HIS HANDS SWING back and forth as if conducting an invisible orchestra. They rarely touch his instruments, which scatter across the limestone floor in a tangle of wires and electronic panels; activated by motion sensors, their ethereal sounds echo through the room. Tarek Atoui is mesmerizing to watch, which is unusual for an artist who began his DJ career nearly three decades ago, and as the sun finally sets behind the arched windows of the Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean de Luxembourg, a cathedral. like the space designed by IM Pei – his performance builds crescendo to a rumbling climax.
Stranger than Atui’s movements, however, are the wired resonators and amplifying devices for his work in progress. The Witness of the Waters, 2020–, which he activated at MUDAM on October 8, 2022. Piles of steel I-beams, bits of unpolished marble, and bits of wood found conceal speakers or connect to them from the outside. Under a glass dome, a lever slides a pointed boulder over another boulder in regular circles, like a Stone Age turntable. Drops of water fall from a beaker into a shallow basin. Most of these materials came from the ports of cities around the world, including Beirut, where Atoui was born and raised. Audio samples recorded on loud docks were channeled through each material to obtain their unique vibrational frequencies. The resulting soundscape is hauntingly indistinct, like a concerto immersed in amniotic fluid – an effect heightened by the fact that our own bodies are composed mostly of water. If the port is the heart of economic activity, The Witness of the Waters is the sound of his pulse.
Twenty years ago, Atoui had just finished his studies in electronic music at the French National Conservatory in Reims when he started playing what he describes as “tribal, almost hardcore and angry techno” at raves in campaign in Britain. As any raver can tell you, techno feels as much as it hears. Good bass will shake you to the bone. When you listen to techno at 180 beats per minute – the speed at which Atoui played most of his music – the heart races, causing blood to rush throughout the body in sublime agitation. He felt there was a physicality to techno, although he didn’t fully understand the implications at the time.
In 2005, Atoui returned to Beirut to record his first album. The city, then in the throes of Lebanon’s war with Israel, resounded with bombs. When not in the studio, he found himself on the streets recording the destruction with a portable video camera. He didn’t really have plans for the footage, but that didn’t matter to Hezbollah agents who arrested him one afternoon on suspicion of spying. Tied up, blindfolded, tortured and locked in a dark cell, Atoui wondered if he would hear the news that he was going to die.
Each architectural space has its own unique frequency, and Atoui tweaks its installations to better pick it up from the air.
When he was released two days later, he had become partially deaf in his left ear. But if a sound wasn’t entirely audible, he could still pick up its vibrations. Atoui becomes aware of his body’s ability to act as an acoustic resonator. Back at his decks, he found the DJ’s skillful little moves insufficiently physical to express how he felt. While guest director at the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music in Amsterdam, he developed the MIDI controller which he later used in The Witness of the Waters, which can be played without touching, like a theremin. This allowed his movements to become more fluid, freeing him from the muscle memory of his imprisonment. “After that arrest, I was looking to build something that really allowed for physical expression, and the MIDI controller I developed was a way to reclaim that movement, release my energy and my frustration,” I recently told Atoui on the phone from the United States. United Arab Emirates, where he attended the opening of the Sharjah Biennale 15.
It was in Sharjah that he first put his invention to the test, in a 2009 play he titled Un-drum/noise survival strategies. While preparing for the performance, Atoui began working with the Al Amal School for the Deaf to develop instruments – including deeply grooved wooden boxes that amplify the sounds of struck coils and metal bars that look like drums. tuning forks – for those who are hard of hearing. These objects generally act as resonance chambers, their frequencies easily perceptible to the touch. “It was meant to break down that psychological barrier that some deaf people have that ‘music isn’t our thing,'” he says. “The act of listening is much broader and broader than just channeling sound through the ear. If we start paying attention to other ways of listening, a whole horizon of building instruments, working together, occupying space, becomes possible.
Collaboration has since become central to Atoui’s practice. He often activates his acoustic installations in live improvisation duets with musicians such as Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Pauline Oliveros and C. Spencer Yeh. Each collaborator brings a different intuitive understanding of how sound can travel through an instrument they have never played before. Atoui records each performance, samples them in future sets, creating an iterative composition that builds and swells as it lives in the world. His method links Atoui to minimalist composers like Steve Reich, while allowing him to design his music more physically. “Compositionally, I started working with subtractive methods, triggering a lot of dense sound and then taking things out, like a mass of noise that I sculpted and sculpted,” he says, describing a conceptual process literalized by its motion-sensor MIDI controller. This is one of the reasons why Atoui prefers to work in artistic institutions, where the longer duration of exhibitions – unlike one-off concerts or performance festivals – allows the music to gradually evolve over time.
Each architectural space has its own unique frequency, and Atoui tweaks its installations to better pick it up from the air. Making it equally audible to audiences of different hearing abilities is a considerable challenge, however, and means that it often has to amplify its performance in counterintuitive ways. “Sometimes the best acoustic situation is the worst in terms of performance, visibility or accessibility,” he notes. For organ inside, 2019, an event that took place in the rotunda of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Atoui countered the echo in Frank Lloyd Wright’s building by placing his speakers at the very top of its structure in spiral. His sets are always very lit, allowing deaf audiences to see how he creates the sounds they experience.
In recent years, Atoui has studied historical instruments and, in some cases, reverse-engineered them. For the 2014 Berlin Biennale, he recorded musicians playing folk instruments that had not been touched for decades inside the Museen Dahlem, and in The Reverse Collection, 2016, presented at the Tate Modern in London, he asked luthiers to blindly construct what they thought made the sounds he captured for the Biennale. Atoui was less interested in producing precise recreations than in giving physical expression to different ears. Its constructed archive testifies to the fact that music is just as variable as the bodies that perceive it.
A few days before our conversation, Atoui was in the Atlas Mountains in North Africa playing drums with a Berber tribe. He has been studying different forms of percussion in preparation for a project on Korean drums that will open at the Gwangju Biennale on April 7. All of the instruments that will be used for the event—woodwinds, strings, brass—are capable of percussion, and because the drums vibrate at lower frequencies, they are uniquely perceptible to deaf listeners. The project took him back to his days as a DJ: “I have these huge drums that are super low and almost play hard techno, even though they’re seventy years old!”
Atoui’s exploration of traditional instruments is an extension of his efforts to bridge differences in culture, age and ability by amplifying them. Each drum, each body, each space has a particular sound that, felt deep within the body, connects us through our most fundamental senses. “What I seek is to give value to things by listening to them,” he says. “And, by listening to them, better understand the value of an object, the importance of a phenomenon, the reality of a place.” Listen not just with your ears but with your whole body, and you will hear beyond the noise.
Evan Moffit is a New York-based writer, critic and investigative journalist.
