Inter­est­ing that my reflec­tive sense of the music look­ing back is per­cus­sion, but there are quite a lot of lit­tle things bang­ing or rub­bing on oth­er things to cre­ate unusu­al and inter­est­ing sounds.

Pow­er Plant is a night-time walk through the Botan­ic Gar­dens on a one-way cir­cuit start­ing and fin­ish­ing at the look­out beside the Cable Car Muse­um.  All the way along the walk are light and sound fix­tures which near­ly all make you look clos­er to see just how they’re done, but because we were briefed at the start that there is to be no pho­tog­ra­phy I can’t reveal any secrets here.

Power Plant promoYou are set off in groups of 10ish at 10 minute inter­vals to ensure no-one is on top of any­one else through­out the cir­cuit (which works well), and the whole cir­cuit takes about an hour (unless one wants to take advan­tage of the food and drinks for sale on the grass by the sound shell and park up there for a while, in which case you could stretch it to 90 min­utes).  There are peo­ple in the dark all the way along to point you in the right direc­tion, and all oth­er side-paths are roped or blocked off so you can’t devi­ate (the odd dark body appear­ing in the side vision also ensured the heart was pump­ing ade­quate­ly).

My favourites were a fog­gy tun­nel with weird 3D per­cep­tion of what you’re walk­ing through, a dis­play at the bot­tom in the duck pond that made me think of trib­al coun­cil on one of those island real­i­ty shows, and the small pad­dock of whirling flow­ers on the way back up that made me think whirling dervish­es. 

So def­i­nite­ly worth the $30 as a oncer, and do wear warm cloth­ing (it was darned cold and pre­cip­i­tous on Fri­day night) and com­fort­able walk­ing shoes for being up and down dale.

Until 16 March.  Tick­ets avail­able via Tick­etek (there’s also a Tick­etek booth at the top of the Cable Car for the dura­tion).