I want to talk about a piece of music of mine.
It’s the piece I opened both my recent shows with, my first Bournemouth EMOM micro show last month and Return To Forbidden Planet this past week at Chaplin’s Cellar Bar. A composition without words, it’s taken from a score to a TV show I delivered a dozen years ago and it’s always been one of my secret favourites, just because it seems to have a “something”.
It can be a surprise, tapping into a sweet spot; a lot of my Momo favourites are funny little tunes that just definitely have a moment in them, and I love them disproportionately for that.
In this case, I’ve always suspected that what I can feel in the arrangement flowed in there from a little note of intuition I may have picked up about the figure who loosely inspired it. A young paranormal investigator from the show.
I had heard distantly that only a year or so after the production, they had died. They were young. I didn’t know details.
There was an extra dimension to this distant knowledge that I didn’t know before I first performed the piece all these years later. But I had discovered it by the time I still chose to perform it again: The official verdict about the death of this person was that they’d taken their own life.
Why did I choose this piece at all? And why then again, with more sober knowledge?
On the face of it, the performance puts me in full Fool mode – I can see it was a lot for patrons of Poole Hill Brewery, that first time, to see some middle aged bloke in a 70s mustard PVC jacket spank his hip with a tambourine behind a trestle table while shouting wordless, throaty, priestly invocations. I gave them no warning.
But the spark of meaning in the piece has grown in my mind a bit over time, and speaks to my purpose as an artist.
An effect of art is to invoke things. It calls things forth and it casts spells. But artists don’t passively download meaning into their work from the ether like priestly chosen ones – we learn them from the marks we leave on each other, and the feelings clawing to get out of us. Bruises and confusions are more often where we start. Artistic spells of storytelling are testimony and very personal interpretation, even when first inspiration strikes like a moment of revelation from on high.
What we end up bringing out of all that becomes an invitation back to the world, to each other, to see and even feel differently. It’s a cycle of recreation. All of us to each other. It is remaking the layers of the world. Funny ol’ you.
Even a high-concept, esoteric silly boy like me isn’t up above the clouds, we are all in amongst the cultural weather or we make nothing with any spark in it.
..So is it always okay to use that spark? To convert those marks?
Should we ever observe but do nothing with what we see – is there a time to feel something but not turn it into anything?
If I’ve grown enough to ask that question, it’s a sign of at least some reverence – but does reverence have to sound sombre, to demonstrate that I get it?
Being appropriate.
This piece is not about death – the music or this Testimo to it. That that the death of the particular person I’ve mentioned linked to its origin is still held by some of their fans to be less explainable than the conclusion the police report had to offer is also something I don’t want to analyse. I do know they were fascinated by the unexplained and were said to have investigated some 6,000 haunted sites around the world, treading into dark places fearlessly.
My piece, Hypnomystic, has a deliberate fearlessness about it. It has something so sort of victorious in it, it is provoking – it is daring something to answer back, knowing it can’t. Confrontingly cocky, but not quite about ego.
I wasn’t thinking about ancestors and sacred rituals when I was creating the piece. For one thing, I wouldn’t have done then. Maybe I had less reverence, I certainly had less awareness. Hypnomystic fell out of me with a simple image: Surely a spiritually mature person has a sense of authority at their back that is beyond their own bones?
The music has a blatant shamanic attitude that I followed my way into on instinct at the time, but I have been feeling it more clearly with new listens to the piece in recent years. That attitude came from a simple gut reaction to seeing the person on screen in the rushes I was writing to back at the time – I sensed something vulnerable about them.
But also being the only Indian in the cast among the descendants of white Europeans, they also had references for the supernatural that seemed richer and more grounded than I’d have had culturally to hand. You might leave home intending to become something sensible and worldly, like a pilot, but life can send you back with a whole new reason to study your ancient texts. I’m wanting to go looking for mine.
I got a flash image in my head of this sensitive, determined, creative young person walking confidently into their investigations with the towering shadow of a God behind them, matching them step for step, but unseen to a casual onlooker.
I didn’t over think it. I didn’t research them or their beliefs or set out to write a deeply personal theme, I just let the idea flow out without thinking whether I should – and because of their identity and because I was doing a cheesy lifestyle telly show, it all came alive with syncopated jutspah of Indian tablas. There is maturity and there is appropriate cultural judgement and there is also a quick way to feeling the emotional world differently as a composer, and reaching for the sound of instruments you’ve never worked with before will do it.
It’s what I chose to do then. I can only say thank you to the unfathomable history of Indian music for inspiration. Appropriate for me to play with untutored or not, I heard something striking me back in it.
Mostly the sound palette of Hypnomystic is that of the whole ghost show – haunted Melotron flutes and strings, X Files-y muted vibes in slow, descending harmonic minor scale. But when those beats do finally drop, they’re not talking to me about any particular person, they’re hitting me with something about the fearlessness of belief.
At this stage of my life, I have more awareness of cultural appropriation in my writing. I won’t pick up the instrumental voices of other cultures without thinking more about it and talking to others more connected to it. While none of us are exotic to this universe and to our home planet, lots of us have readier access in our upbringings to at least some references of more ancient ways of remembering things, frames of the world, knowledges, even practices. Unfortunately, as a white boy from northern Europe, there is a lot of concrete and silence between the soles of my feet and my Celtic histories. As an artist, I could hear something call me precisely because it was from someone else’s culture. And thank goodness it did.
Working on the show gave me the lightest of triggers to write a piece that invokes an idea of someone certain of their place in the universe, and how confronting such certainty is to shadows.
I don’t know if I sense a synergy of shadows between that person then and me today in a timey-wimey way, but I certainly can feel my own; questions of self worth are very linked to commercial value. Cultural expectations around the world reduce the word success to one thing – financial income. It will be no surprise to any spiritual elder you can think of that this very worldly pressure is at odds with a healthier acceptance of one’s self and the real value of life. That any of us with minds open to more inspiring futures have to function with a foot in two worlds confronting each other causes recurring earth tremors to our mental health. But these are the shadows to face if we want to grow, or show up for those futures.
My question now, thinking back about this piece, is: Do I know my limits? How close am I to finding myself suddenly beyond them?
I feel like I’m flick-flacking like a diode between light and dark. Between believing in what I’m doing and wondering where my place is anywhere. I think it is a vibe right now. But I can see how much any of us need grounding in something if we’ve chosen a creatively freer path in life. Like believing in something bigger than ourselves that we feel part of.
My view of the universe and my place in it may be vaguer than ever, but the universe currently seems bigger to me than ever. I also see more of how shamanic are the tools of art and the role of the person who feels they must pick them up. Most especially in our times. A weirdo responsibility to speak up and push frontiers and report back and challenge a few sleepy preconceptions in the so-called ordinary world around us.
I may be imperfectly finding my way forward in such things, but my reverence only grows in my foundations. I may not know who the ancestors are to ask, or if they only exist for certain in narrative ritual – but if so, they will still be as real as any other reality we are choosing to place ourselves in psychologically. And I would rather stumble in with my heart and mind both as open as I can manage. It feels like an oddly victorious defiance to do so.
So, I picked up my tambourine and roared my wordless voice into the beats at the drop and opened my last two shows in full Fool-shaman mode. Trying to call forth a fearless primal truth in me – feeling the something in it that might connect me to you and dispel some bullshit shadows. Challenging my limits of propriety, credibility and commercial worth, precisely because the world doesn’t want any of us to.
I’m not here to muck about. It’s life and death we’re trying to make sense of.
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Header photo by Andy Green.