Ncontrast magazine - Visual Sounds section - theme: Myth (this version was not published)

I try to write about music and I put TV On The Radio’s “Tonight” playing. There seems to be some sort of darkness, some bells that appear,like ephemeral drops of rain that make the ground visible in the instant they hit it. Echoes, pianos and dust emerge as light – abstract elements made concrete through the eye of a camera. A melancholic voice roams the space that exists between the suggested objects. There is also a pilgrimage of whistles and a flute that dances amongst dirty buildings.

I try to write about music and I end up presenting an bizarre landscape inhabited by strange figures, a space where tridimensionality is pierced by two-dimensional bodies. If I see and hear, I can talk as if this were a film: a cinematographic traveling. I find the usual scars and stains of old films, moments of Super 8 where ralentis of over-heating create layers of visual static.

Why do I keep with this synesthesia? I remember my music teacher playing Brahms and asking us “What is the color of this music?” At the time, without knowing why, it seemed to me that it was dark-green. Yes, that’s it…music suggests images and feelings but what does that say about my relationship with this art? What spaces are these and where do they come from?

I find the space of the place where the music was played. A space that assumes itself as an integral part of the music when the material level sonorously pierces the composition: the fizz of old speakers, the glitches, the breathing of the artist and the pages that are turned in the music “Shousetsu” by Radicalfashion. And in the case of John Cage’s “4’33”, the place of the performance is the composition itself, regrouping musicians and listeners in the same envelope.

I’d better not drift away from the song that I started with. In the space that I verbalized I see and hear ghosts of myself, urban depressions, pressurized release of my asphyxiated desires. Yes, this space is not just the aggregation of suggested images but also of hidden divisions of my human conditions that are now waking up. Yes…I feel the music being lived as performance; sounds that are realized in each instant as a choreography in a space; music that is an event of present; music where sounds are acts and movements that materialize bodies, spaces and times.

Yes…I see now that each text about music is a luggage of life experience and culture, a complex and synesthetic experience that bridges the limits of the personal and reaches out for someone else’s experience.

"I'll listen up tonight"