Deep Listening: Else Marie Pade

Dyrehavesbakken – or Bakken as it’s commonly known – is the world’s oldest amusement park, located just north of Copenhagen. Imagine the medley of sounds that made up the soundscape of this park in the mid-20th century, with the shrieks of ghost trains and tinkling of fair rides. This intriguing mix of disembodied noises was what captivated the Danish sound pioneer and ‘Technogranny’ (Ekstra Bladet) Else Marie Pade when she lived close to the park in the 1950s. Pade’s music translated the sounds around her into dark, unsettling soundtracks for films and other electronic tapes. In this event, the Queen Elizabeth Hall is transformed into an uncanny other-world by Pade’s distorted sounds of a long-ago fairground, captured by recording technologies from the 20th century.