Drum Circle

A running tempo underneath exacting placements. The placements are islands; their arrival and their making way for something else impossible without the running tempo that sends them up and sends them down again. This is a temperance practice of a depth reading that is always shifting. It is a matter of emphasis within the on-going running tempo where a slight hesitation or a slight forwarding that ruffles the flow puts a glitch in the momentum and in this sense snags a hook or a foothold that becomes something; a sound put into relief  and that foreshadows the level pulsation silencing it as the core structure like the veins of a leaf with no color or meat of its own. So sounds are brought up as shapes with a real visceral quality that indents and bounces back into a fullness creating an excess thrust into spring-like reversal into this pushing out. This is a making visible or pushing into view. But before it is apprehended as a visual or sound frontier it is felt;  at the level of the body and the weight of the foot going into or out of the ground or the level of  the palm of  a hand creating contact with the surface of a drum and then bouncing back out again.

In the interim between contact and no-contact there is the space for resonance. This effortless residual sound out of the act of bearing down and bouncing back out again is heard as a certain riff which is stored by the player as if it were a message not of their making but coming to them fresh and accidentally. Then something is made of this and it is repeated, inverted, delayed and plunged back down into the level transparency of the core structure becoming the supportive foundation for a another floating sound. There is in time this constant ricochet of  levels that fall in and out of sync with one another so that a rapid pulsation like a jamming or a positive feedback that distorts and then distorts some more evolving into this complexity. And as long as there is a core structure or pulsation, even if this never actually manifests but is simply made implicit like a steady and slow heart-beat, then the play of differences can multiply catching and snagging on to one another; bringing each other down as a head dive and then soaring back out of the ground on the sheer impetus born of this dropping away into an impossible contraction. Invisibility and explosion follow on one from the other as diminshment and excess.

Every opposite plays  into its extreme and then reverses and in this way the music begins to make itself. And the ricocheting tumbling counter-rhythms torn out of the inner pulse begins to organize around a body; a body that does not make music as the placement of notes in a sequence one after another in long impossible strands that knit and pull apart as if from a  master-plan. Rather each affect is felt in the slight sway and perturbation of the core balance in the lower body- the hips, sacrum, lower belly and back- and  in every slight displacement  from side to side and tilting forward and back again. This tilt catches into its polar  opposite so that the body becomes light and transparent and almost nullified as each tendency is matched and steadied through its counter-part. These twinned movements like a pendulum swing begin to create a rapid circulation through the base line of the body as it swivels to orientate into the sound beats that play out as incidentals of this swiveling centralized rooting.  And in time this rapid readjustment becomes refined so that barely a movement is perceived. There remains the semblance of an upright body as a continuous circulation of upwards and downwards movement crossing and binding up from the back base of the body at the lower back and sacrum to the head and down the front of the body to the belly which is a kind of collection point that is like a knotting together. Through this circulation in relation to the lived experience of uneven encounters- in the surfaces, sounds and intimations of our on-going lived environment- all the perturbation of left-right, forward-backwards, up-down is absorbed and accommodated without being stilled or inhibited. This is the spring-like aliveness of a connection as it manifests as a heart-to-heart understanding between musicians in a musical setting but may equally emerge in many dynamic settings where this kind of tuning is allowed to  take hold. There is a sense of spaciousness and extendable time and each placement- as if in slow-motion finds its insertion in amongst the running pulsation of the main beat in an easy affinity that binds in and out of its multiplying shoots.

The effort is taken out and the heart slows. Even perspiration begins to diminish as if  the outer activity of this rapid drumming were somehow superfluous -an accidental slippage out from a calm stillness of simply sitting together in silence. The silence and the mayhem now go hand in hand supporting rather than interfering with one another. And this brings a sense of deep calm matched by an alertness drawn out of this global clarity. Outside of the drumming circle everything is just as it is and this may well bring a feeling of vacancy and even depression because this state of  open absenting whilst remaining in the moment is so unknown in the usual business of day to day life. Stay with this sense and what it brings up both as positive and negative feeling.
It will come and go and translate into something else-something more impersonal-  in  its own time. Even as a period of physical or mental restlessness- even that will dissipate in time into a wider field.