Music
Meet the Danish musical group who play underwater
It took Between Music 10 years and collaborations with professors and deep-sea divers to realise their dream. Now Aquasonic, the world’s first underwater concert, is ready to make its UK debut.
It’s hard to believe with your own eyes, and not a little haunting. Five water tanks contain submerged bodies, dressed in full concert finery. One man pulls a bow across a violin, his hair held in ghostly suspension around his face. Two figures beat out slow, clanking percussion using fists and mallets. A woman in a red gown occasionally floats to the surface, before diving under again and singing haunting, wordless tones, an occasional bubble of air escaping her mouth. It shouldn’t be possible, but it’s absolutely real, and somehow utterly gripping: think Portishead at their saddest and most bereft, and you’re halfway there.
This is Aquasonic, a new production from Between Music – a Danish company known for their innovative performances that crossbreed music, live performance and technology. It all began back in 2006, when the group’s artistic director Laila Skovmand started experimenting with singing into water, face under the surface, to see how it changed sound and timbre. “It was then she had a vision – what would it be like have a whole band playing underneath the water's surface, totally submerged?” explains company director Robert Karlsson, who also plays violin in the group. It took 10 years, and the support of scientists, universities, inventors and deep sea divers, to find out. But now Aquasonic is fully realised, and taking their water tanks on tour around the world.
Playing music underwater poses a variety of logistical problems. “We quickly realised that the regular instruments don't work very well underwater, so we got new instruments re-adapted,” says Karlsson. “There were instrument makers in the UK, US and Canada to help us build an instrumentarium for underwater use. There is something called a hydraulophone, a sort of water organ, invented in Canada by Steve Mann and Ryan Janzen. An organ uses vibrating air to make sound, but this uses turbulence in water to create sound.” Violins work underwater, although conventional ones tend to fall apart after a couple of dips, so the instrument Karlsson plays is made of carbon fibre. In the early days, Skovmand used to sing into a microphone tied inside a sealed condom, although nowadays Between Music use underwater mics, the kind they use on nature documentaries.
There was a lot of rewriting, a lot of re-arranging… We threw whole compositions away
Playing underwater inevitably shapes the sort of music that Between Music compose. One early discovery is that it’s extremely difficult to make the sound of consonants carry underwater, so Skovmand currently sings vowel-like melodies inspired by whale song, rather than words. “There are pieces of music we tried in the tanks that didn't sound right, or presented some technical obstacles,” says Karlsson. “There was a lot of rewriting, a lot of re-arranging… We threw whole compositions away.” And that’s before you get to the technical aspects of presenting an Aquasonic concert – a 13-metre truck to carry the tanks, three on-tour technical staff, two or three days of preparation to set up equipment and fill the tanks with water.
Watch an Aquasonic performance below.
But Aquasonic is certainly in demand, with recent shows in Denmark, Russia, Australia and France – not to mention their UK debut this month at Glasgow’s Sonica Festival. And due to public demand, there is an album on the way. “The sense of something new and unknown is certainly fascinating for a lot of people,” says Karlsson, and he has his theories why. “We all come from water, after all.”
Aquasonic takes place at Sonica Glasgow October 26-28. Buy tickets
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