Underwater band brings us music from another world

Sydney Festival got off to an otherworldly start when the world’s only underwater band, Denmark’s Between Music, gave a remarkable one-hour performance to a packed out audience.

Nanna Bech with her hydraulophone performing in Between Music’s Aquasonic show for Sydney Festival. Picture: Glenn Campbell

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Sydney Festival got off to an otherworldly start when the world’s first underwater band, Denmark’s Between Music, gave a remarkable one-hour performance to a packed out audience in Redfern’s Carriageworks.

Called Aquasonic, the show featured a suite of interlinked works performed in five large aquariums ranged across the back of the stage. The five submerged musicians — two women vocalists, two percussionists and a violinist — performed on a range of instruments designed for them by an international network of musicians, physicists, engineers, instrument makers and neuroscientists.

The result is truly music from another world, combining electronic sound design with an extraordinary range of sounds from an equally extraordinary range of instruments.

Artistic director and composer Laila Skovmand has developed a technique whereby she and fellow vocalist Nanna Bech can sign wordless duets by holding an air bubble in their mouths and singing through it.

UNCANNY

“When you feel the bubble coming out of your mouth you need to bring it back again. Or you can sing inwards. We also have a technique where we switch between singing on inhale and exhale,” Skovmand explains.

The result is uncanny and haunting.

Robert Karlsson playing violin in Between Music’s Aquasonic show. Picture: Glenn Campbell

On the blacked out stage the spotlight fell on the one tank in which co-artistic director Robert Karlsson, his ponytail floating out behind him, played a ghostly violin solo before a second aquarium lit up, revealing percussionist Dea Marie Kjeldsen in a flowing dress and goggles, surrounded by banks of gongs, bells and metal bowls.

Skovmand produced some interesting solo vocal effects singing into a bowl of water, before taking up her position in her tank

This developed into a percussion duet when a third tank containing drummer Morten Poulsen came to life.

The full ensemble, each in their own tank, were gradually introduced as the fiddle and gamelan effect opening developed into a fugue of new sounds — Bech playing a hydraulophone, a hurdy-gurdy-like instrument where a combination of finger holes and strings produce notes through hornlike bell.

Laila Skovman has developed a technique for singing underwater.

Skovmand produced some interesting solo vocal effects singing into a bowl of water, before taking up her position in her tank armed with a microphone and a rotacorda, a variation on the hydraulophone.

Along with the live music was a skilfully interwoven electronic soundscape and some superb lighting effects.

The show was not without humour — one movement comprised a line of internally lit glass canisters filled with water and with pipes leading in from the hidden musicians, producing a symphony of gurgles and amplified mini-eruptions.

The overall effect of the music, especially the harmonised vocals, and the choreography of the performers coming up to the top of their tanks to take in air, was spellbinding.

The concert is repeated at 7.30pm at Carriageworks, Evesleigh, on Monday, January 8, and Tuesday, January 9.

SYDNEY FESTIVAL

● CONCERT: Aquasonic

● WHERE: Carriageworks

● WHEN: Saturday, January 6