TRANSCENDENTAL IN QUEENS
Portrait painted by Doron Langberg
Have you ever felt like merely listening to a song isn’t enough? Like ear buds or speakers can’t bring your ears close enough to rest in the space between the chords, or float inside the melody? I bought over-ear headphones for this reason, in an attempt to be suspended inside the song itself and hear every intricacy up close. I thought that was the closest I’d ever get to crawling inside a speaker and living surrounded by music. But then Omar Apollo made these things literally possible when, in collaboration with sportswear company On, he hosted an immersive listening experience for his new EP “Live for Me”. The event bio had a lot to say about Apollo’s careful curation in partnership with architects and sound designers, but I was cynical about the chances of anything really special coming out of such a nakedly sponsored event. However, as your dutiful reporter, I had to investigate, so last Friday I dragged my sister out to MoMA PS1 in Queens to find out what was up.
After finding a door around the corner from the museum’s main entrance and climbing up at least a billion stairs, we are met by a museum employee who explains that the exhibit has been curated by Apollo himself. Each song has its own room or “pod” where the speakers, lights, seating arrangement, and even smells have been arranged specifically for its best possible listening experience. We are urged to take our time, and listen as long as we want in each space.
The album opens with “Ice Slippin”, its room taken up mostly by a large oval slab in the middle of the space. As people file in they start to gingerly sit around the edges, still unsure of the concept. As the music starts, we begin to ease in, lie down, and let the bass rumble through our skulls and bodies. Above us, our own contented faces stare back from a mirrored ceiling. I enjoy it, but I’m still confused. Is this whole thing just designed around instagrammable content? Have I accidentally snuck my way into an event for influencers?
The next room is full of purples with a bench that wraps around the wall. This time, instead of watching yourself in the mirror, the design of the room almost forces you to watch other people and see the music moving through them. Even with timed tickets and staggered entries, the room includes new arrivals still acclimating to the exhibit alongside those who’ve sat for longer, with eyes closed and bodies sucked into the music. The song playing in this room is “Live For Me”, and without noticing it I’m soon in a trance, and the song has already run through multiple times. As I watch people’s feet unconsciously swing and sway to the beat, I lose complete track of reality and time. I have no idea how many times the song played during our first sitting. The distinction between the start and end of the song fell away. It could have been ten hours long and I never would have noticed. Time had stopped, all thoughts and worries had dissipated from my head, and the room sank away until it was just me and my sister swimming from note to note.
If you haven’t listened to Omar Apollo before, I feel it is my duty to urge you to put this essay aside right now, light a candle, and lay down and listen. Apollo has released music in a range of genres, each a playground for his buttery vocals to float through. His voice mixes with the softness of an acoustic guitar. Lyrics detailing a devastating heartbreak are punctuated with a dance beat that forces you to move with it and a production to be envied by pop princesses everywhere. Sit with his voice, his honey voice, and imagine what it would be like to get even closer, to sit in his music alongside his process in a room of his creation. It’s overwhelming.
Leaving the Live for Me room was almost impossible, but the museum had promised we could go back again and again, so we forged on. The next room, Angel, had three beanbags on the ground and on the ceiling a swirl of blues and greens. As I lay down, I found the feeling I’d been searching for. As I let the sloshing colors carry me through the melody, I felt as though I was truly inside the music, its instrumental elements whirling around me. The stripped back song cradled me, and I lay holding my sister so we wouldn’t lose each other in the primordial soup of synthetic drums and piano. This was not just some sponsored event, this was art, this was music, this was everything.
The final room, “Pilot”, is simple. A bar runs along three walls, creating a shelf for people to lean on, the lights above it are orange, the lights below are blue, and the fourth wall is a mirror. By this time I barely noticed my reflection, my eyes closed as I let the music (and the scents pumped through diffusers) flow through me. Just like the “Live for Me” room, I could have lived here. We stood in that room so long, listening to the song on repeat over and over again, that my sister (a longtime admirer of Apollo both as a person and a musician) decided to sit and let the room and the song consume her. This created a trend, and everyone who came in after us sat alongside us, making the experience more communal than when we’d been awkwardly standing and trying not to bump into each other. We sat as a group, each experiencing the song differently, but entranced together.
In fact we were so enraptured by the song, so caught up in our own worlds, that none of us noticed when Apollo himself walked in and joined us. As people began to recognize him, no one pulled out their phone or screamed or caused a commotion. They just thanked him quietly for making it all happen, letting him appreciate his creation right there alongside us. This incredible experience has left a mark on me, and I find myself mourning all the songs I haven’t been able to listen to like this. Apollo took his music and made it stimulate every sense, play into every neuron in my nervous system. Throughout the exhibit, people were simply taking in the music and reveling in it, stunned with quiet appreciation. No headphones in the world could ever recreate that feeling. I know I’ll spend the rest of my life chasing opportunities to experience it again, no world, no distractions, just me and the music, fused together.
