On the first evening of community quarantine in March there was an abrupt change in the soundscape of the city. For the first time since the Pope’s visit or the last Pacquiao fight, traffic sound halted— blarring horns and revving engines and screetching tires. All gone. But not silent. The little sounds of little appliances, grumbling of coffeemachine, and water passing through the pipes, of animals and insects we didn’t even knew existed, the chatter of our neighbour without videoke machine, were amplified. Many little sounds took the big machine’s place in sounding the city. They are not new, we just didn’t notice before. Well ok, a new cacophony. escuri captures a portion of this sonic experience in his composition.
Track name: Impulse Irregularities // Date created: 13 Oct. 2020// Duration 4:03 mins.//
Impulse Irregularities is a 4-minute piece based on my household’s monthly electricity consumption chart from January until the end of August. This composition aims to reflect and examine the dynamics of the electric power usage within my living space pre-quarantine, and up until now, when the government-imposed community quarantine is still in place, more than 200-days in.
In this piece, a plethora of sonic elements ranging from drones, beats, sampled materials and gathered field recordings abruptly change their sonic characteristics from subtle to the extreme depending on the abrupt shifts in our electric bill, showing how we have been trying to adapt to the changes imposed by this so-called ‘new normal' that’s full of uncertainties.
