- The scene was surreal any way you looked at it: 100s of people descending on an open-air parking garage in 33-degree heat to listen to 100 cars all play a sine wave at the same time. The experiment was Ryoji Ikeda's latest work, A (For 100 Cars), and it was the flagship event of Red Bull Music Academy's Los Angeles festival. The idea was simple in theory, but daunting in execution: 100 drivers in tricked-out cars playing a different tone at the same time for 27 minutes, with each vehicle given individual scores and instructions on volume. It was a spectacle—in the hotels surrounding the garage, people were pressed up against their windows, wondering what the hell was going on down below.
The automotive orchestra was inspired by the pre-digital history of Western tuning standards. With no precise way to measure A—which, we now know, is 440Hz—the agreed-upon tone moved up and down the frequency spectrum over the ages. Ikeda chronicled 100 different iterations of A, running all the way from 1364 up until the end of the 19th century, and gave each car its own frequency and score sheet.
Why cars? Well, it is LA after all. The city is all about driving, and petrolheads, particularly on the east side, have a long tradition of modifying their rides with huge and often ridiculous soundsystems. (One driver boasted of regularly listening to music in his car at 135 dB.) The 100 cars ranged from unassuming compact vehicles to SUVs decked out in holographic paint and images of scantily clad women.
All the cars were built for maximum volume. There was a Chevrolet truck with 12 speakers mounted to each door and its back half entirely hollowed out to make room for subwoofers. Other non-orchestra vehicles were also on display in the spectator area, allowing attendees a closer look at the city's car culture. The audience was as incongruous as you might expect, with electronic music nerds in normcore fashion rubbing shoulders with long-haired car enthusiasts in biker clothing.
The orchestra started as the sun began to set, and the 27 minutes flew by with an array of tones that ranged from high and reedy to low and rumbling. In the open air, the sound of 100 cars wasn't as loud as I expected—the free earplugs weren't necessary—but a trip down to the garage's lower level demonstrated the awesome power of all those systems playing a sine wave at full blast. The composition alternated between pretty and fearsome, and the differences in tones illustrated the unpredictable history of notation in Western music, though it might have been more interesting with more than just sine waves.
But the question, again: why cars? The score included instructions for drivers to rev their engines at specific times, and the performance ended with a cacophony of horn blasts, which felt slightly gimmicky. A friend pointed out that the incredible hum of 100 stationary vehicles could've been a comment on LA's notorious traffic, while another joked that the din of cars all playing different kinds of music after the performance was the real art piece.
It's rare that any promoter or artist gets the chance to transform a public space like Ikeda did with Classic Parking in Downtown LA. The sounds, sights and sensations will probably stick with those who experienced it for a long time.
Photo credit /
Carlo Cruz