I recently sweated in a dark, low tent. Fifty other bodies squatted close to mine. Rich, pitch black darkness surrounding us. I sweated until I nearly passed out. Sometimes singing, sometimes close to vanishing in the damp air. Every now and then I glimpsed the faint glow of hot basalt stones steaming in the pit. An occasional foot might brush off my leg. Heavy breathing and steaming water a constant song. A voice emerging from the darkness might offer some profound words and they would sweat their way into my subconscious. All of us in there together, forgetting everything but that moment and the lilting heat. And that very rare collective vulnerability and trust and intensity.
That experience spoke to the deepest part of me. I didn’t realise how much I needed to be a part of a space like that. I realised that Art for me is an attempt to create that space. A sense of being met exactly as you are, where you are. Feeling that you are allowed to relish in your humanity for a moment, blind to all of the mental projections and madnesses of modern living, To feel surrounded by understanding and compassion when you are in the darkest of places. To accept and allow ourselves to see those twisted thoughts and broken parts and feel safe enough to do so. Just for a moment. Art is a little voice of guidance in the darkness and for me the role of the Artist is to be there in a symbolic solidarity in those darkest and most intimate of moments.
I can’t deny that I have always been attracted to the beauty that can be found in ugliness, things beyond their purpose, re-imagined ideas of how things come alive. And I have always been attracted to unearthing the truth. It’s different for everyone, but there is something collective about the search. I know that the path towards truth is a tough one, filled with brambles and thorns and long, slow moments of seeing who we really are and what we are really doing, and most people don’t want to do that. But that’s what art is for. Little glimmers of things we have discovered and want to share. And the fun part is finding new ways to express those things so that they are abstract enough to feel universal and specific enough to hit us where it resonates. A good dose of the ridiculous is always great to shake things up! Someone recently told me that a performance piece I did was like the Blair Witch Project in a bouncy castle! This will be appearing as a tagline on everything I make henceforth!
Sometimes I am surprised by what comes out of me, and sometimes I work with the grittiest of revelations because they are the most challenging and often the most interesting. Art is not there to be liked or disliked, to be deemed good or bad. It’s just there and we nurture it if we chose to. Samhain is upon us and the darkening of the year. And there is the eternal task of transformation, turning darkness into light. Seeing the beauty in what appears to be ugly. Fifty sweating bodies, anonymous in the darkness was one of the most beautiful and profound experiences of my life.
I emerged first, a quick breathless burst into the freezing, late October air, too hot to stay for the last moments. I threw my body down on the cool grass and watched the dry leaves fall from their trees, the smell of smoke and wet earth delighting my senses. Some kind of ritualistic rebirth. Like every song, it arrived to greet me. Asking for a living form. I am not afraid of where music and art might take me, because I know it’s doing something that has nothing to do with me. And life is far more interesting when we acknowledge that we are not in the driver’s seat. That we have very little control, so we might as well let those beautiful, strange, subconscious expressions lead the way! It’s certainly brought me to the most magical, surreal and delightful of places. If there is one thing in life that I don’t ever doubt, it’s my commitment to art. As my shirt was steaming in the cold air, after one of the most intense experiences I had ever put my body through I knew that to be absolutely true. And to quote my mother I hope that the things I create can be ‘postcards to a darker hour’. Maybe my songs or performances will sweat in the dark with you sometime! Hah!
It was around this time last year that I had arrived back to Dublin after a short trip to Brazil. Prior to embarking on this adventure, I had finally completed my Master’s thesis, which discussed the stylistic development of Western Classical music in Japan. The third chapter focused on the post-war era of the country, specifically on an artistic movement which throughout the 1970s and early 1980s gave rise to many now renowned Japanese composers including Midori Takada, Joe Hisaishi and most importantly for my work, Satoshi Ashikawa.
During my time in the city of Sao Paulo, I was repeatedly overwhelmed by its ever-changing nature. I became obsessed with imagining a music best able to reflect the blending of these modern urban environments. I found an elucidating reflection of this pursuit in the liner notes of Ashikawa’s album, Still Way, where he noted how his concept of an Environmental Music can be understood as an:
object or sound scenery to be listened to casually. Not being music which excites or leads the listener into another world, it should drift like smoke and become part of the environment surrounding the listener’s activity. In other words, it is music which creates an intimate relationship with people in everyday life.
