Monday, 1st of August
Iron Dwarf practice at Gardy's. The flame is well tended. The songs burn, impurities flare and vanish, our focus increases and the red becomes blue becomes white fire. We are ready to record again, and will play in the streets to keep warm over winter.
Saturday, August 5th
Drum class at Belly Dance Arabesque
I wonder what keeps my students coming back, I think to myself that the classes have lost momentum, that these monthly workshops are not enough to really improve anyone's skill, that I am wasting their time and they are wasting their money.
Then, when I am in the studio and I scribe the rhythms for the day upon the whiteboard, and I see the earnest, serious faces of those who have come to class, a little of my doubt falls away. Today we play Sufi rhythms, Tunisian, Persian and Iraqi rhythms, and somewhere between HayAllah, Wahiida and Quaddaam, all my fear vanishes.
The music these people create, and the individual expression they have created for themselves out of the formula of traditional rhythms awakens my passion for teaching and I remember that no-one is wasting anything, not time, not money. Instead, together we lay waste to apathy, to insecurity and doubt, we are made rich by our involvment in music and culture. By our engagement with each other and by careful and practiced listening we cultivate an atmosphere inside ourselves that we carry out of the class and into the world. Everywhere, rhythm, harmony, melody and the grand purity of silence make of the mundane world a beautiful woven tapestry of experience. Like fingers entwine in holding hands, like capilliary water moves through the dark earth, like the wind outside is the air inside the house is the air inside our lungs.
The thing that keeps my students returning is the same thing that keeps me teaching...the opportunity to join with others and defy the solipsistic ideology of our individuated world, to be more than a lone drummer tapping secret codes in the middle of the night, timing beats to the crackle of the fireplace. We come together to learn, and to share our knowledge with each other, teacher and student are interchangable titles. In order to teach, I must learn. My students show me every month the importance of humility, dedication, persistence and unrestrained joy.
Together, we bow before the altar of music
* * *
There was a fire in the flophouse, the ruined building beside the dance studio. Ash has settled in drifts upon cooled layers of molten plastic and charred timber, and beneath everything, the unburned relics of throwaway lives. A harry potter DVD crunches beneath my boot as I explore the now dangerously unstable ruin, ceiling beams cracked and charred thin by the fire which consumed the floor and climbed the walls to eat away at the roof. The once warm piles of garbage and sleeping bags and filthy underwear have burned away to nothing, leaving only the blackened shapes of foam mattresses and glass bottles.
The main wall is now supported on the exterior by a fresh timber framework, preventing collapse out into the carpark, but nothing has been done to prevent inward collapse. Police tape declares the area a crime scene, yet the rear entrance remains accessible, unblocked by beurocratic yellow tape.
It is with cheerful sadness that I say goodbye to this cursed building. I have been haunted by its decayed beauty for long enough, the ghosts of its despairing tennants have whispered their secrets to me and now even their dead aspirations must depart. I expect the building will soon be demolished, for despite its Heritage listing, in this stage of advanced collapse, it cannot last much longer against the urban forces of civilisation.
I must find another hidden place.
Sunday August 6th
A day in my pyjamas, writing all morning, later I play uke in the kitchen as I wait for the kettle to boil, making tea. I build a huge underground pyramid playing Minecraft with Arky. We play crazy eights, poker & black-jack after dinner as we listen to Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy', (the 1978 radio play). All day the storm has blown furious, the driveway slowly fills up with rain, the creek flowing.
Tuesday August 8th
Mixing session with Stompy at LB Studio.
An evening of listening, of feeling. Stompy arrived, guitar case in hand from a day playing music, on the street, and at TAFE which he is now attending to study singing. The evening is ripe, we listen as Mark and Stompy mix tracks for my album, gradually sculpting each individual sound, from the egg shaker to the marching drum, and navigating the subtle relationship between ukulele and tabla. I listen to them listening, noticing our ears pricking up at the same moment as the tone of a wooden drumstick on the steel rim of my doun doun shifts from one of plastic lo-fi nagging, to a resonant, reverberating snap of timber on steel.
We talk, we laugh and then I get a txt message from Heather Osmond, my last boss at the Peechabella farm, telling me that her husband Peter has died. He had suffered for nearly a year from a brain tumor. He was only in his sixties. I had known him and worked with him for two and a half years. Moved to sudden tears, I let go and let my sadness have its say. I explained myself briefly to Mark and Stompy and together we just kept right on going, listening through the tears.
I cook dinner, beef with vegetables and chick peas. I open wine and serve cheese with black pepper crackers. I think there is an instant difference in the way people behave when they have a wine glass in their hands. Their posture when holding it becomes relaxed, the liquid weight has an odd pendulum against which the world may swing. Wine stimulates, subdues, sublimates and substantiates.
