Modern Atlanta

Installation by Roberto Carlos Lange Amplifies Sound to New Heights

Some of the most transformative and enduring art works are the ones that take you by surprise, that you stumble across in a strange city or encounter when art is the furthest thing from your mind.

Brooklyn-based sound artist and musician Roberto Carlos Lange’s Sounding Up There is one such project. It is created with the intent of slyly creeping up on passerby as they go about their day, entering or exiting the 1180 Peachtree building’s elegant lobby, accessed at 14th street. Sounding Up There is stealth in many regards, composed of four sets of milky white meteorological balloons floating like an aggregate of atoms or cell clusters above two serene reflection pools in the building’s lobby. Attached to each cluster of balloons are speakers with sound compositions Lange has created to complement and reflect the space they float within. The balloons amplify the lobby’s height and regal ambiance but add something uniquely ethereal, a sense of magic within the business-like surroundings.

Juxtaposed next to the 25-foot bamboo trees and soaring 40-foot glass walls that bathe the space in diffused sunlight, the balloons create a whimsical tableaux of the outdoors moved indoors, like a city park transformed into a minimalist theater set. In this case it is the theatre of ordinary life that Lange presents his audience with—but ordinary life intensified and made dramatic, reverberating around the lobby’s landscape.

Because lobbies are transitional spaces, passed through going from once place to another, Lange’s soundscape features the rhythmic beat of people on the move. In Lange’s stolen moments he captures the shuffling gaits, coughs and hiccups and overheard conversations that define these spaces where people are unguarded and unaware they are being aurally observed. Lange culls his sound from the serendipitous musical happenstance of city life and turns it into an orchestrated work, with sequences of found sound arranged alongside Lange’s almost musical, rhythmic compositions interspersed with yawning expanses of silence. “It turns into a symphony of the human voice” says Lange.


Roberto Lange

Lange’s interest in music originated in the festive cacophony of the Latin American community in South Florida where he grew up surrounded by a vibrant acoustic tapestry. He describes the experience of drifting off to sleep to the sound of music and voices and auditory clatter at the all-night parties, “penas,” arranged on the weekends by his father. “It’s like I went to sleep when I was eight with a party starting and woke up when I was twelve,” recalls Lange of his childhood bathed in a wall of sound. Studying at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Lange discovered conceptual approaches to music like musique concrète and avant-garde composers which “kicked down the door of the basic rules,” says Lange, and influenced the conceptual direction of his own work.

The inspiration for Sounding Up There was a conversation between Lange and his artist wife in which they wondered, if some disaster befell their Brooklyn neighborhood, what would be their best escape plan? A hot air balloon of course, “there was always this nice thing about being able to float away.”

Lange’s talents are diverse: singer/songwriter in the band Helado Negro alongside former Atlantan Mario Schambon and a frequent collaborator with artists including David Ellis, Nene Humphrey, Brian Alfred, Eve Sussman and music producer Guillermo Scott Herren.



Lange appears at MA11 Design Is Human Week via the Atlanta-based Flux Projects. Flux Projects’ mission is to bring art into unexpected places and to encourage Atlanta’s development as a creative city. The nonprofit has commissioned the dance company gloATL to perform at Lenox Square Mall and artist Gyun Hur to create an installation Spring Hiatus on the mall’s lower level this spring. This October, Flux Projects will again stage their one-night only event Flux, incorporating performance, installation, film and art on the streets, walls and vacant store fronts of Castleberry Hill to engage Atlanta with the infinite possibilities of art in creating a dynamic public space.