Tuesday 2nd of May
Last night was a Zebulon recording session with Mark.; A poem I wrote about two years ago now seems to be an eerie prophecy, The Man on the corner. I took my Italian harmonium, which was found on the side of the road about thirty years ago by a friend and stored in their hallway unplayed for pretty much that whole time. When they gave it to me, I pulled it apart, stripped the peeling varnish back and oiled the timber before re-varnishing it and setting it up in my own studio. Old instruments have a lovely habit of having rather unique tunings, and this one is perfect. When Stompy came in to record a harmonica part, he had to bend every single note to stay in tune with it. He said it might be tuned to A 432hz, and I suppose it's possible that it is a pre-WWII make, these Italian harmoniums were certainly around back then. The song has a xylophone part which is also in its own unique tuning, the end result being a brain twisting harmony that makes me cross my eyes and stick my tongue out, I feel dizzy listening to it. It is on the very edge of dischordant noise, but Stompy is such a master of the harmonica that it actually all works.
I also recorded three other poems, just spoken word demo's for me to listen to and work out if any music parts are needed. Whatever you do don't talk about the war, The Value of Laughter, and Crossfire. I have a sample of traffic noise which I had playing in my headphones as I recited the poems...there is something about the rhythm of rush hour traffic that helps to pace the poems, it gives me space to pause for breath. The atmosphere makes me feel as though I am speaking to someone as I walk along the road.
* * *
Nick quit Operation Firehat today. I'm sitting now at the Coopers Alehouse near Gardy's, The three who remain are meeting here to talk about the future. I guess I could see it coming. Nick has been withdrawn since the Fringe, showing obvious signs of burnout and discontent. Talking with him on the phone today was excellent. I have a sense of the bigger picture. Bands change, but the personal relationship one has with another musician is something that lasts your whole life. Nick didn't want to be associated with Stompy's more abrasive, larrikin and rude lyrics. Nick has kept this burrowing splinter to himself for a long time, and now it has come out, but all too late.
May 3rd
We met, we talked. We three will go on. We jammed in Gardy's room, hearing the songs for the first time without guitar...the basslines are aready so melodic that they quickly become the main melody, the leading instrument. We will try it for a few weeks as a trio and see how we feel, get back into the studio to record. It's funny, Nick never really spoke his mind out loud at rehearsals, he would always mutter quietly to me when Stompy was out of the room. Nick was oddly submissive in this way, never willing to butt heads with Stompy, the result being an unspoken grudge that festered into genuine resentment.
Huh, I'm an armchair psychologist now.
Who can really know a man's mind?
May 6th
A few days with no music. Just beautiful Autumn weather and a chance to get some real work done at the farm. The harvest is done, now winter can begin, all things drawing back into themselves. Towering columns of smoke rise from farms across the landscape as the first bonfires are lit. Yesterday, four Chinese businessmen flew in from Hong Kong to inspect the property for potential purchase.
One
two, three, four
five men in suits -
the world balances on a quill-tip.
* * *
I
am
Anachronistic at 37
more BC than AD
Shovel in one hand
Ladel in the other
* * *
I feel like a backwards hillbilly sometimes, clinging to the old world even as it shrivels up and vanishes. I have other friends for whom the hyper-futuristic world is an open door, an opportunity for growth. For me, the modern world is all flash and sizzle, smoke and mirrors. I am busy trying to learn the Setar, an instrument first developed around 3000BC, I earn my daily bread by pruning hedges and planting flowers, watering lawns and sweeping pathways. Although when I come home I play games on Playstation, I write my journal on a modern, sleek laptop, I listen to music stored on my mobile phone. One foot in the past, one in the future. I wonder what kind of destiny I am carving for myself, trying to live simply in a future obsessed with complexity.
