(portable colors)

“Portable sounds to lift you up.

Portable sounds to take you higher…”

So sang the operatic voice, a perfectly proportional stream of glowing emerald green. It was the close of a song that blended together both styles as well as colors and shapes to achieve yet another track of brilliant musical fusion.
I’m listening to the new album by Toby Mac titled (portable sounds), and I’m lovin’ every minuet of it.
How I came upon this genius work of art was not spectacular, I was color hunting in the Wal*Mart electronics department when the rainbow colored radio waves caught my eye. I’d heard the popular artist here and there, but never actually stopped to listen to an entire CD before. That, along with the agreeable price tag and Toby Mac’s excellent track record, was enough for me to scan the code and slip $13.94 into the automated checkout line. As I await my change a familiar ad plays in unison across the suspended television screens. I glance up, annoyed. The obnoxious, turquoise piano solo plays again. It’s the third time I’ve heard it in the past forty-four minuets. The slender wave dances as it always does, not missing a single note. *sigh*. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not ugly, the first two, three, ten times I heard it I liked what I saw; but when you see the same twenty-second light blue wave four, five, even six times within an hour every single time you set foot into the store, it gets a little old. It’s like that annoying little cousin twenty-eight times removed that shows up at the family reunion to sing a colorless song or dance a cute jig. Is it funny the first time? Sure. How about when the fame-starved toddler does it sixty-two times throughout the day, making you wish you had sent him away to the cake table? Not so much. This tiny clip of a song is a fame-starved toddler. “That’s why you’re buying this CD,” I tell myself, putting the five dollars change into my wallet. I grab the purchased rainbow and drag my mother from the clothing section. I can hardly wait to see what colors the thin disk holds.
I am pleasantly astonished.
Throughout the series of tracks he summons nearly all of the chromatic colors in varying hues and shades as well as forming amazingly rare shapes. He calls the elusive green like it’s nothing more than yellow, often pairing it with beautiful shades of blue or even red. The colors on this CD are insane. The clarity is stunning, and the richness rivals that of most songs I hear. This is color at it’s purest.

The majority of music is just a colored haze, or a sort of moving blob, which is beautiful, but it’s nice to see something different for a change. (portable sounds) is certainly something different; it takes a special kind of talent to align maroon circles in a semicircle, or make triangles of black static stick to the ceiling of my synesthestic stage. It’s as if most songs are dyed with color, like your shirt or chair upholstery, but these are the natural colors, the originals that inspired others to use them in other ways. It’s so satisfying.
The only colors that didn’t appear were purple and white (which is rarer than an albino red panda; I’ve only seen it three different times in my lifetime).
Color aside, the sound ain’t half bad either and the lyrics are a step above. It’s utterly refreshing to hear something that doesn’t depress, but rather uplifts with sound and libretto.
One of my favorite lines,

“I refuse to believe we’re a dying breed/ Children of peace hope and harmony/ Ordinary folks extraordinary love”

And another one of my favorites,

“I don’t want to gain the whole world and lose my soul/ Don’t wanna walk away let me hear the people say/ But they don’t know that who you are is not what you do”

The mix of rock, hip hop, pop, rap and other styles (even opera on one track) makes this CD quite an interesting encounter. As a Christian, music lover, and synesthete, this album is by far the most enjoyable I’ve experienced in a long time. But even if you’re not any of these, I highly recommend (portable sounds).


This is the type of music you don’t have to be in the mood for, when you turn it on the mood comes to you.

"I got portable sounds to lift me up

So don't even try to get in my head."

The Color of Insanity

Music, like a fruit, is capable of color.
It is often “a clockwork orange – meaning that it has the appearance of an organism lovely with color… but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil.”

The task at hand was simple, uncomplicated and hardly time consuming: straighten my room and make the bed. It would take under 70 seconds, but I figured it would be more fun if I could coax out a synesthestic color. So I walk over to my radio, which is never turned off. Ever. When I tire of music or news I simple turn the volume down all the way. This came about because the on/off switch on my alarm clock/radio is in a difficult position to reach, while the volume turn wheel is quite excisable. It is set to FM88.9, NPR, my source of news, classical music, and radio entertainment. I never change the station either. I have no reason to, the only other stations I can receive are the country music and rap stations. Country is loathsome and almost always some shade of yellow or orange, besides that, even if my synesthesia is pleased, my ears refuse to listen to such horrid sounds of human vocalization. And rap, well, let’s just say it doesn’t really get a color. My synesthesia refuses to accept that as music, and frankly so do I.

I turn the sound wheel and watch as the sound appears inside of me. Wow. This color is beautiful. It’s a thin stream of light blue, almost like the sky, only more liquid, and deeper. It travels vertically across a black background, waving slightly as if by water or wind. It’s the perfect color for this chore. Not overly stimulating, but still enticing. It does not scream its existence, yet relies on its own beauty for attention instead. I turn my thoughts to this show of fantastic color while my hands busy themselves crisping the hospital corners of the sheets and quilt.

I am nearly finished when the song comes to an end. The strip of blue snakes its way to the right and makes its exit. The synesthestic auditorium is empty; the stage is dark.

