In the summer of 2024 at Röda Sten Konsthall’s main room, Cha Blasco composed a sound work that threads through Max Ockborn’s installation of paintings and sculptures, a central video piece, and an evolving program of dance and performance. Developed in collaboration with Max Ockborn, the work was conceived as an aural architecture rather than a soundtrack—listening as a wayfinding device, an “emotional map” that helps visitors navigate the density of the space while quietly suturing its disparate temporalities and media. In addition to this collaboration, Blasco presented three other independent works elsewhere in the art center during the same exhibition.

Blasco builds the piece from the psychoacoustic phenomenon of the Shepard tone—an acoustic illusion of perpetual ascent or descent—unfolded here in a quadraphonic field. The result is a slow, breathing continuum that refuses climax or resolution, allowing attention to drift between surfaces and bodies without the didactic push of narrative. Trained AI models—grounded in timbral palettes drawn from Japanese percussion, Balkan choral traditions, and other instrumental sources—generate an ever-renewing fabric of overtones and textures. Rather than exoticizing these materials, Blasco treats them as vocabularies of articulation: points of friction where rhythm, breath, and resonance meet the monumental scale of Ockborn’s forms.

Within the main room, the illusion of endless falling (and rising) tones operates less as spectacle than as atmosphere—an ambient pressure system that animates the paintings’ chromatic edges, unsettles the stillness of the sculptures, and extends the kinetic charge of the dance floor even in moments without performers. The sound does not accompany; it convenes. Visitors become both interlocutors and instruments, their movements continually recalibrated by a spatial mix that treats the room itself as a resonant body.

Samtal och betraktare (Conversation and the Observer) ultimately tests the limits implied by the exhibition’s title, (på) gränsen / (on) the edges: between seeing and hearing, object and event, solitude and assembly. What is presented here is a 12-minute stereo excerpt from the otherwise never-ending quadraphonic installation—an index of a work that, in situ, is less a piece to be consumed than a climate to be inhabited.