Zvuky Prahy / Sounds of Prague

Ambient from the Brian Eno ambient installation in the National Gallery. Sudently group of school class entered the dark room and their voices merged with Eno´s elegy. One of the pieces displayed ther is the “The Ship”, where Brian Eno combined ambience with his own voice. "It was all pretty much normal until, at a certain point, I realized that I could sing the lowest note of the piece, which is a very low C," says Eno. "Well, I've never been able to sing low C before. As you get older, you know, your voice drops, so you sort of gain a semi-tone at the bottom and lose about six at the top every year. That's what's happened to me. So I've suddenly got this new, low voice I can sing with, and I just started singing with that piece. And so it was the first time I thought, "Oh, what about making a song that you could walk around inside?” As an installation, “The Ship” is an all-immersive sonic environment, composed of several vintage loudspeakers placed on monolithic structures, and distributed across a dimly illuminated room. The atmosphere is powerful yet intimate. The voices remastered by a computer program called “Vocal Transformer” receive “a sort of muted ghostliness” which imbues the space with uncanny flair and hypnotic feeling, providing a strong cinematic experience and influencing the listening behavior, consequently turning the listener into an active “viewer” and participant.

The Ship was from the willing land
The waves about it roll

And as aglow by powder band
We lift, we loot, we haul

The tie is still
The sky is young
Roll on towards the goal
And we are at the undescribed
To take a new control

For word a lure a prayful being
The bad the cast away
My never did the greater band
My life with you is dead