Press coverage

The Independent, 13 October 1992

The Independent, 13 October 1992:
"Floor One, called Elementary, aims to disorientate the audience by conjuring up an artificial storm. Sound will be unleashed in sudden, crashing bursts and flashes of light will illuminate vast areas of darkness. The audience will be confined to a tiny space to make the surrounding blackness all the more awesome. 'I don't think people will spend very long in here,' comments Kuhn. Instead, he thinks the place they'll linger will be Floor Three, entitled Jungle, which is a far more cluttered affair. Here, dense coils of coloured cables snake across the floor, the office's neon lights have been masked with tape leaving just a slim shard of light shining. The room is filled with the daily noises of urban life: a phone ringing, a television chattering, the murmur of traffic..." (Ellen Cranitch - read full article)

What's On In London, 14 - 21 October 1992:
"Located in one of London's busiest and noisiest junctions, the sound proofing of Angel Court ensures that Kuhn's sounds can have their full effect. You stand at the windows and look out on the ghostly traffic which you can hardly hear. The sound effects for this city scene are played out behind you in the equally ghostly, and spookily empty offices spaces. Kuhn retains this sense of scae and space by making minimal interventions into the space: a single simple line of small speakers in one, a single speaker in each of the fourteen corners of another and so on" (David Hughes)

The Wire, London, Issue 139:
“People stay five minutes, other people stay hours. It’s much more your individual decision … I use sounds that are unnerving, but I put them in contrast or in relationship so that they have a function within the piece. I am not interested in provocation. I would invite people to come and simply listen, because I have the feeling that many people don’t hear any more. Wherever you go, you have all this trash noise going on. Generally it’s too much. Your brain blocks it off. So if there is something like an intention, that’s the only intention, giving a chance to listen. I don’t teach anybody to listen, I’m just giving a chance, I’m not the mastermind behind all this, there is no ideology … You can be there and experience the situation of listening and looking.” (Hans Peter Kuhn)

The Dancing Times, December 1992:
"Kuhn sees Five Floors as an exercise in "five different ways of listening and dealing with sounds, a journey through the concept of listening." He views each of Angel Square's floors as "a separate set, or act, in the theatre."" (Sophie Constanti)

Variant, Issue 13, Winter / Spring 1993:
"The film director Andrej Tarkovsky wrote in his book Sculpting in Time about the role of music in film: “It does more than intensify the impression of the visual image by providing a parallel illustration of the same idea; it opens up the possibility of a new, transfigured expression of the same material: something different in kind”. Tarkovsky was talking about the effect which music can have on the visual image. This installation offered a similar kind of revelation but in reverse: showing the process by which sound can be transformed by its relationship to space, lighting and the possibility for the listener of moving through, inside and away from it." (Nick Cauldry)