Barbican Outro: An Eighth of Mozart

 

 This is exactly what it looks like: a tiny, wooden audient. Placed in any architects' model of a concert hall, it predicts the acoustics by listening to sped-up recordings of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony (to ensure the soundwaves are to scale), while you work out what to hang from the ceiling. I'm not making any of this up.

 

 

 Dr. Raphael Orlovsky here might be, however. Perching like this was probably the director's idea; he looks great there, and it makes for a fun pan, but do architects normally clamber over their models, pretending to be giants? Is Orlovsky even the architect? I can't find anything about him online beyond the enchanting experiment performed sixteen minutes into this mixtape...

 

 The visiting musicians are very complimentary about the finished article, but I bristled a bit learning the only way onstage was up some stairs at the front – maybe because I was reminded of the beautiful concert halls we played on the Finnetour, where we had to change trousers in the corridor. That's the difference between real art and showbiz, I suppose: real art doesn't get a backstage. A lot of this footage bristles in fact. I remember very fondly how much Arts Reporting there used to be on television, but forget fifty per cent of it was posh people with microphones asking strangers how much they hated it.

 

  The Barbican's labyrinthine inaccessiblility is actually intentional – a power move – so the pissy reaction is understandable. This wasn't meant to be a place people stumbled upon, and I don't know how I feel about that. It's not a physical inaccessiblity, after all. You can find it if you look for it, and once there, share it with others who found it. So it's a faff, but it's also a pocket. And it's a pocket, but it's also a faff.

 Bringing the week full circle, this is what the Barbican replaced – another City in runes.