The Giant Accordion

5 April 09: The giant accordion at Tate Britain was brought over from Italy by Ruth Ewan, an artist in their Altermodern exhibition. Her exhibit is Squeezebox Jukebox, a series of daily concerts of traditional protest songs played live, and I’m one of the performers. Trying to play something you are familiar with, but on a 12x larger scale, causes that giddy feeling when your brain processes something it sees but doesn’t quite believe – similar to the feeling from the huge Anish Kapoor sculpture at Tate Modern a few years back. I’m lucky to get to physically play with this exhibit, too – not just stand back and look. It feels surreal - like playing a building, or candy. It's a bit of a struggle to work this beast, too: the noise from the generator randomly surges, the bellows slow at their apex, and organised placement of keys and buttons disappear when you get right next to them. It all adds to the exhibit tho, and obliquely refers to the struggles the composers were writing about. Hopefully it doesn’t diminish them, but instead continues the life of the songs in a new context.

This is the second project of Ruth’s that I’ve worked on – the first being Did You Kiss the Foot that Kicked You? which placed 100 buskers throughout the city during rush hour, all playing Ewan McColl’s folk anthem ‘Ballad Of Accounting’. A work of hers that I wish I'd seen is Psittaciformes Trying to Change the World, an aviary filled with parrots and cockatoos taught to repeat chants taken from field recordings made at G8 protests. Visitors to exhibits get bombarded with left-wing slogans by talking birds: brilliant. The threads of music, protest, community engagement and humor run right the way through her terrific work.

Altermodern is on until the end of April, and I play two more times: April 21st & 24th.