THE SONIC GAZE MANIFESTO by Gabriel Ganiarov

 

Hiperrealistic paint by Walter Tomassoli

THE SONIC GAZE MANIFESTO

by Gabriel Ganiarov

I believe in eyes.

I believe in their sacred tremor, in their invisible architecture, in the abyss that lives inside them.

There is no word deeper than a pupil opening.

There is no note more honest than the one that vibrates at the center of a held gaze.

My work is born from that place: from the eye as threshold, as the dark breath of what cannot yet be said.

The eyes that appear in my covers, in my songs, in my atmospheres, do not look. They contain.

They are hollows of the unresolved, slow rooms of light and shadow.

They are the only organs that do not touch and yet make one shudder.

Every song I compose, every lyric I write, every rhythm I choose—reggae, ballad, spoken word, rock, electropop—

i
s a way of returning to the eye.

Everything happens there.

Desire, loss, judgment, tenderness.

There, the wounds the mouth cannot name confess themselves.

That is why my images do not illustrate. My colors do not decorate.

I don’t make music videos; I build climates, visions, slow lightning of the soul.

I work with light as if it were an emotion, with focus as if it were a heartbeat.

My pupils speak with an ethereal accent or strike with concrete force.

There are days when their eyelids close like someone giving up.

Others, they open like someone remembering.

My aesthetic does not seek to please.

It seeks to awaken the sleeping gaze of the listener.

I work with eyes in black and white when pain needs no color.

I work with green, blue, golden, black, blurred eyes when the word dissolves into atmospheres.

I work with eyes that tremble, that blink, that fill with wind, with tears, with night.

They are faces without a face, souls on the surface of the body.

The eye is my score.

The pupil, my time signature.

Music, the breath of what cannot be held, but can be invoked.

This is my manifesto:

I do not sing with my voice.

I sing with my gaze.

I do not speak with my tongue.

I speak with the pupil.

i tell stories.

I reveal atmospheres that contemplate you while you believe you are listening.

If in the middle of a song you feel that someone—or something—is looking at you, don’t be afraid.

That pupil is yours too.

It is your ear turned eye.

It is the poem that has finally learned to see.

and it can touch you with its beauty while you watch and are watched.