Upon returning to Ireland, my obsession with Environmental Music only grew stronger as it offered me boundless agency for creativity, this is when I started work on my first album, Laistigh den Ghleo. It was during the writing and recording process that I began to realise just how relevant Ashikawa’s concept of Environmental Music had become in modern times.
Instant access to music via streaming sites has changed our day to day relationship with music, resulting in most experiencing this art form in a passive manner. This offers an opportunity for Ashikawa’s concept of a static music to develop into an Environmental Music which blends and reflects our ever-changing environments. An Environmental Music which moves with the listener throughout their day. This is what I have attempted to develop with my last two albums, the aforementioned Laistigh den Ghleo and most recently, Gluaiseacht. In order to reflect the changing environment of the listener, the music that I have written does give into certain dramatic qualities, leaning away from Ashikawa’s concept of a music “which does not excite the listener.” However, I believe this necessary in my pursuit of developing Environmental Music within a modern framework.
My main hope is that Laistigh den Ghleo and Gluaiseacht help the listener reengage with their surrounding environment and also to recognise the multitude of individual pulses that comprise the world around them. Instead of using music as a form of escapism, Environmental Music is instead designed to create an intimate bond with the listener and their everyday life.
The Cassandra Voices musician of the month for September, Louise O’Connor, explores what makes a trad session so special.
I recently attended a large music festival in England where a trad session took over the night in a small fire-lit tent. There were Irish tunes, Scottish tunes, English tunes and a few Appalachian ones for good measure. Being an Irish fiddle player I was most at home with the jigs and the reels.
I sat and played for hours, mesmerised by the sight of a topless, heavily-tattooed man with a rainbow-coloured mohawk who sean-nós danced with ferocious intensity on a piece of wood throughout.
A trad session never fails to surprise.
These sessions have been a constant source of surprise and companionship for me for many years now.
Growing up in the Burren in County Clare, I played the fiddle from the age of seven. Aged seventeen I departed for university and the bright lights of Cork City. I hardly played in those days, preferring to listen to free jazz, contemporary classical music or the latest heavy instrumental rock band that my new urban friends introduced me to.
Fiddling at 3842m near Chamonix. Photo by Marc Cleriot.
I wasn’t to return to trad until, aged twenty-two, I found myself back in Cork after a period of travelling. The college gang had disbanded and I was in need of new friends. Cue the interjecting character of a French housemate with a passion for learning the bodhran. She brought me along to a session in a local pub. I befriended the fiddle player and was hooked. I was hooked on the atmosphere, the ritualistic nature of it, the sheer craic.
A series of lessons from that fiddle player I befriended and I was almost session ready. Apart from one thing: nerves. On the first occasion that my new teacher persuaded me to play in a session, my hands were sweating so profusely that it was practically impossible for me to play.
Things have certainly got better since then, and the meaning and importance of the session has grown and grown for me.
Céilí dancing in Germany.
In my years spent abroad, it permeated my experiences as a weekly ritual that allows release, a sense of stability and company on my many solo jaunts.
It is obvious how the session format was born out of the Irish emigrant experience in London and America, and the need to hold on to roots. Thanks to mass Irish emigration and the dispersion of the tunes, as a fiddle player I have been welcomed with open arms within the global fraternity of trad musicians. I leaned into the music and the dance as I travelled. I slowly started to depend on it.
Sessions in Oslo were my main social outlet. In Germany I organised céilís in the market square, while in Chamonix, I played tunes at 3842m at a temperature of -10. In Northern England, I picked up wild Scottish reels at the local session, and played them frantically on my lunch break, helping to relieve the stiffness of the office environment I was working in.
II – Among Old Friends
Returning to play sessions in Dublin was a slightly daunting task. I was no longer a novelty. Fiddle players are ten a penny in our fair capital. I forced myself out to sessions in the early days of Dublin life. I always feared I would not know enough tunes, and it would be embarrassing.
My first session came about after meeting a retired gentleman, who invited me to one in a nearby seaside village. It turned out to be have been running for twenty-five years, in a practically empty pub, and involved a group of retired men in their sixties upwards. I was the only female to have ever played in the session, so my arrival was a source of some bewilderment.