We listen more and more.
Saturday August 12th
Just home from Casablabla...if i thought last month was noisy, I was kidding myself.
The street was packed as I pushed my sack-truck laden with instruments to the venue. The same homeless guys camped outside the seven day store, the same staggering early drunks crawling between pubs, youth everywhere finding themselves, and everyone lost in the crowd of each other. In the club, pulsing already with intoxication and hot with raised voices in conversation, heads turn as I enter, I cut a different space in the thick air. Each person enters a room with a different purpose, and this purpose shapes their energy in the room, the patterns of their movement, the paths of their perambulation. The table staff with alacrity and martial precision weave through the inconstant tides of the crowd, bartenders dance elaborate duets, re-enacting the alchemists opera that turns lead to gold as their trade plys the people with the voodoo juice needed to ensorcel them into becoming golden versions of themselves. Besotted with the truth that wine makes us Gods, and in that godliness we can witness and experience that which is blocked from us in sobriety. No cristicism to ascetism. To each his own, for sobriety can become its own intoxication, if one is willing to look deep enough and break through the walls of mundanity that surround the conventional boundaries of sober thinking. Yet it is sober thinking and careful meticulous action that burns in the retina as I watch the staff operate the great machine of a club of this size, and between the great turning wheels of their industry, the dancers spin iridescent, illuminated by the invisible light of eyes that stare and heads that turn and in the interruption of their conversations I can see a young girl stare dumbfounded, holding her mother's hand, watching a belly dancer balance the broad heavy blade of a falcion upon her head.
Beside the bar I play darbuka, harmonica, then setar, and from the mezzanine two of my brothers watch me. It has been more than a year since the three of us were together. The Philosopher, the Artist and the Musician. The noise of the room is overwhelming, I turn my amp up almost to its limit, and I feel somehow that the louder I play, the less anyone can hear anything, pressed between the din of conversation and the ringing tones of my setar. Between sets my brothers and I raise glasses of fine scotch whiskey and toast the brilliance of the moment, this rare convocation in the busy night.
Monday, August 14th.
Rose thorns in my fingertips, it is painful to write, and I cannot play my ukulele...NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Tuesday August 15th
Today in the cafe I improvised a lot on the setar, and I played harmonica better than I have all year, people dancing where they sat with cups in their hands. A young girl, perhaps 3 yeras old, jumped with excitement as I played my setar. Outside the steady rain washes the dust from the world, the air is clean and refreshing, mothers push prams through the rain, men walk their dogs, families gather for coffee. Tomorrow I will work in the rain, pruning roses and pulling weeds. Today I write, play music, deal with centrelink, drink coffee, read a book (Plutarch, The Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic), and tonight is Iron Dwarf band practice.
* * *
Iron Dwarf Rehearsal
It has been nice to just rehearse over winter, no gigs, just the three of us (and my son), in that little room, making the best music we can, and putting everything we've got into those precious minutes and hours we have together. The new set...
Thursday August 17th
The rain hammers down, flood warnings for this evening. I only managed to get out of the farm by a slim margin today, the river was lapping at the underside of the bridge as I drove over it at 2pm. Five meters deep and flowing very fast. A car was swept away on that same river, the Bremer (Meechi), only yesterday when the rains really began here, some unlucky fool trying to cross it at a low ford. Langhorne Creek was half submerged at midday, by now the water would be washing up against the sandbags that no-one seemed to put back in the shed after the February flood. I see cows standing in shallow lakes, grapevines knee deep in muddy water, the road closed through the centre of town.
leaves upon already fallen leaves have lain
and still the rain beats down upon the rain.
Gyodai
Saturday 19th of August
I sat in the studio courtyard garden before drum class today. The abandoned building still stands as it did, but something of its life has been evicted, and I do not feel the draw that I once did to sit amidst its ruin. Instead, I warm myself in the sunshine playing flute upon the second floor fire escape platform, surverying from atop the steel stairs the awkward shapes of rooftops and carparks and fences behind the studio. In the distance a lady walks to Saturday morning church service, hobbled in a tight skirt and high heels, a gray shawl wrapped about her shoulders, she could have stepped from a time machine sent from the 1950's. I take a moment to sit in the studio garden, a tiny serene courtyard hidden behind a tall steel fence, Jasmine climbing and flowering, succulents in pots decorating the coffee table beside me as I recline in a large wicker chair, my class notes open before me. Tunisian and Iraqi rhythms today, all sewn up with the sufi rhythm HayAllah, the beginnings of a new song I am calling, The temple of my familiar.
