blue note




blue note (2025)
single channel video
color hd
3 minutes 35 seconds



At 2:52, when the instruments begin to play all at once, a different, even unexpected tune, my pulse changes. I blend into the uncertainties, begin to flow as one continuous stream.

For a different piece of music, I had written something that I called “vibrations”. It is the same feeling, to have lost oneself, to begin to understand the texture of sound waves,
their colours. To settle among the chaos, the chaotic. To fall through, and into the abyss; like in the dreams:

We are listening, trying to ease ourselves into the unfamiliar, trying to make it familiar. The wind blows lightly, we close our eyes. We are swimming even though we cannot swim. We are letting go of this body which fails to let go of us. We are one but many. We are contemplating the Divine and its opposition. The Trinity and Legion (for we are many). We listen, we hum, we are transported via this machinery of the physical, into the eternal ocean of the spiritual. We consider the non-human, the beyond-human. We are moving in reverse, returning to the primordial stream. Before nothing existed, when everything existed. “And God separated the waters from the waters”. We settle beside the ever-present Other.

I ponder upon the delimitations of language. I have to constantly wrestle with speech and the constraints of meaning. I cannot continue. I have lost this battle. I have settled into incoherence. I now speak the language which can only be communicated by silence. However, the orchestra continues.


Text and video by Esé Emmanuel, voiced by Joshua Segun-Lean.