Overtime, however, they grew accustomed to my presence, and I settled into an uplifting weekly meeting. The session was more like a history lesson in Irish music, or a support group for musical fanatics. After each set the tunes were discussed; its origin; the historical recordings; the alternative key it might have been played in; the ornamental possibilities present in each one.
I absolutely delighted in the whole experience. Each person had their own seat, and had sat in that seat for twenty-odd years. Being granted a seat at that session felt like quite the honour, and I was intrigued to hear the stories of sessions and festivals in the 60s and 70s in London, Doolin, and Mayo.
At some point they would close their eyes and disappear into the reverie of music. And I imagined they were transported at times, back to these epic sessions they spoke of. The tunes were the same, the session was the same. The only difference was the passage of time.
When they told me short stories about each tune, it added to the magic of my schooling. I went away each week armed with a list of tunes to learn, and a story that went with each. My eagerness to tweak my trad vocabulary was renewed every week.
It was a gentle initiation into the Dublin school of trad from men most of whom had been playing for half a century.
III – Central Sessions
After a house move, I began playing at a session in the city centre, which is a more varied affair. Musicians drop in from all corners of the world.
It is the type of session where audience members are as much a part of the session as the musicians. They sit in for the chats, and contribute with a song or a dance. Many onlookers marvel at the whole process.
Like moths to a flame, tourists are drawn to the beat of the tunes. You see the sparkle of awe in their eyes at the frenzied energy through a set of reels, and the ‘earthing’ experience of a mournful sean nós song, which usually brings everyone in the pub to a halt.
We all savour the natural ebb and flow of the occasion.
‘You guys don’t get paid? Phenomenal! How do you know all the tunes?’ A young girl from Vermont asked me. ‘It’s an oral tradition’, I tell her. A tradition, truly, that is handed down by ear, by being involved in the session itself.
It is a much debated topic at a session, but you might never actually know what a tune is called.
IV – Trad Festivals
And then there are the trad festivals. I write this after my best summer yet of attending trad festivals. There is little in this world that gives me greater pleasure than heading West in my car of a summer’s evening towards a trad festival, with my fiddle and a tent packed up, and tunes racing through my head.
I camped at the Willie Clancy festival this year with my friend, a solicitor and concertina player in her 60s who I met in sean nos dancing circles. As it was her first Willie Clancy she remarked that if she lasted the whole week she’d be a different person… and she did. She camped the whole week.
And, as she said she would never be the same again.
The relentless music everywhere, the workshops, the set dancing céilís, the first wild camping experience, the wonderfully open and honest meetings with strangers.
All the components of a transformative experience that indeed has left its mark on her, uncovering courageous aspects of herself buried deep within. Maybe we were all different after that week of glorious sunshine, swims in the Atlantic and trad sessions by the beach. At these festivals, there is a different quality of time. There are days on end to sit and converse, to make friends, to learn new tunes and to gain new perspectives.
*******
The trad experience has certainly changed for me, from my beginnings being plagued by frenetic nervousness, to a point where, in the right lighting, and in the right context, I can even be persuaded to dance a step at a session or sing a song. I’ve constantly surprised myself while being held within the cocoon of the session.
It is as if the hot summer evenings of this year’s trad sessions melted my resistance in a way. I gave in to the encouraging wink and a nod: ‘Go on, give us a step.’ I cared less about perfection and more about embracing the occasion.
I have now started to give the same encouragement to others, in teaching ‘a step’ to groups in the form of céilí dancing. I want to involve people in the magic of the Irish music that I’ve been so privileged to be immersed in.
I’m glad that trad music has returned to my life, and it’s certainly here to stay.
Louise O’Connor is a fiddle player and runs Celtic Dance Party, teaching traditional céilí group dances. Her website is www.louise.ie. Instagram: @celticdanceparty. Facebook: Celtic Dance Party.
This piece came from a little sound I heard in my head, an atmosphere, which I wanted to explore.
First, I made myself a soundbed to play in, and allowed two journeying violin lines to hatch out of my imagination; then I captured them in a digital suspension, wherein I gave one of them a delay and placed them in a pleasant and warm space.
