doppler Effect, flares and streaks of colour and light as the resulting organism lives and breathes truly larger than the sum of its parts. Siren is a vibrant sonic installation, a deceptively simplistic pitch accumulation and a curiously fascinating narrative which should inspire confidence and sustainability into the unfairly questionable future of New Music and conceptual performance art. [Kelly Lovelady]
http://www.invisible-forces.com