V&A’s Boiler Room

The Friday Lates are, much as the name suggests, a series of exhibitions that take place on a Friday night, specifically the last Friday of each month. The content is purposefully chosen to be very different from what one might expect to be displayed in the V&A – this most recent Friday Late, on the 31st of January, was curated by Boiler Room, a somewhat hard to describe entity.

Boiler Room, the brainchild of Blaise Bellville, started life as a guest-list only club night in Dalston that showcased the best of London’s underground electronic music scene by streaming a live TV feed online for every performance. It grew in importance and repute until it became the big name in the scene, and now has offices in New York, Berlin and Los Angeles. Importantly, it has branched out from streaming performances, and now takes part in all kinds of cultural music based forums, including Friday Late.

The first thing I noticed upon walking into the V&A from the Exhibition Road entrance was how surreal it was to be surrounded by beautiful marble sculptures of nymphs and classical era gods and goddesses, while having my ears bombarded with sounds very much on the experimental edge of London’s electronic music scene. The theme of the evening can very loosely be summed up as “exploring the relationships between spaces, technology and sound”, and the first exhibit I saw was the Bristol collective Emptyset’s piece, Medium. Set outside in the John Madejski Garden, and displayed on a large LED screen with several speakers, the piece used semi-static images of the gothic Woodchester Mansion and harsh static to change the area into a grim and foreboding place, in sharp contrast to the brightly lit, opulent and warm museum interior.

Next I came to the grand entrance where the boiler room set itself was underway, and after a short dance, (making sure to get myself in the way of the cameras filming for the online stream) I made my way to the nearby Medieval and Renaissance Room where electronic musicians Bill Kouligas and Mat Dryhurst, joined in their conviction that live streaming will become its own expressive medium, were performing live manipulation of the boiler room audio. Most interesting about this exhibit was how organic it was; the distance from the boiler room was small enough such that you could still just about hear the original, while listening to the abstract mix produced unrehearsed by the two musicians. They were chatting to each other, dancing to their own modified beats and talking to and encouraging members of the audience to “get their funk on”. It was unpretentious fun, created by two people with real interest in what they were doing.

Journeying now to the highest level of the V&A, and into the very comfortable Lydia and Manfred Gorvy lecture theatre, my favourite exhibit of the night, called London Modular, were creating the kind of noises that make you make that face. Four enormous modular synths were being programmed live to create some truly beautiful music, while informative slides were on loop via projector. The best part came when they used analogue synthesis to produce chaotic noise via a series of non-linear dynamical equations, and then used digital logic gates to decide which noise to filter. They dealt with the infinitesimal point at which a system changes from deterministic to truly chaotic, which, as a mathematician, I found particularly interesting. After the performance we were encouraged to go and poke around with the synths and ask any questions we may have, and the enthusiasm of all involved was truly heart-warming.

There was so many exhibits I didn’t have chance to see on the night, but the sheer inventiveness and variety of those that I did, along with the £0 entry fee, means I would recommend next month’s Friday Late to anyone, regardless of its subject matter.