The piece still surprises me when I listen back to it; it went in unexpected directions. But then, I wasn’t planning for it to be any way in particular; I set out to explore in the atmosphere I had created: to see what I could find.
I barely remember making it.
The file tells me the date alright, and I found it on my computer, so I know it must have been me. I have found this is a useful tactic for keeping track of recordings, as my brain cannot organise like this.
My handwritten notes tend to make sense only within about thirty minutes of completion. I often forget having played things.
Once I have worked on something a bit I will do a ‘save as’, and give it some sort of name.
The other day, I had a difficult morning and decided to ‘be productive’, as a way of dealing with my emotions. That was when I found this piece, recorded three weeks earlier. I cleaned up the files, and mixed it a little. It felt like a healthy coping mechanism, and tasted as fresh as spring sorrel.
I often wonder how much denial is involved in my creative process. This piece in particular has a very unconscious feel, revealed in the following elements: I barely remember making it – suggesting I entered a deep flow state while playing; I find it hard to remember how it sounds when I think of it; and it takes an unexpected turn.
I seem to have succeeded in tricking my own brain.
On the other hand, denial is such a powerful force. Maybe I did plan it out and have conveniently blocked this out. How can I speak authentically about my own subjective, mercurial mind?
I consider the unconscious, flow state, to be hugely important in the creative process, and very nourishing to engage with, but I could just be fooling myself completely and creating psychological scaffolding – it is impossible to be sure about any of this.
Home EKG rigs are getting more and more affordable. It could be so interesting to measure brainwaves during different states of consciousness. On the other hand, purchasing one of these definitely involves an unsustainable civilisation squeezing out yet more material goods… Hang on, where did I put my fiddle?
In and between these lines I will explore aspects of the fascinating and dynamic relationship between music, identity and place. Reflecting on my own musical ventures, as well as turning to secondary sources discussing theoretical concepts on the topic, I will point to various ways in which one’s relation to a place is both reflected in, and actively imagined and reinforced with the help of music.
I will also discuss the idea of music as a place in itself. Representing a world that seems to lie somewhat apart from our everyday life, the entrance into this ‘parallel world’ can give a strong sense of connection to our surroundings, to the world, and not least to our selves. For the travelling musician, it can serve as a place they can carry around with them and thus feel at home wherever they go.
A child’s venture into a parallel world
This piece is inspired by my own experience of living and musicking abroad: turning my Austrian ear and heart to traditional musics from Ireland, which has been my home for the past 12 years, and gradually planted seeds for the creation of tunes and songs that would combine elements of Austrian and Irish music traditions. At the same time, North Indian ragas, odd meters and Swedish polska rhythms – which I came across on my travels – started to extend the palette of colours with which I paint on my musical canvas.
Upon reflection it became clear to me that the practice of combining different musical elements, standing in connection to particular places and peoples, allow me to reconcile multiple new identities and connections to new places without losing a strong connection to the place and culture within which I grew up.
Furthermore, forming neither entirely part of the here nor the there – neither Austria nor Ireland or elsewhere, this music seems to present a place in itself that instills me with a sense of connectedness. It provides a place I can retreat to wherever I am in the world. In this music, I feel at home.
II
In September 2005, seeking to learn Irish tunes in their ‘natural environment’, I accidentally emigrated to Ireland. It had been my intention to spend a year abroad after finishing secondary school. But when the time came to return to Austria I simply stayed put, having fallen in love with the West of Ireland: its beautiful shades of green; the wild Atlantic; the mountains; rivers; the people and their music.
Prior to moving to Ireland, I had been forced to rest my hands for an extended period due to a bout of tendonitis. In my newly found home of Sligo I took up playing the violin again, under the guidance of my friend Rodney Lancashire.
A ‘session’ in Foley’s Bar, Sligo.
Beginning anew, I left behind everything else I had learnt, fully immersing myself in Irish traditional fiddle playing. Only later, over the course of academic studies at UCC, did I slowly reconnect with my earlier musical identities. These lay largely in European Classical music, which I had studied on various instruments since the age of five, and Austrian traditional music, which I got involved with through local folk festivals during my teenage years.
Next to Irish traditional music, I started to practice diverse musical traditions, including North Indian Classical music, which I studied intensively during a three-month stay in India, shortly before I enrolled in UCC.
