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Sydney - A glass bowl, a little water and a single voice were the simple tools that kick-started the world’s first underwater band on Friday.
The band amazed audiences at the annual Sydney Festival – a major arts festival that runs for three weeks every January in Australia.
Musicians performed their AquaSonic show, comprising an underwater orchestra of instruments and voice, at the Carriageworks arts centre in Sydney, New South Wales.
It is an ambitious project created by five Danish musicians who perform submerged in specially designed aquariums.
The band formed in 2009 and first performed its AquaSonic concert in the Netherlands in 2016, but the idea for the band was hatched as early as 2002.
“It is very challenging to play live music under water,” said Robert Karlsson, co-founder of AquaSonic.
One day in 2004, Laila Skovmand raised a bowl full of water to her lips in her kitchen in Denmark and began to sing into the water’s surface.
Gradually, she totally submerged her mouth into the water, experimenting with the different sounds she could make.
Years passed and the experiments continued.
Once, Skovmand covered a large box with plastic, took a microphone, covered it with a condom and tried to sing completely submerged in water.
This is how AquaSonic, the world’s first underwater concert, was born.
Skovmand became the composer and artistic director of AquaSonic, as well as one of the performers.
With four other musicians, including Karlsson, she developed a new world of submerged music.
What exactly is this type of music?
“It is similar to the roles of other bands, but with an underwater touch,” Karlsson said.
“We think that water is something we have in common.
"All of humankind and life has something in relation to water and ... we think this concert can speak beyond culture and beyond religion, and beyond ‘you’ and ‘us’ and ‘they’ and the separation that we so often hear.
“Also, maybe subconsciously, we all have reminiscence through water since we are hearing it for the first nine months in our mother’s womb through the water filter.
"So the first sounds we probably registered were through water.” – Huffington Post Australia
WATCH A SNIPPET HERE:
(Photo: EPA/Glenn Campbell)
