Jack Vickridge

"The primary instrument here is an empty industrial workspace, which funnels the sounds of the outside through a process of grand refraction. The offhand trills of tiny birds are gathered and stretched into the stirrings of an imaginary orchestra, while the murmurs of distant crowds are recast as choral hums that seep out of the building’s surfaces. Contact mics are attached to the walls, floors and windows – a process through which Vickridge inverts the typical depiction of industrial spaces as sterile and insensitive, revealing them to be generously responsive to even the smallest players in their natural vicinity. The building’s handling of sound is also a perfect analogue to its primary function as a place of industry, pulling in materials from the world outside, breaking and reforming their contours, welding the disparate into strange hybrids.

Sound isn’t the only entity reformed by the space’s interior. The passing of time also undergoes its own manipulations, and we experience Building Instruments as if through the ears of a lone nocturnal inhabitant. Some events appear to be lost to phases of sleep; others are dreamt out of the dark. There are strange extrapolations of the real – soft tones dance like torchlights across the walls, while rainfall stops and starts as if controlled by a divine tap. Vickridge teases colours out of lightless corners, the imagination merging with the building’s own propensity for acoustic conjuration, with listener and space bound evermore intimately into a duet of playful and hallucinatory manufacture." - Jack Chuter