Treble

THROUGH SUN., AUG. 1

A FUNNY THING happened on my way to P.S. 1 last weekend.

I got off the 7 train, and it seemed like the entire population of my former Brooklyn neighborhood had the same idea. A line of them, as usual significantly better dressed and coiffed than I, wrapped around the building waiting to get into the weekly Saturday-afternoon summer DJ party. Lacking any credentials that would bump me to the VIP line, I assumed that all was lost, but reprieve came stapled to a nearby telephone pole-a flier for the Sculpture Center a few blocks down the street.

In their present digs for just over a year now, the Sculpture Center is marooned out among a host of industrial buildings, but as we've noted in these pages before, it's worth the trek. Don't come expecting rooms of marble nudes. The raw space (a converted trolley repair shop reimagined courtesy of Maya Lin) is currently housing an inspiring group of sound art installations, though my two favorite pieces are actually outside. David Schafer's General Theory includes a PA mounted to the front of the building that emits, in a droning lecture voice, prose dense to the point of hilarity. Inside the gallery's courtyard, Paulo Vivacqua has outfitted the rock garden with a handful of pillar speakers, each sounding out part of an ambient sound piece well-suited to the spare, resonant space the work inhabits.

Inside, some of the 20-plus works leave a stronger impression than others, though the best of the lot I'm still mulling over a week later. They run the gamut from the rather witty (monitors displaying two balls bouncing in and out of sync with each other, inspired by a Kafka story) to the cleanly beautiful (Jim Hodges' interactive installation of blown-glass bells that you can reach up and ring) to the emotionally distressing (Incidental Music by Jorge Macchi, a collage of newspaper reports of violent accidents that then dictated a piano composition you can listen to on headphones).

Be sure to head on down to the catacomb-like basement area (talk about using your space) for several unique, site-specific works. When you get to the end, relax for a moment in the last of the lot, a brightly lit, bench-lined tunnel topped off with vocal chanting and carpeted with healing rock salt.

Sculpture Center, 44-19 Purves St. (Jackson Ave.), Long Island City, 718-361-1750, Thurs.-Mon. 11-6, $5 sugg. don.