Roberto Cuoghi is just one man but, in the daunting clamour of his sound installation Suillakku, he is also a crowd. He is the wailing women, he is the chattering children, he is the roaring priest. He plays the ancient harps, and rattles the rattling things. He makes the noise of the lowing cattle, the thundering horses and the tweeting birds. He does not, however, make the noise of the barking dog. For that, he used a dog. His own dog. Why?

“It is because,” he explains, in faltering English, “it is a very noisy dog.”

Suillakku is an astonishing thing. It comes to the ICA on October 14, but when I saw it, and heard it, and was terrified by it, it was at the Castello di Rivoli near Turin. Aside from the 18ft golden statue of a demon, which we shall worry about later, it consists of more than 40 speakers in several rooms, each broadcasting a tiny part of a huge din.

But not just any din. This din is a painstakingly researched imagining of a din you might have heard during the decline of the Assyrian empire in Mesopotamia, between the years of 612 and 609BC. So, in a slightly off-camera way, we hear about the fall of Nineveh and Harran to the Medians and the Babylonians.

We hear Hebraic chanting and Sumerian declamation. We also hear a recreation of the orchestra that accompanied Nebuchadnezzar, as described in the Old Testament by the prophet Daniel, and thousands of people spitting. It lasts for about ten minutes, on a loop, and it starts softly, and ends so loudly and densely that you feel you are losing your mind. And it is all Cuoghi. Except for the dog.

Cuoghi doesn’t really come across as the sort of man who would seal himself away from the world for three months in order to recreate ancient Mesopotamia. He’s fortyish and stocky, and he has a goatee. In an Italian art gallery, where everybody wears only black, he is dressed down and tweedy. The only thing that screams “artist” are his fingernails, which are perturbingly long.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to underestimate just how unusual Cuoghi is. In one project he began in his twenties, he transformed himself into his own seriously ill sexagenarian father, and lived that way for seven years. Really. He dyed his hair grey, put on six stone, and only became young again when his body began to play along, plaguing him with old man’s problems such dodgy feet, a hernia and, he claims, actual heart disease.

Cuoghi is reluctant to call that project art. It was just a way to change his life, he says, to free himself, and to start living with his partner, Alessandra. “I wanted to disappear and not be noticed,” he explains. “The experience backfired. It became the opposite.”

If you wanted to find a link between that project and this, you could think about an attempt to reverse the passage of time. Suillakku is all about the research. No information survives about Assyrian music, so Cuoghi was forced to think laterally. He and Alessandra spoke to historians and ethno-musicologists, he read the Old Testament, and put together a range of instruments that existed elsewhere at the time.

Upstairs in the Castello, he shows me flutes, sistrums, rattles and strange wibbly things involving gourds, all of which he made himself. Most were used to play a primitive melody known as wee-waa-wee, based on the repetition of two notes. Much like the oeuvre of Status Quo.

The only instrument for which he needed help was a giant, cedar-wood lyre, based on an archaeological find. A musicologist in Milan made him two, strung with catgut. He tuned the first one too tightly. It exploded.

Quiz Cuoghi on the technicalities of his recording, and he sounds both passionate and exhausted. “I was like this,” he says, and picks up a rattle, and shakes it. And again. And again. “For three months.” The end result is noisy, but the process, he says, was very quiet. And also, perplexing. The Assyrians would spit to ward off evil. How does one record spitting? After messy tests Cuoghi used a metal plate.

Much of the wailing in Suillakku is wailed in the direction of Pazuzu, an Assyrian wind-demon. Pazuzu is also the demon in The Exorcist. Cuoghi saw the film aged 8 and was fascinated, embarking on a lifelong love affair with Assyria.

The best known depiction of the demon is on a 6in amulet in the Louvre, which Cuoghi has copied in order to make this giant statue. The plan is to put it on top of the ICA. It has a human body, a dog’s head, an eagle’s feet, wings, a scorpion’s tail, and a snake for a penis.

Not everybody is terrified by Suillakku. Some people dance, some lie down, some laugh. Cuoghi says it deals with the extreme fear of your own disappearance, and the emergence of a new dark age in which the gods reign again. Although, he adds that it works on two levels. “If you prefer,” he says, “it is just an Assyrian rave.”

Suillakku, ICA, London SW1 (www.ica.org.uk 020-7930 3647), Tues-Nov 23 2008

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