No wave pioneer turned polystyle experimenter, Arto Lindsay hails his wayward roots and contemporary links to Brazilian carnaval with a crafty emulation of the real, humid and sexy festivities, realised for a sterile white box in Switzerland

‘7 Types of Ambiguity’ draws on Lindsay’s decades of visiting the carnaval in Bahia, Brazil for a sound installation commissioned as part of a research project led by Thibault Walter & Stéphane Kropf and entitled ‘Phantom Power’. The 27’ piece approximates the sensation of moving thru dense crowds while blocos of musicians intersect huge, truck-mounted sound systems, Afro-Latin rhythms intermingling themes of religion, sex, tradition and novelty in humid expression of life. However, detached from the visual spectacle, Lindsay uses only sound, diffused thru a 27 channel immersive sculpture, tin his attempt to recreate the effect. In it, location recordings of blocks musicians made in a terreiro (temple of Afro-Brazilian religion) are parsed, processed and layered into a near half hour approximation of carnaval, replete with a narrative arc that takes in the battery of sound moving close to the ocean, where its sound waves are almost neutralised by the water, and where weather may stop play, providing punctuation to the drummers’ killer rounds of martial, rhythmelodic syncopation and persistently shifting our perspective as a bystander caught in the throng, and outside it