SLA Industries: Shroud

Here the water doesn’t come down as rain, it comes down in sheets.

It pours through the slits in the firmament of Suburbia and falls in a shimmering curtain.

Umbrella’s won’t protect you, raincoats won’t help in the slightest.

If you walk through one of these glistening shrouds you’ll get soaked to the skin. It’s like walking through a cathedral of glass, plummeting from the sky.

It’s a massive abstract; scattered, cubist patterns like a watery Mondrian. All angles and squares lit up by the street lights into a synaesthesic display of colour and sound.

The constant flow damps down all noise with its broken-TV hiss creating gaps of water, light, sound that are cut off from each other, divided up and sliced piece by piece such that one ‘box’ can be another world compared to its neighbour.

Here, the bright light shines off the falling water and creates a miniature ‘hell’ where the Scorn Street Devils command their little ‘fort’ made from stolen skips and boxes. Music pulses and booms, shaking the liquid walls in a sympathetic vibration. The first sign of a Shiver and they vanish through the scarlet curtains and disappear from sight.

There, speckled UV light, beaded by water droplets, shines on sickly, yellow, potted plants, limp flowers and greying moss, tended by an old man who hides in this corner, out of sight and mind, coughing up his last lung from the damp but bringing a little life to this little patch of rust and concrete.

Just a little.