Monday May 8th
The little things matter the most. My day off today, so I vacuumed, re-arranged the lounge room furniture for winter (making room in front of the fire place), practiced Ukulele for an hour and then went across the road to the local cafe to play music. While I was there, the owner invited me to play music on Mothers Day for the lunch crowd, paid in cash, plus coffee and food. A customer also stepped away from her coffee to photograph me for her Hills Community Facebook group. It was a good thing I shaved before going out, I was a scraggly mess this morning.
Then this afternoon I taught two teenage boys and a retired lady at the Ink Pot Arts Hub in Mt Barker. I had my son Wren with me, and during the lesson he came up to play a rhythm for us, just something that he had stuck in his head. He played it through four times with exact precision, an 8 beat rhythm, then sat back down again. The retired lady has been playing Jembe for about 8 years, mostly african stuff, and also studies Belly Dancing with Mira from BellyDance Amethyst. She recognised the names of most of the rhythms I taught today, having danced to them. Ghawazi, Ayub, Masmoodi, Wahiida, Maqsum - names of places, numerical designations, tribal names, and Baladi which simply means 'My home'.
I got my Dulcimers back from Deliah today. She is such a postive person, high spirited without being ditzy or vague. We talked about the Fringe, her show had been quite successful and had resulted in her meeting venue directors and company managers from overseas who were interested in seeing her show tour in their home countries. I told her about my post show burnout, the guitarist leaving the band, the $300 paycheck at the end of an exhausting season of rehearsals and performances. I told her that this year saw the death of my illusions about ever really making any money from performing, how I see now that I will always spend more money making music than I will ever earn, certainly in this town.
I am still quite down. I am having trouble breathing as I develop Asthma-like symptoms, waking up gasping for breath at 4am every morning. I just had a coughing fit that made me vomit in the sink, that's the second time today.
Still, I cannot give up. I push more and more, my album must be heard by more than my friends. My efforts must bear fruit. I cannot give up. Only a few months to go, then I can launch these songs into the world, these melodies that have kept me awake at night. I live in hope.
Tuesday, May 9th
Firehat rehearsal at Gardy's tonight. Reinventing our sound, re-building the old songs from the ground up. With the guitar missing each of us has to work to cover the emptiness, but it is obvious that we still have real momentum as a three piece. There is some talk of bringing in Rob Wallace as a session violin player...the future is open to us. It feels good that we are getting straight down to business writing new songs. Tonight we finished off Water Avenue, and began a Mexican-Egyptian-Gypsy song, which has the most complex melodies and arrangements of anything we have done together.
As Gardy relaxes on the couch learning and then immediately mastering this new material in minutes, I sit in awe of his focus and continually expanding skill. His TAFE music study is polishing him like a diamond. Everyone is happy, a rare state for any group of musicians, and as a result our music is better, more precise and detailed, more beautiful, less aggressive, yet still retaining the heaviness we all crave.
Wednesday May 10th
A day home sick. I was up half the night with breathing trouble, coughing up phlegm. I got some writing done around 5am though, the lead-up to the breakthrough I made today with the ending plot lines of my novel. I have been struggling to see a clear way to the end of the story, but as I began to understand the motivations, desires and goals of my characters more, especially the villain, it all began to make sense. My brother once told me Never protect you characters and it has been sound advice throughout the story. Every time I made things too safe for my protagonist, the story failed to make sense, but every time I let her suffer the consequences of her actions, everything would fall into place. This is not a punishment complex I am taking out on my character, everything that happens to her is a consequence of the choices she has made concerning power. How she relates to her own, and that of her allies and enemies.
I'm getting ahead of myself. You'll find out when the story is done and I am still a long way from that. Ten more chapters is my current estimate, on top of the 51 that have come before. And this is really only draft number two. The first draft had a simplistic old-timey mythological ending, too neat, too herculean. As I complete the second draft, the characters are all tested, their weaknesses exploited and their strengths countered.
Played some music on my front porch. Cooked some chicken for dinner with my son, listened to Red Panda, read some books, watched some cartoons, sat in bed writing. A good day.
