some blokes blog: Route to Work. Part 1. Pershore Road Car Park

I find the car parks at the end of Bradford Street and the Pershore Road to me immensely beautiful structures in their pure no frills functionality. I’ve always admired dirty great concrete hulks and I reckon these are some of the best but after attending Oliver Beers Resonance project they have been transformed in my eyes into beautiful buildings. As Stafford seemed to claim when its new multi-storey carpark at the rail station would turn Stafford from a town into a city we can perhaps assume that a decent multi-storey is a modern day equivalent of a cathedral. The carpark on Pershore Road certainly has the acoustic qualities of a cathedral as I witnessed in the summer of 2010.

Oliver Beer and members of Ex Cathedra occupied one of the concrete and glass plank stairwells and sang in it, varying their pitch until they hit on resonant frequencies. The viewers or witnesses to this event walked up the stair way past the singers, squeezing right past them in what would have been an awkward proximity if I hadn’t been in such a transcendent state. When the singers found the resonant frequencies the whole stairwell began to throb, the atmosphere was thick with exciting sound and excited concrete. As I walked through a vivid 3dimensional panning of sound was warping round my head so that it felt my head might explode as I walked inbetween a singer and their resonant sweet spot, my ears literally inches away from the two sound sources.

The event came to an end when a bunch of young hoodlums tried to smash up all the recording equipment but I was in such a state of joy that I stuck around to talk to Oliver Beer who was good enough to walk me around the carpark and show me its sweet spots. Just by humming even at the right pitch at one of these sweets spots the whole area around us was transformed into a solid room of sound. The echoes and the source repeatedly overlaid each other and without amplification turned the whole stairwell into a massive instrument.

Beer has done a series of these Resonance Projects in buildings and spaces all over the place but I wouldn’t have swapped the one I saw for any of the others as it had a transformative power, turning what is often perceived as a shit, even scary place occupied by the sorts of people who tried to smash the recording equipment up, into an instrument of absolute beauty.

Oliver Beer - Pay and Display, The Resonance Project (II) from FOM 2 on Vimeo.

Oliver Beer - Pay and Display, The Resonance Project from FOM 2 on Vimeo.

You can see a couple of videos of the project here and whilst they are cool they fall a long way short of the actual experience. Also, really glad I didn’t see the one with children because that is really quite terrifying. Also here are some photos I took of the event.