Visualizing Viginti Tres

[Neil™]

I popped this CD in as soon as I got home from school yesterday and soaked in Tool for 70 minutes in the dark... it was beautiful. I was pretty tired though, so I nearly dozed off when it slowed down near the end. This "song" woke me right up, though.

After a few seconds of trying to figure out what I was listening to (still with my eyes closed), the image on the CD cover and in the liner notes (the giant cavern of faces) popped into my head, and suddenly I was floating around inside it. All the eyes that made up the walls and ceiling etc were closed... The sound was coming from everwhere and seemed somehow disembodied (I can't even think of a good word for it). Everytime the sound grew in intensity, so did a light or some sort energy, and it washed over me from every direction. It was the most fucked up feeling ever.

Not only that, but when it got closer to the middle of the song, right before the weird voice, all the eyes opened up, and it was the faces that were speaking. It scared the shit out of me and I sat right up. After that, everything was just white, and it went back to normal after the song started to wind down. The eyes were closed, and everything started going darker as it ended.

I'm not claiming I had some spiritual outer-body experience, but it's just what came into my head when I put the song on. I don't know where it came from, but picturing myself in that cavern seemed to make the song 'fit' very well. Just my interpretation of the song I guess.

[Muladhara]

I know exactly what you mean, the first thing I imagined when I heard this was those faces, well, mainly one big face with those weird droopy eyes and enormous nose.

It was like it was a central pillar, like in Net of Being (I think).

Wasn't there something similar in that old film Tron? A big central pillar that controlled everything?

[Kochipahk]

That voice scared the living shit out of me when I first heard it. I wasn't expecting anything of the sort. The way the pitch bends the end of the voice is also really disturbing.

[A-Thousand-Lies]

I think I can kind of picture what you mean. Have you had this sort of experience with any other songs before?

[peripheral]

I also fell asleep toward the middle of my first listen. I was very tired for too many reasons to count, but I was in more of a half-sleep, because I was still listening to the CD. Very relaxing. I'm sure somebody already posted this somewhere else, but Viginti sounds very Trent Reznor-ish.

[JuhaDeWolf]

Never fear. I will tell you what this song looks like, I'm synaesthetic.

Basically, there are crystaline rock formations orbited by foggy disc shapes. Then, giant shapes (not unlike the Sydney Opera House) rise up out of the ground only to have thousands of yellow stars shoot out of them. Next, a giant hollow tube rises up which encompasses the "area". Thousands of more yellow stars shoot out of this tube upwards, and a giant spiked flower vase begins to convulse. The entire landscape stretches out into an infinitely long, vertical tube which gets surrounded in green barbed wire. Everything then melts into a singular point, which then starts spazzing out, and eventually dissapears.

[piston390]

The first time I listened to the album I did exactly what you did. It was in complete dark and it was about 11:45 at night. I was dosing off and then Viginti Tres came on. All of a sudden I was in a dark subway train station. By myself. The doors open and I get on the train. The train speeds up. Each pulsing noise is a passing light, yet it grows darker and darker. Then the growing whirr. I can start to see light, and then I see flames. Huge flames. Then I realise where I am. I am in hell. Then the voice came. It was the voice of the devil. This scared the shit out of me. Then as the voice died out, the train left the inferno. It was completely dark now. Then we reached the station again and I got out.

That's what popped into my head when I listened to it.

[Deviouz]

Synaesthetic? awesome... I've always had a bit of a predisposition towards synaesthesia though it doesn't happen as much anymore... basically, I always used to visualise numbers as colours and geometric shapes, always enabled me to do math really fast, and remember numbers really well.

Nothing as full-blown as what you experience obviously... I had an experience like that when I was on acid listening to a concert for Infected Mushroom, it was intense... does that type of thing always happen for you? Are the shapes you see always constant for what you are hearing? How do you bring the colours up when you're thinking, and how does it intrude in your normal sight.

I'm just kinda curious to know more about it... I kinda miss being able to see those colours when I used to think about numbers lol :)

[JuhaDeWolf]

I posted a thread about synaesthesia in the socialize forum and explained it in depth.

But to answer your questions.
It always happens.
The images are always the same, a doorbell will always look like a doorbell.
Most of the time, I only see black and white, but really intense sounds will conjure up colours. Sort of like the movie Sin City.
However, I don't see the sounds in my normal field of vision, so it really doesn't intrude onto anything.

It's really hard to describe, sometimes I see things so complex that I can't even describe them (like the drumming at the beginning of Ticks and Leeches).