Riding the Straßenbahn on my way to the Belvedere Museum I got pretty curious about a huge fractal structure I saw standing at Schwarzenbergplatz. On the way back I felt like having a closer look on what would be the Viennese edition of Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary’s (T-B A21) “The Morning Line“.

Described as a A sonic pavilion by Matthew Ritchie with Aranda\Lasch and Arup AGU, this collaborative work between artists, architects, engineers, physicists, sound designers, and musicians had already traveled to Seville, Instanbul, and now it rests in Vienna until the 20th of November.

10 meter high and 20 meter long, the structure is built of 20 tons of black coated aluminum and equipped with fifty speakers controlled by a fancy audio system designed by the Music Research Center of the York University. As The Morning Line travels the world, T-B A21 has invited an international group of composers and curators to experiment different sound approaches to this new technology, what, in Vienna, gave origin to a 4 days festival, which, unfortunately, I got to know about too late to testify.

One of The morning line's tentacles with the Straßenbahn on the background

The guest curator for the project’s presentation in Vienna was the  Austrian musician and sound artist Franz Pomassl. You can check out the profiles of all the 27 composers for the project here, and listen to the tracks produced by 9 of them, for The Morning Line – Vienna, in the player below.

The Morning Line Compositions 2011 by TBA21