During the silent film era, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, drummers were called upon to provide drums and sound effects for silent films in theaters. Percussionists began to combine different instruments into a setup, so that a single player could take on the roles previously played by several. As Arthur Olaf Anderson said in his 1929 book “Practical Orchestration”: “In the small orchestras of today, these percussion instruments come under the general appellation of “traps,” and very often, one performer will have as many as eight or more different varieties carefully distributed about him in a convenient arrangement, easy to the hand, and will do his duty by all of them in a surprisingly agile and clever manner…He must be a person of vivid imagination…”
This setup was called a “trap set” or “traps,” which was short for “contraptions.” Dramatic scenes with train wrecks, howling storms, or even roaring lions worked best on the audience when a sound effect fulfilled the expectations of the ear. With the advent of sound in films, the need for these instruments and sound devices and the art disappeared.
Inspired by this almost 150-year-old sound tradition, Stanislas Pili and Miguel Ángel García Martín present a contemporary version of this art, continuing the lineage of the pioneering percussionists who gave the first pictures a magical sound context. Whether the sounds that the duo produces in the Gare du Nord will fulfil the expectations of the ear, however, is another film.
Tickets are CHF 15-35 for adults and CHF 10 holders of the Colourkey and children under age 12.

Website
garedunord.ch/en/calendar/2924/friendly-takeover-4-miguel-angel-garcia-martin-en

Where
Gare du Nord
Schwarzwaldallee 200
4058 Basel

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