Exhibition Detail

Photo by Ralph Gibson

Lou Reed, Metal Machine Trio

The Creation of the Universe
November 21, 2015 - March 26, 2016
Upper Main Gallery

Cranbrook Art Museum will present the audio installation of Metal Machine Trio: The Creation of the Universe, a live ambisonic 3-D sound installation inspired by Lou Reed’s controversial 1975 double album Metal Machine Music. Originally presented by the University Art Museum, California State University Long Beach (UAM, CSULB) in 2012, where Lou Reed worked in collaboration with the acoustic specialists at the Arup Engineering SoundLab in New York, Reed was able to recreate, for museum visitors, this groundbreaking composition from exactly the same acoustic perspective he had while performing it onstage.

The installation at Cranbrook Art Museum will use twelve loudspeakers in an ambisonic arrangement to create a fully immersive sound experience. The live recording of Metal Machine Trio: The Creation of the Universe took place at the Blender Theatre in New York in 2009. The improvising trio included Lou Reed, Ulrich Krieger and Sarth Calhoun.

Metal Machine Trio Musicians
Lou Reed – guitar, continuum fingerboard , electronics
Ulrich Krieger – electric saxophone, electronics
Sarth Calhoun – continuum fingerboard, electronics

The exhibition at Cranbrook is presented by Cranbrook Art Museum in collaboration with Sister Ray Enterprises, Inc., Arup Engineering SoundLab and HARMAN and is curated by Christopher Scoates, who now is the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Director of Cranbrook Academy of Art and Art Museum, and Raj Patel, a leading international acoustics, audio-visual, and multimedia consultant and designer with Arup. The exhibition at Cranbrook Art Museum is made possible with the support of Julia Reyes Taubman and Robert Taubman.