This 350yearold London Landmark Just Hosted Its First Techno Night
CNN London-
St Paul's Cathedral, an iconic part of London's skyline for hundreds of years, concluded its usual evening mass at 6pm on Wednesday. Just an hour later, the Church of England Cathedral, founded almost 350 years ago, was ready to host its first techno night.
The historic site has hosted many important events. Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 1897, the funerals of Admiral Lord Nelson in 1806 and Winston Churchill in 1965, and the wedding of King Charles III and Diana in 1981. But this week, as part of a collaboration between the City of London Corporation and Fabric, the nightclub hosted Australian techno rock artist Ray Cumming, known as his theatre. Accompanied by the Ry X London Contemporary Orchestra.
“We wanted to bring people back to the city,” said Jorge Nieto, creative director of Fabric, a few hours before the event. The area around St. Paul's Cathedral is a bit lost among the large number of office buildings and corporate cafeterias, Nieto said. “It's about reconnecting young audiences with the city and reinventing spaces.”
The public reaction to the incident was overwhelming. According to Fabrice, 95% of the 2,000-person church sold out within three hours of pre-registering for sale (and the remainder sold out within minutes of releasing to the public), resulting in a waitlist of more than 4,000 people.
That evening, a crowd of young people sat in awe of the sounds of electric guitars, drum machines and synthesizers in the 17th-century dome. In addition to security, the event was attended by the cathedral's lay ministers, who typically wear their religious badges and supervise services such as the Eucharist, Mass and Holy Communion. Unlike a typical techno concert, there were no bars. The stage, despite being a performance space, seemed almost superfluous; Instead, it was the blue, red and orange lights reflected in gold leaf murals or intricate stained glass windows that drew attention as the music swelled.
For Ry He said that St. Paul's Cathedral is complicated. “There aren't many things you can give up everything for,” he told CNN in an interview before the show. "If you have a place that already has wonder and beauty and majesty, when people come in, they're already transformed. Then half the work is done."
Organizing a rock concert in a protected area is certainly fraught with difficulties. The cathedral's unique architecture and abundance of negative space proved to be a particular challenge for the commission. “I don't think a synthesizer has ever been used in this building before,” he said. “So I thought, how about this?” “Will you make a sound?” They also have great resonance: each sound triggers a chain reaction of echoes that float through space for 11 seconds; If you play too fast, you risk feeling a shock. "I play this way," he said, "I don't play anywhere else, only in this room. I make music almost exclusively (from San Pablo)."
Since the cathedral was in service an hour before the show, Raya and Nieto's teams only had to do a soundcheck the night before to get it right. “We thought we could do it,” Nieto said. “We stayed here until 2 in the morning and turned the volume up to T.”
Perhaps it was the regal iconography of the cathedral or the power of the live music, but there was a certain excitement throughout the show. When Ray ordered the audience out of their seats during his finale, we did so by yelling a lot louder than the average audience member. The guests left their seats and approached the pulpit, and some of them climbed into the chairs. "Who says you can't play techno in church?" Ray shouted to the audience and received thunderous applause.
