Studio Sessions: Oliver Beer

Oliver Beer b. 1985, United Kingdom Follow +

If you listen closely, everything sings. Rooms hum. Objects vibrate. Bodies, too, have frequencies that shift as we breathe and grow. For British artist and composer Oliver Beer, this is more than just a theory; it’s a way of seeing, and hearing, the world. His works—installations, videos, psychedelic paintings, and stirring sonic arrangements—have been drawing on this idea since he began his ‘Resonance Project’ series in 2007, uncovering the innate musicality of spaces and the emotional pull of frequencies we often don’t realise are there. 

Beer’s 2025 project, Resonance Paintings: The Cave, exhibited at Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris, pushed these musical investigations further than ever before—to the Paleolithic painted Lascaux cave in the Dordogne. There, he entered spaces where early humans not only made marks on the walls but also, it transpires, probably made music too. Having mapped the cave’s natural acoustics, he returned to the sweet spots with musicians including Mélissa Laveaux, Rufus Wainwright, and Woodkid, who sang their earliest musical memories to the walls, letting the resonant frequencies of the space transform their songs into something almost supernatural. The recordings didn’t just result in audio works, but in an evolution of Beer’s ‘Resonance Paintings’, where sound becomes the paintbrush as powdered pigment dances across horizontal canvas, shaped by carefully controlled vibrations from speakers positioned beneath. In this case, the colours used by Beer include the very same pigments as can be found in those prehistoric chambers.

This is also the process behind another recent project, ‘Nymphéas’ (2024), a reimagining of Claude Monet’s ‘Water Lilies’ (1897–1926) commissioned as part of the 150th anniversary of the Impressionist movement. Having recorded underwater soundscapes at Monet’s iconic garden pond in Giverny, Beer brought the audio back to London to commit it to physical form, combining it with the pure tones and harmonies that he wields as his paintbrush: oceans of geometric ripples fixed on huge canvases in the exact dimensions of the series that inspired them. These works provided the perfect opportunity for Beer to broaden his often-monochrome palette to span blues, greens, pinks, and purples—an exciting shift that echoes Monet’s own exploration of colour as he captured the subtle nuances of the pond’s surface.

I join Beer at his meticulously organised studio in an old railway arch in south London, which just so happens to be on the site where William Blake once painted. Inside, jars of pigments are neatly lined up, tidy boxes with labels like ‘broken vessels’, ‘violin components’, ‘sheet music’, and ‘books—cut up’ are stacked on industrial shelving. Paint stains in earthy tones mark the concrete floor while spotlights highlight a selection of his hung works, old and new.

FD: Let’s start by revisiting your childhood. The Cave involved you asking singers to perform their earliest musical memory to those famous painted walls. What’s yours?

OB: A folk song called ‘Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair’, which my grandma, who was Scottish, would sing to me when I was going to sleep. I only ever knew her version of it until I was a teenager, when I heard Nina Simone’s 1959 rendition. It was a lesson in how a single fragment of cultural memory can vary so much when sung by people from different cultures. 

FD: What kind of music was playing at home when you were growing up? What sounds were you surrounded by? 

OB: My parents didn’t have a CD player or any musical culture to speak of. I grew up in the countryside in a ruined old farmhouse, with no heating or other people around. One day, when I was around eight or nine, my sister came into the house with a woman who said she was running away from the bailiffs, asking if she could hide her grand piano in our barn. Next thing I knew, a truck arrived with a Steinway Model B. It was this strange, beautiful machine and I was obsessed with it. The woman gave me intense and advanced piano lessons for about eight weeks and then disappeared, leaving the piano in the barn, gradually going out of tune. I’d play it every single day, slowly teaching myself. Thanks to that, my parents took me along to a good local school and said, ‘Our kid is making music, what do we do with him?’ The school gave me a full scholarship and that’s where I was introduced to music in a formal way, where I created my band, and was taken to art museums. That encounter with music completely changed my life.

FD: You should track the piano lady down and tell her! Do you remember first becoming aware of listening more intently to things? 

OB: I remember going to London for the first time and hearing the tube tunnels and finding a way to make them sing by singing the right note to them . . . and I remember my parents being completely weirded out by what I was doing. But I think most people have this capacity. It’s just that our visual culture is so dominant we forget how to listen. 

FD: Was there a time that you felt lost in the world but understood by a piece of art or music?

OB: On my first ever visit to Tate Britain, when I was around 13 years old, I saw a photograph called In The House Of My Father (1996–1997) by Donald Rodney. It’s a picture of a hand lying on top of a bedsheet holding a tiny model of a cabin. The description of the work explains that the artist, who had sickle cell anaemia and was ill in hospital, had built this little shack out of his skin grafts—all stuck together. There’s this sense of the fragility of the body, and also of the life that we inherit from our parents. I remember seeing that picture and feeling the power, eloquence, and sadness of it in a way that I hadn’t experienced before. In that moment, I discovered that art could express something I hadn’t understood could be expressed.

“Music is, I think, one of the strongest direct lines to our emotions ”

FD: That’s amazing. Returning to the present day, what’s soundtracking your studio time at the moment?

OB: I recently got a lot of vinyl. There’s a new Nicolás Jaar one, an anniversary edition of Space Is Only Noise (2011), which is really beautiful. I’ve been raiding charity shops because I love the things that people reject. It seems no one wants classical music on vinyl, so now I’ve got a massive Leonard Bernstein collection. I’m listening to people I’ve been collaborating with a lot too, because you want to really understand their music in different ways. For example, Mélissa Laveaux, who is an incredible singer. She’s Canadian, French, and Haitian and she draws a lot on her Haitian vodou musical roots. 

