Thoughts on Drumming

17.3.2010




It is as if the wide-scale dissipation is what makes things work. What allows it to catch in and get going. I am thinking again of the drumming workshop in the Arts Hut on Sunday. The fragmentation and re-mixing of sounds out of the felt contrasts of the contact of hand on drum- this relaying out of a crushed momentum that bites in somewhere mid-air buffered by the many flying particles of other sounds. The gestures follow them through. They become them between the chest and the waist- through rescaling that connection between the hands- the upwards and downwards motion being equal. The height of the bounced off hands is gauged by the pressure of the skin on skin contact between hand and drum. A consistent alteration. So, out of this is crafted a kind of negative form around which the hands set free in the aftermath of that contact and move and come to defined limits as if a blind man followed through the contours of real objects naturally stopping at their end. The arms loosen from the shoulders. The centre abdomen remains a permanent plumb-line. But as the motions intensify- focus down, bounce up, hover and stay before re-applying pressure through the palms of the hands elsewhere, that central plumb-line opens and moves out without losing its rooting location; always a position of return.

That process where the motion and its application actually begins to ride freely on the sound-streams it is involved in, is when precision-focus, and looseness-dissipation begin to work in tandem. That is when the body settles into a direct placement in which a loose effortlessness and an incredible power turn through one another. That is a kind of dissipated affectivity in which non-similar sounds, gestures, expressions, moods begin to run through into one another. That kind of thoroughfare of a long-distance influence towards what is intimate is a state of Resonance.( It also happens in the Solar System- There was a program last night on it. A young Professor running his hands through the sand in a desert, drawing circles in circles where a rock he placed just outside of the circle has, he tells us, an influence on that circle; smiling quite madly). It is to do with regular and anticipated states of conjunction where distant realms begin to fire into each other and accumulatively perturb or magnetically shift into a certain tendency or leaning. That builds though repetition creating a change in shape; of how things are put together- of what is then likely to happen out of these states of regular alignment, either in cataclysmic events or slow and gradual shifts. That is not a self- manifesting state but is a circulation of affects. Of co-influencing. It is more in line with how musical sequences in African Drumming emerges. Different patches or layers of beat combinations- like composite hot and cold intensities that rather than tear each other apart into final stops and starts, filter through one another creating flows, incursions and turns that build to even more powerful affects or dissipate into nothing. They are allowed to play out and for a certain period are maintained in that state and safe-guarded through that repetition. These runs and rolls then meet, collide or go through other similarly preserved runs. Somewhere in that coming together, there is a point where parallel worlds influence one another creating areas of bend and other areas of resistance. There become areas of loosening and stretching out- other areas of intensification - a doubling and re-doubling of gage until there are multiple fill-ins within the same meter or quota of time. These varying sound textures begin to act like physical properties, nudging and jostling with one another. Than again they become oblivious and ride right through the body and texture of each other. Different points of shoring up emerge like sand-ridges formed by multi-directional wind cycles. The meter shifts a fraction and a cyclical waltz is swaying through a regular march, lurching and playing off the regularity beat, enticing it and humoring it with on: off leanings. An atmosphere begins to arrive.

Something occurs within this contingent organization; the gradual build of an atmosphere held between many tangents that co-incidentally, at a certain point in time, affect one another. It is the making of a body. The lines of engagement. Something here that catches in through the mechanization of beat. A whisper or innuendo which is as much reliant on the orderly repetitions which it plays off, augments, cuts in its tracks in order to be known. That is a kind of articulation. A voicing out. It's that voicing which becomes the body engaged. Feeling runs out through the jointing of that process. And it's out of that that something very exacting, very loose, very forceful emerges. The body is played into its feeling through that sounding out. Joy-pain.

The man who sat on the edge, now and again inserting complex runs, then extinguishing himself and sitting, watching, waiting was the man who suddenly got up and moved in the centre. Falling and shoring up in a dance with his eyes closed. Moments later he took up behind the base drum and with a stick in each hand he seems to move through the sound arriving at each placement inside of the sound pattern. He is reliant on it letting go into it. Fully aware in the many stages that that involves. He is visually present. Before that he had been hidden and cut back from any direct contact. Eyes were guarded from human witnessing. He emerges into a fullness completely tangible. Every aspect of him is jumped and bounced out into that fullness. Laughter quivering through reels of destruction. A meeting. A competency of presence. Stillness so that I can still picture all these perturbations in one inward glance.

He is like a hologram where every small portion holds the resources of the whole. There is no left or right- just a moving through the centre as if in this stationary place behind the drum, he is walking and the sound is simply the magnified resonance of that application. It is sustained and driven in the cross beats of sound-gesture that means that every single gesture and every sound to emerge is a cross-current; a multitude of tangents enticed and teased and held in exacting place by one another. By all of us. A conversation. It remains, even as it dies where the sound ends. We stack chairs. Drift away. Portions follow us out. Spread into the city.