Conversations, moving cars, humming cities, trickling water — these sounds aren’t music as far as the conventional definition of music is concerned, but the imagined rules of art are bound to be challenged one way or the other. “Step Plaza” the first track off Escuri’s Wander Studio album, starts with random conversations in Japanese, and if one could understand the language, they could quickly assume that these are just mundane conversations much like every other conversation that we have on the daily. Then, a dreamy tune explodes together with the speech, then it turns into something else entirely. Mundane sounds that we readily filter with our senses turn into a place that we have never been to, but a moment that we could relate nonetheless. And that’s how one could frame Escuri’s craft — music through soundscapes.
“The soundscape of the world is evolving. Enveloped in our surroundings are sounds that define who we are, where we are, and where we might be heading.” Jett “Escuri” Ilagan started his craft back in 2015 as a way of translating his musical ideas through digital music production. While his beginnings were mostly defined by random compositions like sketches on table napkins, his perception of his art changed when he met and joined BuwanBuwan Collective.
Escuri’s Soundscape Recording Images by himself, Naoki Yoshimoto, and Kasuyuki Kasagi.
The idea of marrying soundscape and tunes seems like a strange idea to most, and Escuri was not a stranger to that kind of reception. He said that context is important so that people can easily understand his work. He explained that due to our attachment to visual culture, we are much more inclined to focus on what we see rather than what we hear. Escuri wanted to paint a picture of a place, of a moment, of an experience, by taking us through an auditory journey. “Noise can be defined as something that we resist to acknowledge, these are the sounds that we learned to ignore. In this context, I want to emphasize these elements and transform them to something digestible to the ears,” he shared.
The process of painting it is as complicated as its visual counterparts. Without the usual voice components, Escuri assembles his pieces by following a narrative. He has to make sure that his pieces tap into one of our most primal senses in perceiving the things around us from a distance. In the end, the tracks meld in together and allows us to visualize experiences not of our own, but something that we could feel and recognize just the same. For Escuri, noise is subjective as it goes together with everything that we hear on the daily. It is in channeling these elements into pieces that would help us to ‘totally appreciate sound’.
His latest project Wander Studio takes us on such kind of journey. As an evolution of his past projects AudioTour and Soundscape Exploration, Wander Studio takes us to Konagecho and its neighboring places and lets us discover its urban environment. Unlike his past project where most of the production took place in his studio, his latest work immersed him in unfamiliar places and situations.
Cover Image — Akiyama Naoko, Above Image — Sudol
Last June, Escuri participated in Goethe Institut’s “Sound of X” where he, together with other artists, translated their immediate everyday environment into music. He will also be performing in a group show at PIN-UP Gallery in Okinawa, Japan, and will be representing our country in an Artist-in-Residency program in Taipei Artist Village. He will also be part of One Beat, a music fellowship to be held in the US.
You can check Wander Studios in Bandcamp, and catch up with his latest projects through his Instagram page.
