Roadtrip: Sound Art & Alexis Bhagat

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We're in Times Square, but we've got our ears to the ground. There's traffic growling around us, a flock of tourists are snapping pictures of a photographer and her model, six-story billboards pawn jeans and cellphones. But our attention is trained on a single solid tone emanating from the subway grate. It's a secret piece of public art, a sound installation by Max Neuhaus.

Another sound artist is leading this expedition, a man named Alexis Bhagat. We met him at the Conflux Festival a couple of weeks ago and he's graciously taking us around for the afternoon. He's a jaunty man with a predominant earnestness and he prods us for our observations on the Neuhaus piece. In a couple of months he'll be publishing Sound Generation, his new book of interviews with sound artists.

Alexis Terin Sm

"Who found it comforting? Who found it unsettling?" The group's about split, and we can barely hear with the busses passing by. "See, I always found it really comforting here. There's an urban legend that the sound comes out of some electrical current. It's not, its art. But its calming. Everything's crazy except this one tone, which is constant."

Alexis Ollie Sm-1

As we're leaving Times Square, I ask Alexis about our next destination. The "Dream House," he tells me, "is a piece of eternal music." He flashes a quick smile before I lose him as we descend into the subway.

When we arrive the place is inconspicuous from the outside. The artists – Influential minimalist composer La Monte Young and his wife, light artist Marian Zazeela – live on the floor above the apartment-sized installation. There is no sign or advertisement aside from lettering on the apartment door.

But inside the place, its otherworldly. Barefoot, we're led into a white room with springy carpet. Pink and purple lights bathe the room in a syrupy glow while Dream House-Sm geometric cutouts cast shadows on the wall. The air is thick with incense. And then there's the sound.

Its an overwhelming and dissonent drone. You can hear it with your body. Composed of sine waves vibrating on precise prime numbers, the sound fills the room from a fridge-sized speaker in each corner. I'm not sure about eternal, but its certainly not stopping while we're there. We begin to move around, exploring the texture of the sound. We cup each other's ears rhytmicaly. We imagine swimming in the noise. And before we know it, its an hour later and time to go.

We'll go to dinner with Alexis and chat more in a while. He'll tell us about his work, a kind of sound-art extension of poetry. But as I'm coming down the stairs out of the Dream House I'm lingering in the visceral experience of the sound and thinking of what Alexis said earlier about calm. As I look north I glance without thinking at the construction cranes at the World Trade Center site. The cacophony of the street floods back and I catch myself humming, soft, constant.

-Terin Mayer

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Sound Art & Alexis Bhagat

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