The Audium
1616 Bush Street
Performances Fridays and Saturdays at 8PM
$10
by Camper English
When I entered the room where the Audium's musical performance was to be, I squealed like a little girl in a tickle fight. It is billed as "a theatre of sound-sculptured space," but it looks like a set from Barbarella. I wanted to plug in the Orgazmatron right there, but my pleasure was supposed to be aural, not physical.
The Audium is basically a room with 169 speakers mounted on the ceilings, walls, and floor where a musical performance designed for the room is played. It is far more interesting as a way of knowing what people in the sixties thought outer space would look and sound like. The theatre was conceived in the late 1950's and built in 1960, long before surround sound or electronic music and it surely hasn't changed much since then.
The solid wooden doors at the front entrance lead to a ticket counter wherein a sad old man was sitting. He took our $10 and told us the show would start in a few minutes. We walked into the waiting room to find 8 other people standing around trying not to laugh. The foyer was filled with wooden sculptures which are globular in shape. Wow! Round wood - How Futuristic! There were a set of stairs leading to the bathrooms like the type built everywhere 40 years ago that are just planks for steps with no solid backs to them so that they appear to be floating in thin air! My favorite part of the room was the free coffee. They didn't have a pot of brewed coffee but instead a hot water dispenser and canisters for coffee crystals, sugar, and powdered milk. Crystallized coffee! What will they think of next? Orangey tasting juice drink that people will take into space? Just think what the future holds!
Soon it was time for the show. The dejected ticket-taker guy locked the front door and lead us through a wooden trapezoidal door (remember: plastic space furniture wasn't really big until the mid-sixties) and into the "sound labyrinth." That was just a lighted walkway made out of curtains that zigzagged for a whole ten feet.
The performance space is an oval-shaped room with chairs in concentric circles. The rug is dark in color but everything else is a sterile, "modern" stark white. At the end of the room is a raised control room which is the obvious precursor to the DJ booth. Who should appear in there and start twiddling knobs but the old guy. It became obvious that this pathetic creature was Stan Shaff, the creature of the Audium and also its composer, performer, ticket taker, usher, and coffee crystal cannister fill-er-upper. We were taking bets that he sleeps on a futon in a spare room upstairs as well.
As the lights dimmed, we became more acutely aware of a bubbling brook sound. I think it, like all songs that start with water sounds, was meant to soothe and prepare one for the piece, but as anybody who has ever spent any time in a chillout room knows it is not only a gimmick that indicates that they will surely hear the same sound at the end of the song to make it seem circular, but also that everything in between will be boring, self-important, and sucky. (With my keen ability to dismiss an entire musical work in the first few seconds I think I have a bright future to look forward to as a music reviewer.)
SUDDENLY, as if out of NOWHERE, we heard a solemn note from a trombone. Then, from another place in the room, two dings from a triangle, no WAIT, now it's coming from over THERE. A slow hum built up in one part of the room, then shifted to another. Next, a dramatic pause, then we were barraged with electronic noise so ancient that I thought we were listening to a heated game of Pong.
It was at this time in the performance that I could no longer stifle my laughter. I was doubled over my chair (it was pitch black to allow us to focus more on the space-noise,) and gasping for breath at the effort of trying to keep quiet so that Stan wouldn't have to assume the additional role of bouncer to eject me. I have never laughed so hard to a piece of audio in my life.
The purposefully random bits of blips, bleeps, bloops, and the occasional sample of a child's voice was certainly entertaining for a while, but by intermission the joke had worn off. I did stay through the second half of the performance to see if good old Stan would produce anything with the slightest bit of musical value but it didn't progress past a hodgepodge of sounds in no particular order. A three year old with a low-end Casio keyboard could have done better.
One might think they would update the musical composition or at least use the place as a backdrop for kicthy space-porn, but I suppose that would rob the Audium of its frozen-in-time appeal. It's worth going for a good laugh.
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