In Là

*In Là“ is the outcome of the collaboration between Gavin Bryars and the Italian visual artist Massimo Bartolini. Staged as a large-scale installation at the Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art in Prato, Italy, (the opening was in autumn of 2022 and the exhibition is still running until May this year), Bartolini transformed scaffolding into pipe organ bars, suspended from the ceiling across seven rooms of the museum as the central piece for his retrospective exhibition. It is the music played by these singular organs, composed by Bryars, that makes up the two sides of Alga Marghen’s LP edition
The music of “In là” by Gavin Bryars directly refers to his experimental and conceptual territory of the early 1970s, prior to the composition of seminal works like “The Sinking of The Titanic” and “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet”. “In Là” presents the composer working across the vast space of the installation, with sounds physically spread in each of the museum’s rooms and placed in careful consideration of the space continuity, while at the same time never fulling being experienced in its totality by the listener. This allows the LP documentation of the work to become a singular complement to the live, real-time aural adveture, unveiling phenomena and perceptions of the work’s rich tones and poetic structures that would otherwise be unavailable
While Gavin Bryars background in music is well documented (started as a jazz bassist working in the early 1960s with improvisors Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley, later worked with composers John Cage and Cornelius Cardew, founded the Portsmouth Sinfonia and collaborated with Brian Eno to the Obscure Records series), the connections of Massimo Bartolini’s poetic to sound as less known. The early practice of modifying architectural or domestic devices into sound producers, eventually led Massimo Bartolini to create installations made of scaffolding tubes which are modified into the pipes of an organ. Conceived in different forms and in relation to different architectural contexts since 2008, these works clearly relate to Baroque organs, the most visual of musical instruments, and to the use of scaffolding in construction sites. From these references they adopt the quality of being part instrument part architecture, a work of sophisticated engineering, a “ladder” for climbing up to God