Thursday May 11th
Dream. A kind of family gathering, my mother had a surprise for me, a cousin I hadn't seen since I was a child was going to be there. She had an unusual name, had written a book, had black and blue hair. The gathering was happening in a converted barn, but the other large farm sheds were full of mud pits where crocodiles were being bred. They were trained to not attack people, but there was still a nervous fear about being in the room with them. The crocodile dens were dark.
The gathering also had live music, and I was doing a short set of my own stuff.
The crocodilles are interesting, I've never dreamed of them before.
* * *
It is eleven o'clock, but I don't want it to be. I have polished song transcripts and printed out copies for my drum classes on saturday. The songs play in my head, layers building like sediment, one sound upon another. Like falling dust. persistent. invisible. the bottom of the ocean. the peak of a mountain.
Saturday, 13th May
Drum class today. The advanced students are on the verge of something big, a growing confidence spilled over today, buoyed partly by the african classes that two of them have also been taking. Today very little was taught, but much was learned. Someone would strike up a rhythm and rapidly the whole group would begin to improvise over it, layering one upon the next, and out of the spontaneous beauty of undirected, unarranged music, each of them burst forth with marvelous new rhythms, new solo patterns. Unfettered by the limits placed on them by song structures, or time limits, they shouted from rooftops, they danced on the tiles, they threw themselves from the edge of their hesitation and landed, stepping as if guided by a hand divine, onto the platform of their own confidence.
The beginner class is a far more intimate affair with only two students, one of them new to class. It is a simple mistake to become complacent when teaching beginner material, so the first thing I always say to new students is There is no such thing as a teacher. I can show you what to do, but you must do it. You must teach yourself the things you witness in class, you must repeat alone what you experienced in the group. I am not a teacher, I am a student, teaching what I know. There will never be a point at which there is nothing left to learn, and so, there are no teachers, only students with differing experiences, aspirations and talents.
Sunday May 15th. Mothers Day
Pig 'N Thistle Cafe.
Two kids on the couch, bored. The boy, under ten, paws at a sticky green eyeball, a toy. The girl, about fourteen, sits too bored even to fidget. Around them the cafe is alive with quiet movement, people at work in a conversational way, step, speak, collect dish, step, speak, step. Customers cluster at tables, the very old, the very young and everyone between. Mothers day, like many festival days, seems now devoted to the sharing of food and the giving of flowers, a family day. The kids on the couch are the youngest of the owner, who busilly dips between her roles as chef, maitre d'hotel, waiter and mother. Her eldest son is a kitchen hand, beaming with the pleasure of his work, while the father works as head chef.
I set up my gear and begin playing as the kids get milkshakes and come back to the couch. I start with harmonica. It's good to start with harp, people know the harp but it doesn't get played everyday like the guitar, so an audience will prick up its ears to hear one played. Some old men nod or tip their hats in seeming kinship, the instrument means something to them. Wherever you go, stories circulate about harmonica players going back generations, someone's grandad played one in the war, their uncle still plays the last post on remeberance day.
I play a gypsy waltz, the room begins to sway and the magic of sound paints everything. Everyone in the room is conversing over the music which has replaced the silence now conspiculous in its absence. People listen to the music, and I think that it helps them listen to each other. We are moved by music, it gets under our defences and affects us whether we like it or not. Like stories.
In between songs I tell a couple stories to the kids, beginning with The Tale of the King's legendary Fart, from the 1001 Arabian Nights. Kids normally love fart stories, these two weren't so impressed. But when I told them the story of the Setar, I saw their imaginations captured. It goes something like this...
A couple hundred years ago, Iran was ruled by a foreign power, it doesn't matter who, tyrrany is the same no matter who wears the jackboot. The powers that be declared it a crime to sing one's prayers and to play a musical instrument at the same time. Punnishable by death. In protest, a prominent Setar player went into the streets to sing and to play. Of course the police came and took him away for execution. After his death, luthiers began adding a fourth string to the Setar, which made the instrument even better for singing with. The instrument has become a symbol of resistance against oppression.
