Off Broadway

Many of us go about the tedious and exhausting process of renting or buying an apartment in New York with an eye (and an ear) to keeping street noise out of our living rooms and bedrooms. (Check out Jay Ramono’s recent piece in the Times, Checking Out The Noise Level for pointers). On the other hand, if you don’t actually have to sleep in the place, the idea of hearing Broadway brimming and buzzing three floors below while you’re safely ensconced in some Soho art gallery munching on wine and cheese seems like a lovely way to spend a Thursday evening. Well, you’ll have the chance to do just that starting March 21 with the opening of Jacob Kirkegaard’s “Broadway” at the Swiss Institute Contemporary Art (SI) on, yes, Broadway between Spring and Broome.

Since I don’t know an accelerometer from a hole in the ground, here’s SI’s own description of Kirkegaard’s fascinating sound installation:

The piece "Broadway" is a five-channel sound installation that draws its source from the five subtly vibrating columns running through the gallery space. When you put your ear to these columns you can hear them resonating with the sound of Broadway below. The internal sound of each column will be recorded with accelerometers (sensitive contact microphones) and played back into the space through the columns by means of exciters (electro acoustic devices). Thus the five columns are being turned into loudspeakers - each one of them playing the sounds of Broadway in another resonant scale.

With this piece, Kirkegaard not only draws a multifaceted portrait of Broadway as idea, location and historical concept - he also offers a unique way of experiencing the reverberations of an urban environment, as it were, "from within.”

If only because Kirkegaard’s last release, Four Rooms (Touch Records), was a sonic portrait of four rooms within Chernobyl’s “Zone of Alienation,” one should expect more than just spineless ambient knob-twiddling. “Broadway” runs through May 7.