The enormous B&W Halls on Refshaleøen provide the setting for a monumental installation of sound and light on Culture Night 2025:
LAMENTATION DE MORURUA is an immersive experience of music, light, and lasers in the vast industrial halls, usually closed to the public.
The halls (with ceilings up to 70 meters high) were once used for shipbuilding and today houses the stage sets of the Royal Danish Theatre.
The composer and electronic music pioneer Gunner Møller Pedersen wrote LAMENTATION DE MORURUA in 1989 as a work for solo soprano, electronic choir, and 4-channel tape.
Originally invited to compose a celebratory piece for the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, Møller Pedersen instead created a lament against France’s nuclear testing at the Morurua atolls in French Polynesia.
On Culture Night, LAMENTATION DE MORURUA will be reimagined in a site-specific production staged by the light and sound collective Båll & Brand in collaboration with the electronic project Robotic Folk (LT), the music organization Strøm, and The Royal Danish Theatre.
Båll & Brand direct and stage the entire installation, transforming the colossal hall into a living space of light and sound. Using lasers, mirrors, haze, and custom-built phosphor screens, they evoke the immense forces unleashed on Morurua: not the iconic mushroom clouds of nuclear test explosions, but the sensation of witnessing a blast - the blinding whiteout, the subsonic slow-motion rumble of earth-shaking detonation, and the eerie green afterglow lingering on phosphor surfaces, combined with abstract forms inspired by physics, atomic fission, and chain reactions.
Robotic Folk - the solo experimental electronica project of Lithuanian composer Jonas Jūrkunas - reinterprets Møller Pedersen’s original composition. Working with quadrophonic sound like the original, he adds subtle rhythmic pulses, ambient textures, processed echoes of the choir voices, and spectral soundscapes that deepen and strengthen the lament. Known for merging acousmatic sound with guitar aesthetics into what he calls a “meta-guitar”, Jūrkunas expands the sound world of the work while keeping its core intact.
With a Culture Night wristband, visitors can enter the installation continuously between 18.00 and 24.00.
The 15-minute experience runs in a loop, starting every half hour. Audiences are free to move through the hall at their own pace and stay as long as they wish.
A four-tower multichannel sound setup immerses the audience physically in the music, surrounding them with the lament. With its vast dimensions, the work becomes an organic symphony of light and sound that floods the entire 562.500 m3 shipbuilding hall.
This new production of THE LAMENTATION DE MORURUA is part of Strøm’s project Lydskatten, dedicated to preserving and disseminating the history of Danish electronic music.
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