The sound of (weird) music

By Elizabeth Stieber
Times Staff Writer

For three decades, Cellblock 7 rested in peace, remarkable only for the layers of dust and the laser-like beams of sunlight that filtered through the skylight and window slits in the cells.
Now, the long, peeling corridor awakens with a rumbling that echoes from one end of the cellblock to the other and back, followed by an applause of clanking metal.
The creepy sounds that now haunt the suffocating, dingy halls of the old prison represent the notes of an eerie composition of clanging, pounding and crashing sounds.
At least, that’s how multimedia artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller see it.
"It’s a huge instrument," Miller said of Cellblock 7, as he and Cardiff put the final touches on their newest installation, called Pandemonium, at Eastern State Penitentiary last week.
Cardiff and Miller, both Canadians who live and work in Berlin, Germany, have undertaken artistic ventures featured in New York, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, London and Berlin.
They specialize in large installations that incorporate noises, though the artists usually work with recorded sounds.
"We’ve never done a piece like this before," Miller said. "We wanted to do something around the idea of reinhabiting the space with a presence."
They used the left-behind rotting, rusty, dusty stuff that rested untouched for more than three decades at Eastern State as their noisemakers.
To demonstrate, Miller hit a note on his electric keyboard.
The dark, rotting Cell 23 nearby burped a deep thump.
Sean Kelley said he never experienced anything like this exhibit in his 10 years working at the prison-turned-museum at 22nd Street and Fairmount Avenue
"It’s the coolest thing ever," he said as the cellblock shrieked around him.
The installation marks the corridor’s opening to the public.
The massive, narrow, two-story Cellblock 7 was completed in 1836 and used until the prison closed in 1971.
For years, the museum wanted to put the space on view, but funding for repairs became available only recently, Kelley said.
The $200,000 project was funded by the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiatives, which is a part of the Pew Charitable Trusts.
The skylight is the last of the repairs and should be completed next year.
Curator Julie Courtney asked the artists to bring an exhibition to the prison after she saw — rather, heard — an installation of theirs in London.
"There are so many possibilities" with the prison, Courtney said. "It is a marriage of artists and site."
Pandemonium is open now through November.
With the help of colleagues both local and abroad, Cardiff and Miller spent more than a year developing the technology and mapping out their plans. They spent a month working on the installation in the prison.
Their 15-minute symphony draws a different noise from each of the 128 cells that line the two floors of Cellblock 7.
Cardiff and Miller constructed L-shaped beaters resembling a drummer’s foot pedal and set them on anything they could find in the dank spaces — a toilet, a light fixture, pipes, a bed post, a wooden night table — to create haunting reverberations.
The beaters are set on electronic devices that are connected with a two-computer system that is hidden in a second-floor cell.
Six miles of wire link the beaters in the individual cells to the computers.
A software program in one of the computers constantly replays the composition.
The artists have recruited a local colleague to check on the exhibit and make sure everything is running smoothly.
To compose the prison piece, Cardiff and Miller first connected the beaters to an electronic keyboard and played around with the sounds.
The "notes" are seemingly random.
At times, the banging and clanging strikes louder and louder, overwhelming the space.
"Sometimes, it’s a riot," Cardiff said.
At other points, the thuds and taps play a rhythmic game from opposite ends of the cellblock, "like a heartbeat . . . or the ticking of a clock," Cardiff said.
The beating slows to a near stop, followed by a random clank or boom here and there.
"The building is so beautiful," Cardiff said, "we wanted to give a sense that it is breathing." ••
For more information about Eastern State Penitentiary, at 2124 Fairmount Ave., call 215-236-5111 or visit www.easternstate.org
Reporter Elizabeth Stieber can be reached at 215-354-3036 or estieber@phillynews.com