Voice

There was the sweet smell of fertiliser being dumped out of a wheel barrow on to the pavement directly in front of the church. Yes this is London. Steam was rising from deep within its belly because of the heat being produced from out of the slow process of decomposition. It was rich and dark like crumbling chocolate but there were small pieces of straw and sticks poking out from within it that couldn't be broken down. It smelt of animals- the rich smell of animal hide and what comes out of the back of them and is steaming from being incubated within the digestive tract running from mouth to anus inside their warm animal bodies. The digestion was carrying on now out on the pavement amongst the sodden yellow leaves. Soon the fertiliser would be scooped up and spread onto the dying flower beds to either side of the pavement where small gated public squares looked stark in the half-light.

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The man on stage had a guitar like the time I had seen him on TV when his voice had soared unexpectedly from his quiet frame. He was lit up today in a warm purple light against the background of the pulpit carved out of soap stone with a space underneath that could have doubled up as a child's den. The stained glass windows captured the dispersed and dank light of the outside and brought it in, creating a channelled aura in figures of biblical scenes. The small electric heaters glowed orange at alternate intervals along the upper most pews bringing the people corralled below into one single entity.

There would be no singing today because the singer had woken up without his voice. The man announcing him said that this was the bad news but the good news was that he would be playing some acoustic music for about half an hour. There was a visible rustle. A restlessness set in. The woman in front leaned forward to her friend and there was whispering. Several people checked their blackberries lighting up the fronts with the push of a button.

The music started. The man worked his vocal range between chest and forefinger without opening his mouth. Within this looped sounding eye and ear created between them first precision of focus and then reverb. Sound on sound tumbled out in each delicate placement like setting colours free each one allowed to fly into the spaciousness or nullified and dampened by the turning wheel of the meter and the melody that kept coming, an attack so sweet it was relentless. A body moving forward delicately but insistently.

Voice is not only a quality of the vocal tract. It is anywhere that our attention is put full-heatedly and with courage; where a loop is made between unwavering attention and the free play of movement. I remembered than a small girl whom I`d known. Her wide eyes scanning, like moving across a new terrain, the features of the children and adults before her. She would pick up objects one in each hand and then gazing at them with outstretched arms run with them for a distance before replacing one object with another as if refuelling for the next part of the journey. She had no words but it became obvious that she was patterning her sing-songy breath-like sighs to this stop/start lullaby drawn out of her movements like a waltz sweeping so far then lingering as if in a dip only to be seized by another impulse and carried on by the wave. Then she had began to drum caught up in the drumming and tapping of others and acutely entering into these stops and starts with her own two hands. She began putting the objects onto the skin surface of the drum to watch them jump and dance as she beat out her rhythm. I would hum around this rhythm and then lift her up in one sweeping motion to carry her through the air than land her back down as the song continued to sweep up and around and down again. Perhaps there might be a gap- a silence and a listening into the breath which is coming and going. Then again I might tap back into the rhythm or she would as if it had simply journeyed underground for some time and is now re-emerging on the surface with the flow unbroken and recognised by all.

I`d seen the singer with no voice doing this same thing here in the desanctified church catching in through the hesitancy of a silence which becomes an interval loaded with expression because the tune had been caught back into with the same consistency and tenderness as before. No one is watching their blackberries now. No one is whispering. All are deeply settled in the journey sitting as one.

This common meter is what gives the voice whether sounded through tapping or moving or humming or story-telling, a vibrancy and clarity. There is a warmth to this like the digesting compost that is carried further into each consistency where it lingers on the airwaves and in the delicate fibres of our nostrils that flare slightly as we draw closer.