"Late one night this week, I joined a small crowd at Venice’s Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello. Cocooned within the pint-sized chapel of the music school’s baroque palazzo is a strange scene. Here, the artist Oliver Beer has arranged an eccentric collection of vessels (including a money tin he’s had since childhood, in the shape of a squashed Beefeater) on plinths, microphone wires running from the insides of each to a keyboard, so that the pots can be ‘played’. All spaces have their resonant frequencies (including the room you are sitting in right now); when those frequencies are amplified (whether within a teapot, miniature pirate ship or ceramic dog), we can hear it too. When I visited his installation Little Gods (Chamber Organ) – part of the Parasol Unit group show Uncombed, Unforeseen, Unconstrained – Beer had just begun a marathon 24-hour performance, playing his own variations on Erik Satie’s 1893 Vexations (only a few lines long, the piece’s original score carries the added suggestion that its uneasy piano phrase be repeated 840 times, très lent). The humming toy-like tones bled through the space, forming a texture that floated into the adjoining galleries. In these singing pots, not only is sound a carrier of nostalgia and memory, there’s the idea that sound is something that might outlive us all."