Moreover, I made first attempts to compose my own music. One of the first pieces I wrote was ‘Austrindia’: its melody is based on, but doesn’t entirely stay faithful to, the scale used for Raag Charukeshi, an early evening raag I had studied under Pt. Sukhdev Prasad Mishra, in Varanasi, India.
Yodeling on top of BenWiskin, Sligo.
I experimented with singing the melody in a yodelling style, a vocal technique derived from Austrian traditional singing practices in which notes are approached in a direct way from the chest to the head voice, causing a distinctive breaking noise characteristic of this type of singing.
This first attempt to bring my different musical worlds together brought a strong sense of fulfilment, inspiring further compositions in a similar vein, including ‘Like Lisa’ and ‘Jodlfunk- Da Alma Zua’. These also feature yodelling techniques like ‘Austrindia’; this time, however, the yodel is set to modal scales, more typical of Irish traditional music.
Both ‘Like Lisa’ and ‘Jodlfunk- Da Alma Zua’ include sections carrying elements of Irish traditional music: the middle part of ‘Like Lisa’ is a tune in g mixolydian. Although adhering to the scheme of two underlying rhythmic cycles of seven bars of 7/8 and one of 5/8, and three bars of 7/4 and one of 6/4, the phrasing of the bow and ornamentation such as cuts and rolls is strongly reminiscent of an Irish reel or jig.
III
Upon reflection I realise that, in their various different ways, all of these compositions strive to unite my home place of Austria with my newly found home in Ireland, as well as other places such as Varanasi in India, which are close to my heart.
Playing in Hampi, India.
This, as I became more and more aware during the course of my research for a dissertation project, provides me with a sense of continuity in what I do and who I am, helping to express myself authentically as a musician and individual. It provides me with a certain stillness. I can be true to myself, and avoid feeling that I have to ‘hide’ or ignore any one part of me.
I further realised that what I conceptualise as ‘place’ is much more than a specific landscape, cityscape or physical environment. It also includes certain sounds, memories and, more than anything, the people I associate with that place.
Moreover, it became apparent that diverse places don’t merely co-exist in my music: at the moment of performance, they form an entirely new place, without any fixed geographical position. This place has no literal geographical basis, though it does foster a ‘placeness’ of a different order, in the realm of the sound, to which I can retreat whenever I play.
When I perform my own music, or music with which I am at home at the same level, I feel a strong sense of being transported to this ‘parallel world’. This develops a bond with a higher form of truth, that lets me go a step beyond everyday reality.
As a musician adhering to a modern vagabond lifestyle, music offers the possibility of entering this place no matter where I am. It is a constant in ever-changing surroundings that enables me to bring my home with me, wherever I go.
IV
Place may be conceptualised as far more than a mere geographical location: like everything else we experience, our concept of place is tied to the mechanisms of perception. Thus, incoming stimuli from the outside world are taken in and consequently matched up with our cognitive frameworks.
These in turn are crafted with the help of our knowledge, previous experiences and memories. It follows that our concept and perception of place is a construct of mind that only partly relies on certain physical surroundings, a land- or city- scape.
Alpine Austrian music session outside hut.
Similarly, when discussing America’s ‘invisible landscape’, folklorist Kent C. Ryden describes places as ‘fusions of experience, landscape and location.’ Quoting geographer Yi-Fu Tuan he explains how ‘the feel of a place is registered in one’s muscles and bones’. For Ryden, the kind of feeling that we get for a place when we get to know it better constitutes ‘a unique blend of sight, sounds, and smells, a unique harmony of natural and artificial rhythms such as times of sunrise and sunset, or of work and play.’
Issues of place and identity are more and more relevant in an increasingly globalised world. Moving from country to country is becoming a regular and normalised activity for many, if not most of us. As a consequence of our vagabond lifestyles, many different places form parts of our identities. It can feel like we are at home in a number of places, or in no place at all.
Rapport and Overing explain that anxious advocators of an ‘idyllic past of unified tradition’ express their concerns that ‘individuals are in transit between a plurality of life-worlds but come to be at home in none’.
At the same time as feeling a connection to more than one place or experiencing a sense of homelessness, it can appear that we are literally in more than one place at the same time, or indeed in no place at all. This is often due to modern technology, which may lead to a perception of a virtual reality lying beyond any objective or physical reality.