I played music for the kids for almost an hour and when they left I played for the staff. The customers dined in the next room, able to hear my music, but not able to see me play it. So my audience was the staff. Once I identified my real audience it changed the way I played as I took care to study their reactions instead. The Barista bopped her head to the flute, the teenage kitchen hand smiled at the ukulele songs, the Chef liked the Dulcimer songs.
I wasn't dissapointed by my being at a remove from my expected audience. I just saw who I was playing for, and I played for them. When I had played for about two hours I ordered a short black, and was deeply satisfed by it. Oh the layers of flavour in a well made espresso. Chocolate overtones and a sweetness unlike any sugary treat known, then the earthy foundations of the coffee flavour. I had a ceasar salad, which I wolfed down in sudden hunger. I felt like an honoured guest at a family run roadside inn. A free meal is worth more than the menu price. There is something in the act of being served that delivers something else along with it. I am a parent, I am always making and serving food to others, and it is always a pleasure when someone does it for me. Knowing that my music paid for the meal is even better.
I liked playing for the staff. They were just doing their job, pleased that every time they moved from room to room, someone was sitting by the window playing music. I felt I was there to soundtrack to the moment. I hear my melodies underscoring conversations, punctuating the rhythms of speech. Replacing the silence between their breaths with glissandi, the strum and pluck of a limping waltz, the songbird cry of an Elder Flute.
Note on the history behind the Setar:
The Persian Setar originally had three strings, but a Darvish named Moshtaq-Ali Shah added a fourth one to improve the sound. That’s why this string is also known as Moshtaq’s string. Moshtaq is a well-known figure in mysticism and literature. On the 27th of Ramazan in 1792 (1206 Lunar Hejri calendar), he was stoned to death because he sang the call to prayer at the Jum'ah Masjid, while playing the Setar. His body is buried in Kerman’s Moshtaqieh square next to Mirza Hossein Khan’s tomb and is a pilgrim’s stop among mystics.
This great mystic called his instrument "tchoub-e-sagzani" - a stick to beat dogs - as a reaction against the then puritans who wanted to ban music.
This information was sourced from several websites, but most notably from the book,
Al-Kimia: The Mystical Islamic Essence of the Sacred Art of Alchemy
By John Eberly
Monday 16th May
Recording with The Bridgewater Trio.
We meet with smiles, glad to see each other again. We chat about the wedding gig...it really does stand out from all the other gigs. It is hard to speak about it, we look away, embarrassed by our failure to adequately encapsulate the experience with words. There will never be anything quite like that night. We position chiars, position instruments. We sit in a triangle Passing like a shadow between us, Mark moves with silent precision, laying cables, plugging in microphones, then kneeling before his low desk, he gazes lamplit into the rainbow screen of the recording software. We play bits of our first song, Malfuf, remembering the parts, finalising the arrangement. I keep getting lost in the second half, fumbling with the rhythm changes.
We stumble, struggle, half scribble notes upon a page that isn't looked at afterwards. Alice has a stunning capacity for structural understanding. The depth of experience her classical training has provided her has not moulded her into a cookie-cutout replica of the established school, rather she seems the quinitissential student, eager, curious, critical of establlished norms in society as well as music. A thinker, but also one who understands the limits of thinking, and where feeling takes over. Balanced. That is my impression of her. Posessed of self knowledge, and aware of her own ignorance. I am continually impressed by her skill as a musician, and the quality of her humanity as a person.
Mark presses record.
I won't describe every detail. You will hear the results for yourself sometime. We recorded three songs, shared a meal of fresh fruit, vegetables, soft cheese (mmmmm, tripple cream brie......) and roast chicken. We drink good coffee and play music until ten o'clock. Solomon, during the evening, re-played a drum solo about six times, as we struggled to pull everything together for Malfuf. I have heard Solomon solo a lot, and I believe that is reveals something about him. He is very driven, a pounding beat thunders through him, sometimes overtaking him in his pursuit of power. I thought I heard a samba marching band playing through him tonight. I think his solos reveal something of his character as a man as well. His paintings hang in the Marion Gallery as a part of his latest exhibition, while he is completing paperwork for the SALA festival later this year. He paints strong, striking images in black and white, stark illustrative patterns, psychedelic. He works long hours in a cleaning job, on weekends working from 4am - 2pm, with more regular daytime shifts on weekdays. He has a daughter, 5 years old, but that is all I really know about his family. Solomon has drive, the energy and the will to pursue his dreams.
