2023 ︎︎︎ The Seven Elements
Washington Baths, Portland, ME
For one week we inhabited a bathouse, housed in the apartment above the halls, tubs, showers, and 10,000lb rock-mass saunas, learning how to listen to the harmonics, temperature fluctuations, and rhythms of bathers in this concrete sanctuary (we dubbed their combined powers “saunics”). As the days slipped by and we imbibed the hot/cold cycles ourselves, we entered a jellied brainstate. Conscious decisions melted with happenstance and impulse, making the distinctions between them inscrutible. We consumed enough bottles of eastern european sparkling water to exchange our bodily water content at least once per day. Big waves of relaxation changed our music, and many complex processes were simplfied.
While melting into puddles, we also devised a sound installation called The Seven Elements, which was enacted on a “Silent Friday” wherein every visitor is asked to remain silent throughout the day. We tried to play with this silence, rather than capitalize on it, by activating many of the spaces ambiently: we sent live audio from the cold pool outside the saunas to a hidden PA system on the roof, letting everyone in the exterior warm pools know that someone, somewhere, was cooling off. We installed a miniature speaker in the sauna’s vent that played audio of machinery and pipes, recorded over the course of the week, into the deepest chamber of the bathhouse, bringing sweaters in closer sonic proximity to the infrastrusture of the space.
We also made versions of our instruments that could withtand the temperature and humidity fluctuations of the baths, and played them live in certain spaces throughout the day. Sometimes a flute would sound in the sauna, a drum might drip its way out of the plunge, a duet of wind instruments howled from the rooftops, or a rogue singer would double up on the harmonics of the showers to hilight the room tone. Some attendees seemed unfazed, some seemed to drop in to the waves.
After the in-person interventions, we hung around the lounge reading peoples’ cards from our Real Deck, which prompted some true revelations, and then later in the evening performed a live set that included sounds from inside a bucket, the flower niche, the hallways, the communal water jugs, and a mouth.