In his discussion of the consequences of modern life, Giddens explains how through the advent of modernity, space became disconnected from place. Through the invention of maps that would represent the world from a universal and objective viewpoint, we came to conceive of something Giddens refers to as ‘empty space’ as an entity in itself that is no longer connected to a specific physical setting. The existence of space as something that has no boundaries or specific meaning recalls Stilgoe’s definition of ‘landscape’ that stands in opposition to natural ‘wilderness’:
a forest or swamp or prairie no more constitutes a landscape than does a chain of mountains. Such land forms are only wilderness, the chaos from which landscapes are created by men intent on ordering and shaping space for their own ends (Stilgoe, 1982).
Music is an effective means of inscribing meaning onto space and express a relationship to it. According to Jaques Attali, our very distinction between music and noise reflects the distinction between ‘culture and nature’. Through engagement with music we erect boundaries that define if something is a ‘place’ or ‘space’; if something is ‘home’ or ‘foreign’; or if something belongs, or does not. Consequently, social, individual and geographical borders are reflected in music, which inform a sense of place.
Music can be used to differentiate between different places and people, but it can also serve to expand boundaries linking ‘homeland’ to what Mark Slobin refers to as ‘hereland’. It creates bonds between different countries, and links to any place one wishes to be at or belong to.
Moreover, it has the potential to give us a sense that we are all connected to all places, at all times. This appears to be the spirit behind so-called ‘Ethno festivals’ happening all over Europe, which bring together young people that exchange their folk musics.
Ethno-in-Transit.
Individual musicians, groups and entire nations link and separate themselves, their places and people with the help of music in various different ways. We sing, play, compose, listen and dance to music that carries references to specific locations, or indeed travelling or being ‘on the road’, in the form of song lyrics. We engage with, and create music that contains imitations of sounds that occur in particular places, or as Zuckermann points out, the frequencies of a physical environment.
Slobin states that we ‘domesticate’ what to our ears is foreign music and adapt it to make it our own according to commonly shared agreements of what our own music is. We engage in what Slobin refers to as ‘code-switching’ in order to shift between a number of different musical styles or to layer different styles of music on top of each other in one and the same piece. We share and associate ourselves with music that to us reflects the feel, the shape, and the people of a place.
V
Given that any space can be turned into a place through the assignment of meaning to it, it can feel like the involvement with music – be it through listening, playing or dancing to it – creates a place of its own.
Victor Turner explains how as part of our ever-repeating social dramas we enter a ‘liminal’ space, a kind of parallel world that he describes as ‘neither here nor there […] betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial’. According to Turner, it is this period in which we are somewhat apart from our everyday life that both mirrors the nature of our artistic involvement and is advanced by it. This place has its own rules, its own reality and its own time: that of the present moment.
Alfred Schutz explains how music, due to its polythetical structure, is conceived of step by step rather than as a whole: a time zone apart from quotidian time. He explains how music unfolds in what he refers to as ‘inner time’. Thus, when we perform, we share our own ‘stream of consciousness’ with that of the composer: ‘two series of events in inner time, one belonging to the stream of consciousness of the composer, the other to the stream of consciousness of the beholder, are lived through in simultaneity, which simultaneity is created by the ongoing flux of the musical process.’
Claudia Schwab and Matija Solce.
When we play music together, we equally tap into each others’ streams of consciousness and together ‘live through a vivid present’. In addition to sharing ‘inner time’, the music is lived through in ‘spatialised outer time’. Thus Schutz says both ‘share not only the inner durèe in which the content of the music played actualizes itself; each, simultaneously, shares in vivid presence the Other’s stream of consciousness in immediacy’.
When Schutz explains the musical process of ‘inner time’ he adds that ‘when for one reason or another the flux of inner time […] has been interrupted […]’, the performers might have to fall back on devices measuring ‘outer time’ in order to play together.’
Pleasurable as it is, not every musical performance brings with it the experience of dwelling in a parallel world: a more intense and lasting experience of entering a different place seems to be related to the ability of staying in the present moment.
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi conceptualises flow as ‘the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter’. He explains how ‘in the flow state, action follows upon action according to an internal logic that seems to need no conscious intervention by the actor […] there is little distinction between self and environment, between stimulus and response, or between past, present and future’.