Myself? Tonight I heard my solos, tricky, leaping, skipping, dodging the beat to trip over themselves in a three legged race. When I get it right, it's really special. When I don't, it's a crooked man's shamble down a broken down lane, unresolved, lacking structure, ill conceived and poorly timed.
But when I do get it right...the trip becomes a stumble, and that becomes a tumble, and that becomes a roll, becomes a leap, becomes a cartwheel and a double sommersault to land, drop dead in the centre of the beat.
Tuesday May 17th
I have just listened to a radio play, The Orbiting Human Circus. It is so beautiful, the kind of story that opens you up from within, from a place before words, a story scooped from the very edge of the imagination, a story that blurs the line between reality and dream. I am at work, now in this expanded state, I feel the wind on my skin, I hear the grass beneath my feet, the music of the world is all around.
* * *
Just back from Firehat rehearsal. There is something very business-like, reinventing the band as a three piece. The old songs sound empty when we play them as we used to, but as we listen more carefully, and find ways to evolve them, abandoning the old ways, embracing the new. We laugh about renaming the band Iron Dwarf, we make the new mexican metal song even more complex, with a new 15 beat ending melody. 123 123 123 12 12 12. Recordings on my phone, setlist scrawled on a notepad left on the floor. Just another day in a rock band.
Saturday May 20th
Drum Arabesque at the Body, Mind and Psychic Fair
There are strange gigs like this one that seem to have nothing to do with the audience. They were there, I saw them, but they were meaningless. The Body, Mind and Psychic Fair is not a place I would ever have expected to perform, but today my drum students and I played for Regan and Sarii. The crowd were there, but I did not play for them, I only saw the faces of my students, these friends of mine in drumming. I saw the faces of the dancers, the push of their movement, the hint of bare feet turning beneath their huge skirts. I heard our music, I was inside the circle of sound. I saw the crowd, but they were not really there. I played for my students, I played for the dancers. The crowd, the fair, were nothing more than a pretext. I played for the music, and when it was over I milled about with my friends, drummers and dancers all, faintly absorbing the soft afterglow of their pride.
The crowd meant nothing. They had not come to see us play, they were only there because of the fair. They sat down because it was a place to sit down and something was happening on a stage, something other than a psychic talking into a microphone. Though the fair was well attended, I felt a lethargy for the shiny baubles on display. Trinkets marketed within the boundaries of spiritual benefit. Meditation stools were sold as Black Dragon Seats, gemstones were Healing Crystals, Everywhere psychics plied their trade, selling ideologies and therapies, every one with expensive signs and clever slogans. The last time I was here in the Jubilee Pavillion it was to see a Roller Derby match, before that I had seen The Mars Volta, Aphex Twin, Marilyn Manson, Soulfly, Korn and plenty of other acts in the Big Day Out.
Being a part of the screaming crowd at the roller derby was closer to a spiritual experience than being a part of the crowd at the psychic fair. Seeing The Mars Volta WAS a spiritual experience, crushed in the thrashing crowd, pounded into an altered state of consciousness by the massive waves of sound and the ever intensifying furor of their stage performance. The psychic fair was a shopping mall, complete with bright lights and listless wandering consumers. I used to believe in all of that stuff, so I guess I'm expressing a bitter resentment at my own youthful gullibility. They would probably say I am holding an emotional block and that I could use a healing session.
They might be right.
They might be just another used car salesman trying to make a buck by dressing up a rusted patchwork ideology and selling it as the path to liberation.
