Homemade Megaphones on a Moroccan Mountaintop

Pablo Serret de Eña creates sound installations with a creativity and sense of humour about them that we love. A few months ago he got our attention by making an amplified drum kit out of packing cases for his band Sacramento, and since then we've been getting steady updates about his various projects, most of them involving home made speakers and a lot of electricity.

Last year he headed to Morocco with a group of fine arts students as part of a project with the center for fine arts in Tetouan, built megaphones out of scrap metal, and left them on top of a mountain pointed at Spain. Yeah, we wanted to know why too.

In Spain we see Morocco as little more than a migration launch pad, a place with football pitches and hash fields and not much else. I'm I had the idea of making loudspeakers out of scrap and placing them up on the mountains, and making like a a rainbow of of sound between Spain and Morocco. The idea was to build like a prehistoric internet, with the networks and connections made up of shouts. I'm thinking of setting up something similar – as a kind of reply – in Tarifa [The closest point between Spain and Africa]. Or, even better, up on top of the Rock of Gibraltar.

Well, all across northern Africa, all Islamic countries I suppose, they've got megaphones on the minarets for the call to prayer. This project has things in common with that kinds of "loudspeaker" but my intentions weren't religious.

People don't throw things away in Morocco – they know how to take a lighter apart and turn it into a helicopter. It's not like here, where you can find stuff on the streets. So we had to go straight to the supermarket of shit; This place had literally mountains of scrap, as well as a few happy donkeys roaming around. It was run by this guy in a perfect white cordrouy suit who we had to haggle for hours with, but he threw in free transport. The delivery guys turned out to be an ex-con wearing air max's and his two mates, all piled onto a Lateq moped with a rack soldered onto the back.

One sounded pretty hi-fi, the second didn't work very well and the third was a real mishmash with tubes coming out all over the place.

It was the only time in my life I've ever thought about what it must be llike for arms smugglers. We borrowed a van with a tarpaulin for a roof and drove on some insane roads during a torrential rainstorm. It did make me wonder exactly why I was doing this.

The whole journey, I mean, on the one hand, it made me really happy. For someone to send you out on an adventure in some beaten up old cars, great, what better? But then again there was a certain responsibility involved, although it might not seem like it. The people who accompanied me – along with the locals – transformed the whole thing into something more akin to American Pie than a conference of nerds in smoking jackets and headphones talking about cables. Morroccos surprsingly suited to forgetting your inhibitions. But it's really fucking cold in the north.

The last time we saw they were perched on the roofs of the Fine Arts Building in Tetouan. The idea is to go back when we've got the other side made -but there's always he posibility that someone'll sell them back to the guy in the courdroy suit.

Something I'm really excited about – the European tour of the Acampada Drone. It's this mountain of apparatus producing intermittent noise – radio interference, transmissions white noise – which we presented in Madrid at the last In-Sonora Festival. The idea is to do a tour in a van (like a band on tour) from Madrid to Oslo (stopping at five, maybe ten places), loaded up with all this kit, and stopping to "sound" alongside other groups and artists. The idea is also to collect more parts along the way, and create a documentary of the journey, interview the people involved, etc. I really hope it works out.

Thanks to Ryanair and their stupid baggage policy I had to take the Vortex Amplifier, talking koran and kids walkie talkies I'd bought out there in my hand luggage, and it didn't all fit. A guy who was in the queue with us called rashid, agreed to take the Vortex amp for us. When we landed at barajas he confessed that halfway through the flight he was having some serious second thoughts about that… I still don't know how they let us through with it all.

INTERVIEW: AINHOA REBOLLEDO
TRANSLATION: TOM BUNSTEAD