TEXT AUDREY BUHIAN
DESIGN MICHELLE SONG
ILLUSTRATION IRIS WRIGHT
ARTS
What’s Happening Where
07
A priest, a wife, and a daughter drift into a door frame as though their bodies are being pushed through water. The entry is slack and passive. Their faces show a fear of going any further. Catching sight of what lies beyond the door, the priest begins to trace a mournful sign of the cross into the air, but the video frame is already slipping away, impatient. The frame turns instead towards a dying man lying at the far end of the bedroom. An overhanging Our Lady of Guadalupe watches while sweat discharges from his brow. In pursuit of agency, he bows his head to accept the lighter offered by an extemporaneous, skeletal hand. With a drag of his cigarette, the room pinwheels into optical oblivion. His irises come alight at the mirage. Amid his distraction the three figures slip away from his bedroom door, leaving space for another to slip in. Wheeling herself forward on a toy rocking horse, a red-dressed child inches into view. A beat of recognition passes, and his tired eyes capsize beneath the weight of a smile. The dying man beckons the child to his side and she follows—wordless understanding stringing her along. The red-dressed child is Laura Lee Ochoa, bassist of the musical trio Khruangbin, and this is the animated music video for the song Cómo Te Quiero from their 2018 album Con Todo el Mundo. In lieu of a signature sound, the Houston-based band holds down an extensive track record in experiments with sonic fusion. From the extravagant reverb of 1960s Thai funk to the propulsive guitar work found in Persian rock, Khruangbin is known for their instrumental soundscapes that never fully belong to any one place. It’s this demonstrated affection for synthesis and expansion that makes the quiet world of Cómo Te Quiero profoundly distinct and curiously precious. I came across the animated video by chance three years after its making, yet somehow the timing was just right. Lee Ochoa’s retrospective gaze mirrors my memories of the past year with more fullness than seems possible. A loved one in my life is dying. He sees figures in his bedroom that I cannot identify. Around him, our relatives wonder if there is a medication that will stop the apparitions where they begin. The mutability of these circumstances across life and art illuminates the ways that an encroaching death is pushing me towards a discourse of preventive care—care that intends to tether its recipient firmly to the land of the living. As a consequence of its representations throughout medicine and media, this fearful display of love is often upheld as an infallible cure to the drifting mind—perhaps the only thing that can be done to seize agency on behalf of both the dying and their loved ones in the face of loss. Yet in the midst of losing a loved one in my life, the world of Cómo Te Quiero invites me to consider otherwise. I begin to understand the ways that even care can blur the line between what it means to hold onto someone and what it means to hold them back. +++ ¿Qué pasa, a dónde vas? No pierdas la cabeza Sacas tus dientes para mí Y cuéntame una historia Te esperaré, y al final Siempre estarás What’s happening, where are you going? Don’t lose your head Pick up your teeth for me And tell me a story I’ll wait for you, and at the end You will always be On a sonic level, Cómo Te Quiero deploys lyrics with restraint and understatement. Occupying a slim 30 seconds of the four-minute song, the lyrics are taken from six phrases of a letter written by Lee Ochoa to her grandfather after his passing. Working in tandem with Khruangbin’s reputation as a largely instrumental group, their one-sided conversation is bottled into vocals that prefer slippage and collision over an offer of legibility. In the few seconds that a guitar riff wanes, freeing up space for lyrical clarity, any vocals that may have been coherent are sieved through a tremulant Leslie speaker. Designed for use on electric organs, the speaker was made to recreate the resounding quality of elaborate pipe organ systems—never to modify the human voice. The effect of running Lee Ochoa’s vocals through its pivoting design is an echoing, sonic cloud, often gone before its shape can be discerned.
These qualities of capture and escape channeled by Cómo Te Quiero’s instrumental composition are a beautiful fit for the video’s auditory landscape. As she began collaborating with Sanam Petri—the video’s creative director—over the animated elements of Cómo Te Quiero, Lee Ochoa honed in on the unpinnable final days of her grandfather’s life. They were filled with vivid visions—a pinwheeling bedroom, someone’s skeletal hand—that she could discern from his bedside recollections but never see for herself. In an interview with Khruangbin’s North American record label, Dead Oceans, Petri likened these visions to experiences from another dimension—images, sounds, and sensations culled from a different set of physics and temporality. “Laura always wondered what the world looked like in those last days, what was happening behind his eyes,” Petri recalled. With their energies set on mapping this uncharted inner world, they agreed that the video would “take the viewer on that last journey with him, back though his mind one last time. One last great adventure of a grandfather and granddaughter.” +++ As the video picks up from her grandfather’s beckoning, Lee Ochoa crosses the bedroom to stand by his side. He takes her by the shoulders into his embrace and begins to recount his visions. He starts by taking a breath around his cigarette, released as smoke from his pursed lips. Initially a realistic rendering, the plume of smoke begins to unfurl and swell across the screen, surpassing even the rectangular bounds of the video frame, until it is recast as part of a pastel cloudscape. An airplane soars out of the cigarette clouds, and through the windows, Lee Ochoa and her grandfather are seated as its passengers. From here, her grandfather’s visions continue to lead them through a journey of changeable matter, landmarked by cycles of material creation and collapse. Yet all throughout, exactly where they are headed remains unknown. The images that Lee Ochoa’s grandfather witnessed in his final days might be termed as ‘deathbed phenomena’—incidents which encompass a range of sensory experiences while remaining rooted in the distinct context of death drawing near. Medical practitioners and writers disagree whether deathbed phenomena are comprised of visual stimuli that can be more accurately described as visions or hallucinations. In the world of Cómo Te Quiero, the term ‘vision’ feels most appropriate. Hallucinations refer to the perception of forms and figures in an external space that others would view as empty, whereas visions invite a consideration of these forms and figures’ potentially spiritual dimensions. Deathbed visions are distinguished from hallucinations for their capacity to situate the dying in encounters which usher them towards a departure from this world. Airplanes, trains, and concrete roads are all symbols that appear across comparative medical accounts of deathbed visions, and lead their recipients towards a literal point of departure. Deathbed visions have also manifested in incidents where dying individuals tell their loved ones that they need help finding their shoes, even as they are bedbound. Many images that emerge in deathbed phenomena fit cleanly into these explicitly navigational examples, though they may also manifest as more symbolic points of departure. A characteristic vision recorded across medical accounts of deathbed phenomena is the appearance of a salvational figure specific to the individual’s cultural context, who presents themself as a spiritual guide for them to surrender their trust in. Another is the appearance of a loved one who also presents themselves as a guide away from this world. In many cases, these guides are loved ones who, unknown to the individual, have just passed away themselves. In contemplating how these visions unfold for their recipients, the image that comes to mind might be an abrupt switch, where the individual’s material environment is suddenly replaced with the sensory atmosphere of deathbed phenomena. Yet these visions rarely appear as straightforward divergences from their environment, rather unfolding as integrated fusions of the two—for instance, ladders, staircases, and stepping stones that extend from a bedroom corner into an unknown beyond. The deathbed phenomena that unfold throughout Cómo Te Quiero extensively map the onset and tipping points of such integration. As Lee Ochoa and her grandfather cross a river by boat, the water beneath them begins to contract, kaleidoscoping apart until it eventually lends shape to a set of blue playing cards. The video frame pulls away from its tight view of the cards, revealing that they are held by a life-sized incarnation of Our Lady of Guadalupe. As she slides her cards across a table towards Lee Ochoa and her grandfather, the river’s blue shifts once more, this time into a pattern streaked with white. It is the precise pattern of the striped pajamas worn by Lee Ochoa’s grandfather all throughout the journey.