HayAllah, God is in the room. A fancy meditation seat will not invite HIM to sit closer to me, a crystal wand will not make my magic spells more powerful. There is no priest, no shaman, no pastor, to help you out of this disaster, and scratched into the prison wall plaster, there is no God, there is no master. One cannot buy a seat in heaven. God costs nothing. Transformation costs nothing. We are born illuminated with grace, and the path to peace is a process of relinquishing the burdens of unhappiness, discontent and greed. There is no product or service that will do anything to further one along the path.
Today I played for the musicians who shared the stage with me, and for the dancers who so proudly wear our music and who, through their grace and sensitivity, make movement from sound. For so long I have craved an audience, I have chased the stagelights as hard as my body will allow, but somewhere along the way I realised that the audience have little to do with the happiness I feel as a performer.
Tuesday May 23rd
Change. It is happening in me. At 10:30pm I sit to play Setar and a melody comes out unheard of, played by someone with hands far more confident than mine. There is someone inside me that doesn't share my insecurites, doubts, or fears. He plays so beautifully, so instinctively that I find myself listening to the song; rather than feeling that I am the one playing, it is I who am being played.
A new attitude to music, a more mature handling, less desperate, less attached.
Yes, less attached.
What is it I dreamed of when I became a musician? Big stages, bright lights, cheering crowds. I have experienced all these things in different ways. The accoutrements of music. Now I find myself playing the music, FOR the music. It's not for the crowd, even though I take to the stage to entertain them. Selfishly perhaps, now it feels that I take the stage to entertain myself, and to share in the music with my fellow musicians.
Saturday May 27th
A few days off work, sick at first with a lingering cold, then a knee injury which has kept me hobbling around my house like an old man. Lots of time for music and writing. In the mornings I drink coffee and work on my novel, the brutal and violent conclusions writing themselves regardless of my desire for a peaceful resolution to the story. Outside the sunshine is too bright, the birdsong too cheerful to remain in the darkness of a fictional subteranean prison, so I put on my coat, grab my ukulele and limp across the road to the cafe where I sit playing in the sunshine, customers tapping their feet. The owner is very generous, offering me lunch, bringing me coffee. It is lovely to feel valued as a musician. These little sounds I pluck from a box with strings make people happy. When I cannot work it is nice to know that I can still make something of worth in the world.
My coffee done, I shift along the street, stepping into the toystore next to my house where I sit on the steps and play, chatting with the owner who is also my landlady. The music brings a couple customers in who buy little things they would not have lingered to see had it not been for my ukulele.
In the evening my friends come to visit, we listen to radio plays and play chess by the fire, talking and laughing at the grim comedy of Welcome to Nightvale. Arky is a very good chess player, and his victory over me was absolute. Seated in my old rocking chair, his careful tactical use of a line of pawns made my efforts to corner his King futile. It took less than an hour for him to put me in check-mate with his Queen and a Rook. Marvelous. I like losing at board games. I love watching a successful strategy at work, and it is even better to see the look of pride and self respect on my opponent's face. It doesn't matter what the game is, the fun is in the contest of minds.
Sunday May 28th
late at night
kept company by the silence of my home
I sweep my fingers across a three string dulcimer
lost in time and space, i imagine the prarie, warm and endlessly star lit
a land without clocks
where day is measured from horizon to horizon
and nights go on until you don't think the sun will ever come up again
will it ever come up again?
and then when the sun is high in the summer, when corn and beans and squash grow thick upon the warm earth and you wonder to yourself how could the night ever come, in a day such as this.
but it does come.
doesn't it?
late at night
kept company by the silence of my home
i strum the strings of my three string dulcimer
and out of that hollow darkness rested on my knees and caught taught with wires that sing, i strum and find a new song in an old one.
i sweep where once i did strike,
in silence where once i did sing
and in that imagining, the prairie stretching dark and endlessly star lit
i find in timelessness, in languid laziness
unfettered from need, pride and repression
the perfect way to play this song
for which my sister will sing
the words that came to me
late at night
Oh
so many
nights ago.