FD: Were you a fan of hers, and of the other musicians, before you started working with them? Is that what prompted the collaborations? 

OB: Some of them. With Rufus Wainwright, I didn’t expect him to do the project. I was just telling him about it and he shared his beautiful earliest musical memory with me, and it just happened from there. He then introduced me to Woodkid. And I saw Mélissa play at a left wing political rally in France. One singer, Mo’Ju, I actually invited over from Australia, where some First Nations communities continue rock art traditions—painting in the same places their ancestors painted for thousands of years. 

FD: How did you first encounter the caves, and what made you want to collaborate with them, as opposed to just taking inspiration from them? 

OB: I’ve worked in lots of architectural places—the roof of the Sydney Opera House, the Kiliç Ali Pasa Hamam in Istanbul, the sewers in Brighton, the glass tunnels of the Pompidou Centre in Paris—all of these very specific forms. I could see from the shape of the cave how it was going to sound, but I never imagined I would get down there in person because it’s so precious and rare. But thanks to a prize from the French government intended to support new art projects post-COVID, they let me in with the former curator of Lascaux and an amazing archeologist. You whisper a note really quietly and, if you whisper exactly the right note, it fits into the cave: it bounces back on itself, reinforces itself, and becomes 20 times louder than your voice. The cave fills with this incredible sound. The curator and the archeologist had never heard this, even though they’d been working there for so long. I made a map of the cave showing where the notes could be found and cross-referenced it with the map of where the paintings are, and there seemed to be more paintings where there were more notes. This suggests that the people who were painting in the cave may also have been making use of this phenomenal kind of shamanic experience that you can create there with your voice.

FD: You were saying that you’ve been listening to a lot of records recently, and I understand the making of your ‘Resonance Paintings’ can be sonically quite intense, but I’m wondering what role silence plays in your creative process?

OB: It depends on what you mean by silence. Right now, you can hear the railway and the pub garden next door. I love the fact that my studio is invaded by this city soundscape. And silence is never really independent of the space in which it’s contained. The ambient sound of silence has a particular colour, a particular harmony, determined by the geometry and volume of the space that contains it. When I was working on The Cave, I asked once to be left alone inside in the total darkness because that silence was very important to hear: the soundtrack to the empty cave for millennia, when we weren’t there activating it with these incredible singers. 

FD: And what was it like? 

OB: It wasn’t like anything else I’ve experienced because it’s such a deep silence. To know that you’re physically separated from the rest of the world by hundreds of metres of rock . . . I laid down on the ground and took some time to think about why I was doing what I was doing, to reflect on everything that those singers had brought with them as well. We obviously see the physical trace of the paintings, but what we revealed was the acoustic trace. It’s a highly personal, emotional response that goes right back to infancy. 

“If we valued sound the way we value image, and better understood how deeply they are intertwined, the world might feel a lot more connected”

FD: Given that sound is so often ephemeral, how much do you think about permanence and decay in your work?

OB: A lot. The musical DNA shared by all the singers in The Cave is only as strong as their line of cultural inheritances. For someone like Mélissa, her vodou song has travelled with her and her family from Haiti to Canada, from Canada to Paris, and she’s still holding on to it because music is such a strong survival mechanism of culture. Who knows how many generations her song has gone back? So, music can simultaneously be the most ephemeral thing, and yet survive—and that happens when it has meaning, but also when you have the privilege of inheritance. Because, as we can see in the world right now, but across history as well, being robbed of that inheritance is part of cultural oppression and colonialism. 

FD: Do you think that the act of listening well can change how people see the world?

OB: Definitely. If people learn to really listen, which involves being receptive and ceasing to speak, espouse, or proselytise. If people really knew how to listen, then the world would be a more peaceful and harmonious place. 

FD: Has a sound ever made you cry? 

OB: All the time. Music is, I think, one of the strongest direct lines to our emotions. The sound of a painting made me cry the other day actually, which is more unusual. A landscape by Paul Cézanne, downstairs at Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. I could hear and smell and feel the place; maybe it spoke to somewhere that I had been myself because, completely out of nowhere, this painting moved me. 

FD: Is there a sound you hear often that you reckon most people would ignore, but that you really treasure?

OB: I don’t know… There are incredible sounds everywhere. Even when pouring wine into a glass, I can hear the sound of the glass rising in pitch and the symmetrical descent of the bottle emptying. It’s like a duet between the two, both singing with each other. In America, where there is air conditioning in every room, often, each air-conditioning unit has a different note because it’s set to a different speed, so, as you walk from room to room, you hear these various harmonies gliding between each other. 

FD: Accidental music! It’s magic but so many people just don’t notice it.

OB: Your iPhone screen has about three million pixels to give you the best possible image, but its speakers are tiny and the sound is so thin. If our cultures were more attuned to sound, I think we’d be much more sensitive to the beauty of acoustic experience and we’d express ourselves differently, more profoundly. When we speak or sing, we are physically touching each other with our voices. Right now as I speak every atom in your body is vibrating in synchrony with my voice and with my words. The tiny bones in your ears are also moving, turning those vibrations into thoughts. Sound and music run very deep in us. If we valued sound the way we value image, and better understood how deeply they are intertwined, the world might feel a lot more connected and a lot less superficial. —[O]

Main image: Inside Oliver Beer's London studio. Courtesy Ocula. Photo: Alastair Levy.