Tarek Atoui’s Turbine Hall review, hallelujah, it’s raining musical instruments!

Tate Modern, London The Lebanese artist has turned trumpets, drums, cones and voices into an ingenious, interconnected sonic beast with funny, sad and mystical results. Prepare to feel the earth move!

O n the floor of the Turbine Hall , there are wide water basins and huge flattish rough-hewn rocks you might see on moorland or in a desert. You can sit or stand or climb on them. But if you look up, you won’t be able to stop looking up, because it’s raining musical instruments. Immense elongated brass trumpets and giant glowing drums seem to float in the air, suspended from the girders of the former power station’s roof.

If Lebanese artist Tarek Atoui had just left it at that, it would be an impressive, intriguing installation, but this is Tate Modern , honey, and Atoui hasn’t been asked to occupy its grandest space with mere physical objects. Instead, his sculptural creations and found stuff resonate and echo with an ever-changing, invisible art of noises. An earth-shaking bass note throbs from a hanging trumpet, or is it from that translucent cone rising out of the ground like an ethereal minaret? Then a drumbeat booms through the space and a woman’s plangent, achingly lovely voice sings notes of infinite nostalgia and melancholy.

It’s entrancing. The music has you hooked. It is music, I think, though abstract, non-melodic, a rising and falling of sounds that lead you around and through the installation’s forest of solid things. But then, is music ever not sculptural? Listening to the scything percussive notes of Stravinsky certainly is; and the desire to crystallise sound waves into something visible has haunted everyone from the inventors of opera to designers of psychedelic lightshows.

Yet Tarek Atoui still manages to do something new and beautiful with sound and vision. He teases you and boggles your mind with how his musical instruments relate to the sounds you hear, how the stones and water basins, pipes and strings have produced this sonic outpouring. The entire installation is an interconnected musical machine.

It’s funny too. There’s a warm, generous if absurdist humour to it all. In the past, a crazy mechanical contraption like this would be called “Heath Robinsonish”, after the early 20th-century British cartoonist who came up with such things. A better comparison is Leonardo da Vinci, who invented wild musical instruments among his other real and impossible machines: organs worked by water, a string instrument shaped like a fantastic beast.

Atoui, like Leonardo, seems to be looking for a lost harmony in the world, a secret note that pleased the Lord. Sadness hovers in the sounds that fill this vast grey space, as the bass notes pound harder, building up to an apocalyptic blast. What is being mourned and where is he taking us? You start to feel you are in a city of sounds and sights. The crowd of towering, floating pinnacles, the mysterious voice and crescendo of percussion, suggest an ancient, tumultuous labyrinth of a city. I thought of Lahore and Marrakesh, of a street-singer heard once in an Istanbul market. Yet this city is purer, less tangible. Its towers fly in the air.

Ultimately, you can’t reduce this magical, elusive work of art to a fixed meaning. You have to surrender to it. The sound gathers you up in its ecstasy like a spiralling mystical dance. There is a strong similarity with Sufi drummers and dervishes who use music and motion to inculcate a liberating, trancelike calm. I certainly didn’t want to leave. The vibrations and complex visual composition keep your brain busy but you are also soothed and at peace.

It also suggests the urban life all around this site, the exotic sounds of Bankside: the music of the city, gathered into Atoui’s collage of random noise. But reality slips and fades as you are shown a world beyond the physical. All these objects, from the cones to the stones to the electric guitar played live at the press view, are but as air. They fascinate the eye but the sound eventually dissolves the material world. The solid stuff Atoui begins with becomes as unreal as a reflection in a courtyard pool.

Atoui has grabbed the opportunity to work in this vast space with both hands, creating something rich, ingenious, funny, sad, mystical. This is a Turbine Hall installation to lose yourself in for hours, dreaming and wondering. It’s the sonic answer to a sun indoors, and Atoui is a modern magus.