Volta Feedback

High-voltage lutherie. Media saboteur Yann Leguay plays 50,000 volts in the vault of the old Christiania Sparebank.

Inside Sentralen's Hvelvet, with thick walls on all sides, Yann Leguay bends over a tangle of cables and modules. On the floor beside him, two jack plugs lie almost touching. Between them, a white filament flickers — electricity drawn taut like a string through the air.

This is Volta Feedback, a plasma instrument of Leguay's own making: a high-voltage current passed between two electrodes produces an arc that generates sound — sound made visible, vibrating between two points. Leguay calls it high-voltage lutherie, the craft of instrument-making applied to 50,000 volts.

The arc is not obedient. It sends electromagnetic interference through the room, disturbing nearby electronics. Leguay captures these disturbances with sensors and folds them back into the system, pulling the sound in more brutal and unpredictable directions.

Behind Volta Feedback lies Leguay's conviction that every step in technological evolution increases the distance between people and physical matter, turning us into passive users of invisible systems. Volta Feedback refuses that distance. The electricity is here, in this room, visible and loud, and utterly useless.

The concert is part of Ultima Thule: The Closest Possible Sound. See the full programme here.

Want to know more?

• Noise musician Yann Leguay is also known as a "media saboteur". He works with unusual machines and unstable setups to expose what we take for granted about technology, and break the illusion that machines are neutral, clean and transparent. "Dematerialisation is a scam" — "we must use the definition: delocalisation of the material," says Leguay, on the politics of technological evolution.
• Some physics: When very high voltage electricity jumps between two points, it ionises the air between them, creating a glowing channel of superheated gas. This is the filament you see flickering in Volta. As the electrical discharge fluctuates, it disturbs the surrounding air, generating the sound we hear.
• An installation version of Volta Feedback will also be on display at Sentralen during the festival.