*******
Claudia Schwab (photo by Peter Crann).
Place, with all that belongs to it, including memories of home, connections to certain peoples and their music or the impression of distinct landscapes, undoubtedly plays a fundamental role in our understanding of self. A strong connection to a place creates a sense of belonging, and thus of home. Furthermore, the experience of entering a form of parallel world that lets us be aware of a higher plain of existence speaks for the fact that music can be seen as place. In this place, we can find a deep connection to ourselves. We can feel the togetherness with others, satisfying our innate need to be understood and to be with other people. It is a place that we can carry with us, that can make us feel at home wherever we are in the world, and glimpse an alternate form of reality. This has certainly been my experience of gallivanting around the world as a musician.
This article is based on Claudia’s thesis, completed in September 2013 while studying for a Masters in Ethnomusicology in University College Cork.
He tasted his breathe while talking, it smelt surprisingly of milk.
“Need to get a shower,” he said.
A television was blinking upstairs. The automatic shutdown announced the television will be black in few minutes. Iggy was lying on the floor looking at the ceiling.
He started figuring out what happened. Once again he put his dreams against reality. His stupid nature against facts. He thought about her as just a woman now. She could not have been a real woman. She was a symbol. She was definitely a sign of a possible redemption. My little China girl, you wore a beautiful uniform sitting straight on your back at the restaurant. Cheering discreetly. But redemption never arrives by chance. You have to work on it and even then there are people who will never find a proper one. There are simply people who needs to be against the wind at 300 km/h. I gave you a different room every night, so you would have never felt bored. I gave you the best wines with the most complicated aromas. I gave you the biggest television ever. But you see, the redemption I’m used to tends to collapse easily. And so it did. I need to be against the wind at 300 km/h. And I ruined everything you are. We’re people used to chewing other people, you know.
The table is broken in the middle and unfortunately it’s my fault. When you cannot control your feelings and – more than everything – your fucking movements, those kind of things happen.
Iggy stood up. Then he jumped twice as if there was an imaginary rope “No headache,” he said to himself.
“ There is no point in telling the whole story…,” he said “it’s quite intellectual.” “ What do you mean?” Ron asked. “ I mean, not good things for us. Kind of painful.”
WAITING FOR THE MAN_ VELVET UNDERGROUND
https://youtu.be/hugY9CwhfzE
It’s freezing and the rain is coming through my shoes. I’m standing at the corner in Lexington and I need to shit. I wait here like a street lamp with money clutched in my hand. He will be here in few minutes, sick as dawn. Then I will shit somewhere. I need to control the needs of my body and establish an order. But it’s going to be hard. Because everything makes me want to shit. Bricks are reflecting rain. Grey is everywhere. There is a prostitute on the other side of the street. I suppose she’s a prostitute. I hope, otherwise I can’t imagine why is she standing there. She’s young, she could be seventeen or eighteen. She doesn’t look particularly sick: she’s just waiting for something, trying to follow the right order of things. I need to shit.
I start to think about God. I need a real God that fixes things, a fat reliable God living on my shoulders. It’s incredible how humans can build totally depressing spots. It’s fucking bad to be here. Your life is a guinea pig life without a wheel or anything like it. I need to shit. And a God, for fuck’s sake. I want to feel his dry breath behind me.
No way. This idiot is never on time. Who is he? I don’t mind, I just have to be on time for him. But he shows no respect, no fucking respect. Twenty-six wet dollars clutched in my hand. Yes, we really have the worst Gods ever in this place. Never on time. Then the prostitute crosses the road. She’s coming towards me, slowly. Despite the rain her make up is really solid. It seems that you need to shit, she says. And she stares at me. Then her hands go through her bag and she shows me a small paper box. It’s brownish and dry. She reminds me of someone I met in school. Remember that you need to shit, she says. Luanne? I ask. She nods her head. I give her twenty-six dollars, it seems the most obvious thing. I open my hand with my crumpled twenty-six dollars. She takes them and puts them in a bag without even looking . I’m sure I have already seen her. She looks younger than seventeen or eighteen. But she could easily be in her thirties as well. And she’s so fucking dry.