In the evening I play setar, inspired by the music of Hossein Alizadeh, a recently deceased master of Persian classical music. With my tax money this year I will pay my car registration, get new Ukulele strings, and have a few lessons with Sina Aria, the setar teacher in Adelaide. Ah dreams of wealth...like grasping at steam.
Saturday 26th August
This is almost my last entry. With the recording process now complete, all that remains is the insular and rather slow process of mixing, mastering, album art, promotion and the launch. This document has always been intended as the liner notes to accompany my album and it is important I keep that in mind. This was never to be an open ended, ever unfolding episodic blog about the life of a musician. It was, and is, about the nine months of intense recording and performing that preceeded the album release. And a release it shall be. I have held this music inside me for a long time, developing that which to me is the most important creative endeavor of my life. I have shared this story with you as a way to let you in, a way to break the invisible barrier between artist and observer.
So...since last Saturday's drum class, a few things have happened.
Iron Dwarf went into the studio to record two songs (Red Fox Reggae, and Garde VS the Jungle Bunny), an evening filled with cinzano, beer, laughter, chicken and some amazing music. Stompy told me that he has waited his whole life to put this band together, and that he is hearing his musical dreams made real. It is an interesting thing to see the ways that the Dream World and the Living World overlap. It is like waking up with sand in your shoes and the stolen magic wand of the faerie queen in your hand. Making art is exactly like bringing the magic of the Dream World back with you when you wake.
This week I also finished the second draft of my novel, The Hangman Tree. It has taken about seven years to get this far. 215 pages. So I bound it with string and now I will read it cover to cover to make sure that the story in my head is the one I put on paper, then the third draft can begin. It is the legend of Djinnee, Shaman of the Red Sands, and slowly, word by word it has made its way from my dreams and now it is in my hands. It is the fourth book I have written, but the first that I have devoted so much time and attention to, devoted to the idea that this novel is THE ONE. My other books, (Recurring Nightmare, The White Tribe, and Spider on my tongue) are all first drafts, each about a hundred pages long. Good story ideas, but essentially I consider them to be the practice neccessary to get good enough to write The Hangman Tree.
Lastly, I bought new strings for my Ukulele, the first new set since I got the instrument three or so years ago. Spring is almost upon us, and I can feel the energy pushing up through my body, the transformation both physical and spiritual that will carry me forward into my new life.
The Music of Invisible Enclaves is almost here.
Sunday 27th of August
Writing all this has given me the opportunity to see myself, and to see the life I have chosen, with all its faults and flavours. I worry that I worry about money too much, that my suffering in this regard is my own fault. So much of life is governed by one's attitude and perspective. I have grumbled the most when I have expected music to provide me with money. Much of my complaining is of course the result of unrealistic expectations, and my attatchment to imagined outcomes. This all leads me to consider that I have been asking the wrong questions. I should not be asking how I can make money, I should be asking in what way I may serve.
How may I serve music?
I cannot expect music to provide for me, I must provide for music. In a world torn assunder with war and the bitter conflicts of right and left, I make space for the kindness of music. I cannot say what problems it solves, but in the morning when I wake, it is there singing to me, and in the day while I work, it is there, practicing melodies and rhythms, and in the night we meet hand in hand.
Brother turns against brother and the rivalry of religious doctrine makes fools of us all, but music whispers that all ideologies are insecure, and in the silence it grants us, new pathways to peace may be found. I have moaned about the crooked economy of the arts, I have whinged that my efforts to make money with music only leave me poorer than when I began, but there is something so much bigger at stake than money.
Being a musician is an act of service.
I serve you who listen.
I serve the musicians who came before me, and those who will follow.
I offer these melodies and these rhythms up before the altar of my God and I pray that one day I might know peace through this meditation.
Monday, 28th August
I listen with ever increasing attention to the subtle differences in acoustics as I shift my hand position or posture over the sound board, or as I tilt my head up to look around the cafe. Dividing my attention between listening to the instrument and listening to the room, I can let go and let my fingers listen to my ears, and let the room take control of how each song will be played.
Four cab drivers who meet here regularly for breakfast, dressed in crisp blue uniforms, epaulets adorned and coats trim braided, tell stories of customers and roads and crowds and for a flash I am transported back to any time at all in our common ancestry, listening to carriage drivers talk about their horses, their customers, the roads and the crowds. I've said it many times before, the medieval simplicity of this cafe evokes common themes played over and again in human gathering places where food is served. This cafe has no nooks, no booths, no quiet spaces to hide aloof from the commoners. We are all commonners, of the common, of the heath, the hill and dale and valley and even of the plains, we are plain people eating bread from the grains baked by a local baker. And in the corner, a local musician plays instruments from half a world away.
