Deaf Test: Oneida's "Changes in the City"

Someone with a camera -- one that could film video of some sort, a nice one that could shoot highspeed -- recorded a movie of you as you were being surprised. You were then placed in a room, seated in a lone chair which faced a screen occupying an entire wall's worth of your surroundings. The footage of you, the footage of you being surprised, lit up the screen. The light in the frame gently strobed, and you thought you could detect minute variations, the way the light behaved like a thousand coinciding decisions to exist, a cloud of anomalies surrounded each bright centered pulse.

This is not "Changes in the City." This is "Sheets of Easter."



"Sheets of Easter" is very thoroughly iterated and very staccato. "Changes in the City" gathers force around a repeated bass line. Instead of a strobe, the light is more of a constant steady glow that the bass line's pulse gradually feeds. The bass line sounds like the opening bass line to the Twin Peaks' opening theme song, a little. Every so often there is critical mass; the song whirls, and collapses, and the intensity redoubles.

This is not "Changes in the City." This is "The Adversary."



The bass line reconfigures, slowly, across a series of diminishing climaxes. The bass line is smothered by the sounds it has nurtured. You are watching a sunset. Shrieks of data blink duskward. The iteration is tired but relaxed; resigned yet content. The light fades out.