A Side / B Side
~ Electric guitars & the Organum.



A Side / B Side is the closing performance of Lindsay Lawson's Organum, a site-specific installation at the Bärenzwinger in Berlin.
The Organum consists of steel pipes cut in the key of C# and the key of A# and ascending in octaves. Suspended all around the outdoor spaces of the Bärenzwinger (a place that housed bears until 2015 and is now an art space), the Organum acts as a giant chime and is activated by the natural elements.

Wanting her work to be activated by musicians, Lawson invited Alizée Lenox as well as percussionists Els Vandeweyer and Rieko Okuda to interact with the piece. Since the Bärenzwinger is oval-shaped and the Organum is suspended on either side, the musicians decided to approach the performance as two sides of a music record.

For side A, Vandeweyer and Okuda played the Organum in the water that was in the area where the bears used to swim while Lenox was in the upper area. For this section, the sounds of footsteps in the water and percussion emanating from the Organum seem to float over the guitar drones. The ensemble creates a meditation for the bears.

For the B side, Alizée Lenox went to play in direct contact with the Organum. Wanting to create sounds from both instruments at the same time, she used the neck of the guitar to strike the steel tubes of the Organum. The vibrations created by the impact resonated through the guitar's microphones while the steel tubes continued to chime.
During the performance, the musicians began to improvise together. Vandeweyer and Riokuda began a more rhythmic section while Lenox began to slide the guitar strings by pressing them vertically directly onto the Organum.
The droning sounds and percussions accentuated and revealed the haunted and dark side of Bärenzwinger.