Fitness
An underwater club night? Dip into Wet Sounds
Electronica artist Joel Cahen makes a splash with his dreamlike performances at swimming pools.
"It's the loveliest, most relaxing kind of strange... you feel like you’ve completely escaped reality for a while.”
Bet you’ve never heard notes this deep before. Wet Sounds is a series of electronic music gigs held inside swimming pools, with different tunes being played above and below the water. Once you’ve got your cossie on and you’re in the water, you can decide what melodies you want to hear by either diving to submerge yourself, raising your head out of the H2O, or floating on the surface to merge the two tracks together, creating you own personal mix.
It’s part bathing, part raving. It’s the water-birthed brainchild of musician and experiential artist Joel Cahen, and it’s as wonderful as it is weird.
Wet Sounds in Estonia
© Wet Sounds
It sounds as trippy as it is drippy. What kind of people go to Wet Sounds and what’s the experience like?
Wet Sounds events have toured all over the world. “It was like being in a dream… a literal wet dream!” says guest Kyrsty, 27, who attended a performance at Willes Pool in London's Kentish Town. “As well as the two sets of music being played over and under the water, there were huge images of ferns and faces projected onto the walls, the pool glowed with multi-coloured lights, and there was even a gramophone bobbing about in the shallow end! I’ve been before and in the past there have been scuba diving actors and underwater sculptures made from billowing fabric. Wet Sounds is totally immersive and the loveliest, most relaxing kind of strange; you feel like you’ve completely escaped reality for a while.”
It should be no surprise that at such an inventive, imaginative concert, the tunes aren’t your standard electronica beats‘n’bleeps, either.
“The Kentish Town show featured live bass clarinets and excepts from a new opera called Teffradot by Rebecca Horrox, which blends classical voices with death metal vocals to tell a mythical story set in Snowdonia,” explains fan Tom, 25. “I’m really into alternative stuff, but I spoke to plenty of folks in the pool who’d usually only listen to mainstream Top 40 artists. They’d been attracted to Wet Sounds by its novelty value, then discovered a whole new genre of music. Because the sounds create so much of the atmosphere, and it’s such fun to play around with them by diving up and down, pretty freaky tracks end up being surprisingly accessible to people of all tastes, ages and backgrounds.”
Watch some footage from a Wet Sounds show below.
Seems like everyone (satu)rates Wet Sounds very highly. How did such an off-the-wall, oddball concept come to exist in the first place?
Cahen has a long history of producing uniquely unusual, interactive events. He helps run Scrap Club, a day where participants are given hard hats, protective goggles and sledgehammers, then let loose to cathartically smash up old fridges, cars, computers and televisions. Their destruction is accompanied by a Stomp-esque soundtrack delivered by a band who use bits of scrap metal and defunct white goods as instruments.
He’s also involved in making recordings of plays designed to be listened to via headphones connected to your smartphone while walking through particular places. They use GPS to trigger sound effects and parts of the story to play when the user passes a given point or enters a certain building, so the listener’s surroundings become a virtual theatre set.
“The idea for Wet Sounds came to me in 2008, when I was swimming in a virtually silent pool,” Joel says. “The acoustics in the room were really interesting, and the few sounds I did hear had a unique quality. It sparked my curiosity to know what it would be like to fill the pool with music as well as liquid.”
Since then, Cahen has taken Wet Sounds to everywhere from Brussels to Norway, and worked with musicians he hugely admires along the way. “Some of my favourite pieces created to be played to swimmers include one by composer Christopher Collier, inspired by the true tale of a church in North Wales that was purposefully flooded to build a reservoir,” he enthuses. “The music echoes with spooky, resonant bell sounds. I also love Tomoko Sauvage’s compositions, which featured dripping noises you could her underwater: disorienting, hypnotic, and magical.”
What kind of equipment is needed for a Wet Sounds performance to go swimmingly?
“We play tunes via six speaker channels above the water and two beneath it,” says Cahen. “Underwater speakers are available in different qualities: cheaper varieties are used to broadcast sound during synchronised swimming sessions and underwater hockey games, but we’ve got really decent ones often used for military operations by the Navy.”
The body experiences sound differently when submerged in liquid to how it does on dry land. “Sound waves travel 4.5 times faster in water than in air,” Cahen explains. “This affects the brain’s ability to perceive where a noise is coming from. Ordinarily, a sound reaches one ear slightly after it reaches the other, which helps your mind figure out the direction of the source. Underwater though, sounds travel too quickly for you to pick up on this clue, so music seems to appear from nowhere. Plus, sound waves in the water directly vibrate the bones of the inner ear, bypassing the outer and middle ear completely. The result? Everything sounds like it’s being played inside your own head. It’s very intimate.”
If you’re looking for somewhere to truly let music wash over you, Wet Sounds is the place.
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