Photos and feature by E.R. Pulgar
“I see music in colours. I love music that’s black, pink, purple or red—but I hate music that’s green, yellow or brown.” – Charli XCX
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It’s summer and I’m snorting poppers at a music festival in Brooklyn. I’m standing in front of a set of speakers a bit taller and much wider than me. Deep inhale, hands on the behemoth, bass pounding in my ears and heart and hands. The rush begins. I close my eyes and see purple as the music courses through the veins in my trembling arms.
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In Eliseo Subiela’s surrealist masterpiece El lado oscuro del corazón, the main character Oliverio is a poet who wanders the streets of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. He meanders the great Latin American cities begging for food by yelling his poems at strangers, taking the occasional marketing gig for money before swiftly abandoning it, facing the personification of Death head on—flirting with her and scaring her away with the vitality of his words — and going from lover to lover in search of a woman who can fly. Halfway through the movie, he takes a blind lover who can see the colors of objects whatever she touches: a green book, a white shirt, a red tone of voice, a black pair of pants. When they finally make love, she yells out “blue, blue, blue” as the pair climax and recede into a silent ocean of sheets. For the briefest moment, they levitate above the bed.
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Beach House stands still during their set at Brooklyn Steel, and rely on the rich color of their sound — Victoria Legrand’s purple-hued voice, Alex Scally’s guitar always forest green to me — and the ever-changing lights of their backdrop. By the end of the night I’ve experienced the entire color spectra, reduced to a thankful polychrome shudder. I let out a tear or two, and looking around I can see a few people joining me, the water from their eyes changing colors and glistening in the light.
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I wander alone through a mansion party I’ve somehow been invited to and sneak into a room with just a baby grand piano and a leather couch. The pianist will be the only person I speak to that night who’s not trying to make small talk. He starts playing “Rocket Man” and I blush, and that line about an “L.A. lady” hits hard looking out the window at Sunset Boulevard. The performance feels like a warm pastel pink mixed with light blue. It’s my second time in this city, and this is the moment that feels like home.
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Used to sit on the rocks in South Beach covered in sun.
Used to sit on the rocks in South Beach covered in sand.
Used to sit on the rocks in South Beach covered in water (drying).
Used to sit on the rocks in South Beach covered in air.
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When I was a kid in Venezuela they used to call me catire, a term of endearment that translates to “fair-skinned” or “blonde”. I’ve been pulled over at the airport and interrogated about what I’m carrying; these are the moments I’m most aware of my beard and my brown skin. This specific kind of nuance always catches my white friends by surprise, shocked that in other contexts I’d be considered white. An ambiguous meztiso identity, especially in a young Venezuelan, especially in a young immigrant, means relating to everything and nothing. It means having the absence and presence of every color lodged inside of you and figuring out how to move forward.
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I have sat with the four elements and they’ve whispered things to me I’m still trying to figure out. They come in colors and sounds; when I was little and more prone to believing in magic I would embrace these visions. Last week, I meditated on the beach for the first time in years and saw a string of orbs of every color with my eyes closed. I mistook the way the water spoke for a song. Miami Beach is still the only place I know where I’m in balance with the elements, the music of the ocean and the people shuffling by, the full array of pastel hues that is my home.
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When I’m back in Florida I always end up staying out late, and the road back is always empty save the occasional car. Driving at sunset has its own set of colors that paint whatever I’m blasting down the highway, but at night, in the black expanse, the sound of a guitar blaring from the speakers hits different. Whatever voice is yowling into the starry dynamo from my radio is my companion, the person I’m driving home that night, the person holding my hand with the other on the steering wheel.
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The mantis shrimp has 12 color receptor cones in its eyes. Humans have three, and through them we’ve been able to discern a magnificent, if limited, array of colors. What could those colors sound like? What colors can those shrimp hear that don’t even exist for us?
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Via Merriam-Webster:
chrom·es·the·sia
variants: or chiefly British chromaesthesia \ ˌkrō-mes-ˈthē-zh(ē-)ə \
: synesthesia in which color is perceived in response to stimuli (as words or numbers) that contain no element of color
— called also chromatism, color hearing
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Black is a shade the western world interprets as the absence of color. If you’ve ever painted with watercolors, you’ll see the colors on your canvas, a bright finished product, in contrast with your cup, a single shade made up of every color on the spectrum.
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E.R. Pulgar is Alt-Citizen’s “Of Poets + Punks” columnist. In this monthly column, he will explore the relationship between music, emotion, and language. His music and culture writing has been featured in i-D, Remezcla, Billboard, and elsewhere. He is working on his debut collection, a long poem about water.