BURNING CHROME | Totality 1.0 — When the underground echoes in an upscale white cube
They came. They stayed. And many of them were mesmerized.
TechSabado file photo
There’s a strange feeling when something you’ve spent thirty years doing in dim, sticky, alternative bars suddenly unfolds in an air-conditioned fourth-floor art cube in Makati, surrounded by the kind of upscale art crowd. At WHYNoT — where impresarios Baby Imperial and Marta Lovina insist it’s not a “venue” but a “producing/programming initiative” — Somatosonic’s Totality 1.0 landed like a quiet rupture, a signal crackling through a demographic that, let’s be honest, probably doesn’t know the difference between Noise and “noice.”
But they came. They stayed. And many of them were mesmerized.
Totality 1.0 bills itself as a contemporary stab at Richard Wagner’s idea of a gesamtkunstwerk, the “total work of art.” Usually, when artists invoke Romantic-era ear candy like something from Wagner, my instinct is to brace for a lecture — and some Nazi thingie. Ah, never mind. Don’t get me wrong. My heart is with pareng Wilhelm. But Somatosonic — Tad Ermitaño, Christina Dy and Marco Ortiga — are too embedded in the messy physics of real experimentation to let the concept go academic.
Here, “total” didn’t mean pompous. It meant plumbing the limits of gesture, light, vibration and movement with tools that feel both handmade and half-alive: Dy’s bonefone, a stethoscope-instrument that could make a chiropractor run to the nearest fire exit (literally cracking bone noises in Dy’s right shoulder — quite an achievement in experimental sound creation, if I may say so), the accelerometer McG glove (I wonder if a ’90s Nintendo Power Glove could do the same — a concept I unashamedly could steal for my own gig), Ortiga’s kinetic rigs, and Tad’s tungkod — now in its almost perfect form and sound — with its Godzilla-step “godslam” and that deliciously fascistic “dirty mic” that makes him sound like a rogue radio station broadcasting from martial law.
Miggy Inumerable’s interactive computer graphics stitched the whole thing into a single perceptual membrane — a moving, breathing skin across WHYNoT’s industrial-clean interior. For once, Manila’s humidity worked in our favor; the room felt electrically dense.
The most interesting part of the night wasn’t even onstage. It was the audience: a younger, mixed expat-plus-Makati set that definitely wasn’t the Cubao X / Intramuros tunnel / on-top-of-postwar-building-in-Escolta or Malate-era sound-art tribe Tad and I came up in. As established installation artist Poklong Anading joked, “Ito ’yung crowd na bumibili ng art.” True. And maybe it’s finally time.
And since Poklong surfaced in the room, I have to shout out fellow sound, and visual artists who hovered around Somatosonic’s experimental turntable like it was an oracle: Lena Cobangbang, Datu Arellano, Corinne de San Jose and Mitch Garcia. We ended up dissecting art, life, and whatever strange frequency Somatosonic had tuned the night into.
Are we, as Marco teased, the pop of sound art? Or something like that. God, I hope not. But maybe it’s good that the scene no longer requires cement floors, broken toilets and cigarette fog to function. Maybe this kind of leveling up just means more bodies encountering the work — even if more than 95% walked in not knowing what sound art actually is.
To me, what mattered was the applause at the end — loud, genuine and a little stunned. Many didn’t know what hit them, but impact doesn’t require literacy. It just requires a nervous system.
There were some minor technical hiccups — that’s a guarantee with custom electronics, sensors and wireless anything. But as any noise artist knows, the beauty of thick electronic texture is that it forgives its creators. The mistakes blur into the thunder. The glitches become part of the vocabulary.
Visual artist CD, meanwhile, delivered one of her strongest forms in recent memory — my memory — not as a “pole dancer,” but, as always, as a sound instrument. Somatosonic’s philosophy of accommodating each other’s ideas shows up clearly in her movements: every gesture is a control message — literally MIDI, metaphorically language — across years of collaboration.
So is this moment good or bad for the scene? Is that even a question? I’ll admit to mixed feelings. Part nostalgia, part relief. Noise, experimental sound, kinetic performance — these were once fringe practices you only found through rumor and stubbornness. Now they’re drawing crowds who arrive with tote bags and leave with Instagram Stories.
But watching a roomful of people who had no previous link to experimental sound art sit through 60 minutes of multisensory intensity and walk out buzzing? That’s not dilution. That’s infiltration.
Sound art in Manila is no longer underground. And maybe it doesn’t have to be.
If Totality 1.0 proves anything, it’s that disruption can travel. It can climb four flights of stairs in a Makati art compound. It can surprise the uninitiated. It can make a new generation ask, “What the hell did I just experience?” which, frankly, is the best possible outcome.
Somatosonic didn’t compromise. The audience adapted.
Maybe that’s the real total work of art.
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