VENUE · NOTES FROM PRODUCTION
We spent four months walking through disused buildings. We chose the one where the acoustics argue back.
The Chapel used to be a staff canteen. The Vault was a boiler room. The Garden is, literally, a garden — or it was, until the north wall fell in during the 1980s and nothing grew back except knotweed and a single fig tree that refuses to die. Each of these spaces arrived with its own sound, and we’ve spent the last ten weeks negotiating with those sounds rather than fighting them.
The Vault, for instance, has a ceiling made entirely of concrete ribs. Kick drums ricochet off it for about four milliseconds longer than any mastering engineer in Berlin would be happy with. We could deaden it with enough baffling. We didn’t. That ricochet is now a feature, not a bug — it’s why the VAULT room hits the way it hits, and why every techno booking we’ve put in there has ended up writing us a thank-you email.
“Rooms aren’t neutral. The best ones have opinions. We listen to them.”
The Chapel is different. It’s a long narrow room with a low beamed ceiling, hard plaster walls, and a polished concrete floor. It sounds like a very dry Vienna salon, which is exactly why it suits prepared piano, string quartet, vocal ensemble — anything with complex harmonic content that wants to be heard in detail. We’ve placed 160 seats in there, no standing. No phones out. It is, by design, the quietest room at the festival.
And the Garden. The Garden has no walls, no ceiling, and no rules. We’ve cleaned it up — removed the knotweed, saved the fig, laid a small dance floor around it — but otherwise it is what it was. At night, with only a single lantern and a ground-level speaker array, it feels more like a rehearsal than a performance. It feels, in other words, like the way we’d listen at home.