[VIDEO] The Vigeland Mausoleum: An eerie and beautiful room with 15 seconds of natural reverberation, and me and some friends got to play music there!

Many consider Emanuel Vigeland's masterwork to be his own mausoleum, Tomba Emmanuelle (Italian for 'Emanuels grave'), better known as Emanuel Vigeland Mausoleum. He built it in Grimelundsveien 8 at Slemdal in Oslo, Norway, originally as a studio and future museum for his works. When Emanuel was about 50 years old, he changed his plans and started to build the place to be his own mausoleum. As part of the rebuilding, he walled up all the windows, and in a niche at the low end of the main room he placed an urn for his ashes, which are still there to this day. It is said that Emanuel, who were dissatisfied with living in the shadow of his more famous brother (Gustav Vigeland), made the door so low that one is compelled to bow before his urn.

Inside, he filled the ceiling and walls with a 800 square meter mural bearing the name "Vita" (Italian for "life"). The main theme is human life from conception to death, with a focus on sexuality and reproduction. A recurring motif is women (especially redheads) as sexual beings or as mothers. Where man is depicted, he serves as a sexual partner for the women, but toward the end of the life cycle the man is finally perceived as an artist, and he dies as a creative individual midst his artistic tools.

For those interested in room acoustics and reverberation, this graph shows the correlation between sound frequency and reverberation time:

As a reference, for frequencies where speech is important (500 Hz – 2 kHz) the reverberation time is about 13 seconds, rising to 18 seconds at low-frequencies.

I talked to my friend Eivind, whom I play with in the experimental spacerock band iRerror, about looking into the possibility of us playing music in there. After exchanging many, many emails, we finally got the thumbs up from the people preserving the mausoleum. We were able to book the room for 6 hours and immediately started inviting friends and artist that inspire us; people that we knew would appreciate the opportunity to play such a magical room. When the big day arrived we were a group of nine people from Norway, Sweden, England, France, Australia and the US. It was six hours of mesmerizing melodies and cell-vibrating frequencies. We will never forget that day.

All of the camerawork is done by me (except for when my band, iRerror, was playing, when Nils Brandsma was filming)
All video and sound editing is done by me.

Here are all the performances from that day. I hope you enjoy, and thank you for reading, watching and listening!

• Kent