Parfums Pourpres du Soleil des Poles. SLG

Ulla von Brandenburg, Julien Discrit, Thomas Dupouy and Laurent Montaron
The SLG,
http://www.southlondongallery.org
presents the UK premiere of a new performance of a work originally created for the New Festival, Centre Pompidou, Paris in 2009. Taking as their starting point the phenomenon of synaesthesia, a neurological process which automatically links one sense to another, the collaborating artists have made a new piece focusing on the idea of somebody seeing colours when they hear music. Working with a synaesthesist, a minimal and static music piece is played on three traditional reed organs and then translated into a colour system simultaneously projected into the space.
The poetic title, a quote from Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘Metropolitain’ lured me into attending SLG art performance piece. Recalling a paperback wrapped in ‘Illuminations’ and filled with verbal delights by this complex and often romantic poet, I was unprepared for a violent affront to my aural senses in the packed hall at the SLG.
The room was filled with sound that gruesomely pared down to a grinding and grating noise was… drone. I endured the long hour watching the keyboard players fingers seemingly glued unrelentingly to the same key. The card players finger’s were busy shuffling for arrangements corresponding in color to the sound from stacks of cards in varying colours layed out on the table next to him. Sound is a like taste, a sense, difficult to substantiate