But then… something unexpected happens: the color of insanity attacks.

The song wasn’t over all, in fact it was just beginning; and where I expected to hear the voice of Greg Waxberg telling me the title of heaven’s blue was something very different. All the instruments played at once and without unison in a horrid display of musical prowess. The orange color exploded in my head like an atom bomb, filling every nook of my mind within a fragment of time. It spread from the center of the synesthestic stage as if someone had piled dynamite in a bucket of paint.
I instinctively raise a protective hand to my temple. It’s not every day a color bomb goes off in your head, at least not one this intense. I stride over the other side of the room and slam the sound wheel to a safe position. The orange intruder fades within a few seconds, and my thoughts again belong to me.
“There’s on for the blog,” I laugh as I exit the room, notebook in hand, ready to record the event.

Understand that it’s not that I despise the color orange, really, I don’t mind it on men’s athletic wear, or the walls of a trendy Chinese restaurant, I just don’t want it in my head, that’s all. Think of orange as a cougar. Now I love cougars as much as the next guy, but do I want one roaming freely in my house? No, please.
It’s not unreasonable. I’m not scared of orange, it’s perfectly acceptable in its natural environment, or when it’s trapped by a canvas’s clutch, but when it uses my limbic system as a scratching post, then we have a problem.

GodSpeed,

_Nathanael

A Mutant-Like Trait

Chances are you’ve never heard of synesthesia, an odd neurological “phenomenon” in which sensory perception will trigger another sensory perception, forming a sort of sixth sense (or seventh or eighth, if you have more than one form).
To tell you the truth I was unaware that this ability, this thing I did, had a name until earlier this year (thank you Discovery Health Channel). I was massively excited that it had a appellation, and a cool one at that! Synesthesia. It sounds like a character from X-Men or something. I can easily picture that in my head,
“I can’t hold them off! Synesthesia! Use your powers to distract them, Jean and Wolverine will attack them from behind!”

Eh hem…

Perhaps I’d better try and explain synesthesia before continuing. For one, it isn’t a mutant gene, and it isn’t an evolutionary step (forwards or backwards). It doesn’t hurt, and it doesn’t interfere with brain function in any way. Synesthetes are just like everyone else, except they see things a little differently. Ok, a lot differently, but I promise you cannot look into a crowd of people and say “Ah ha! There’s a synesthete!” unless of course you happen to know the person you’ve just pointed to.

For me, music is color. Whenever I pop in a CD or lay witness to a concert performance each song has it’s own unique color, shape, movement, depth and sometimes texture. The colored constancies are almost always pleasant, and also entertaining to watch. It’s a colorful recital that only I can attend.
The show ends the moment the song dies, but I can always hit the replay button and watch the exact same thing again. That’s how synesthesia works. Whatever you see, you will see for the rest of your life.

This gift (I shun the doctor’s terminology of calling it a “condition”) is fairly rare, though it’s hard to accurately say how many people have it, since many don’t know the name and keep it secret. The stat 1 in 7,000 is in my head for some reason, but don’t hold me to that number. I myself only know two others who have it, each with different forms. My sister Richelle tells me that numbers and letters have gender. 1 and 2 are male, 6 and 8 are female, and so on. And my friend from church, we’ll call her E for now (until I ask her if I can use her name on here) can tell you the age and gender of any object in the room. When we first told each other about our abilities I asked her to tell me the gender of things around the church youth room.
She points to a saltshaker, “that’s a girl.”

We walk towards the chairs, “this one’s a woman, and that one’s a man.”

“What about my phone?” I ask, pulling it from my pocket.
“It’s an old man.”
I laugh at the realization that I’ve been carrying an old man around in my pocket all day.
Then it was my turn. She whipped out her cell phone and played various music ring tones. I call em’ as I see em’, “This one’s Red. That one’s dark blue. Pink on a white background, like a haze. Light blue wave. Yellow.”
Someone in the background is playing Guitar Hero to the song of Free Bird. “Uggh, it’s orange.” I don’t like orange. It fills up my head and makes it hard to think, and it will give me a headache if I listen to it for very long.
E also associates letters with numbers. She rapidly points to words, calling out the numbers they add up to, “43. This one and that one make 26” and so on. We got quite a few ‘what have they been smoking?’ looks from people as we went about, playing with our mutant-like abilities, but it’s way too much fun to stop.
For the rest of the night I try not to sit on female chairs, or use male napkins to wipe my face, thinking it a bit perverted. I’m wondering if I’m sitting on an old man right now, as I type this. What about the keyboard? or the computer? I have to get up and kick an old shoe, slam a file cabinet shut and slap the couch to remind myself that these things are not human, that they aren’t watching me and that they don’t feel anything when I hit them. I also have to remind myself (and you) that while this sounds completely and utterly bazaar, she has grown up with this, just as I have with my colors. It would be like saying, “wouldn’t it be weird if you had to hear things? Like, instead of reading people’s lips, you would hear a voice! That would be so creepy.”

Well, I think I’ve written enough this time around, I’m going to go watch DCTalk (and no, that’s not a movie, in case you were wondering).


_Nathanael