And the low note becomes the diagnostic...


Recently, I sat with Ustad Bahauddin Dagar as part of his residency with FourOneOne (thanks Che!). Each week over the span of a month, he’ll be having conversations with artists and performing asynchronous duets. I was the first.

I expected we’d talk about music in the formal sense: technique, improvisation, tradition, maybe lineage if I managed to articulate my fragmented collage of history clearly enough. Instead, we talked mostly about life. The search for no answers. Teaching. Personhood. The weight of the work. The body.

He told me that the first thing he has his students do is wake before sunrise and sing the lowest note they can sustain for an hour. I laughed a little because that sounds exactly like the type of instruction someone gives you before your life changes permanently.

Still, something about it stayed with me. He explained that the practice strengthens the voice and activates the brain in particular ways, but what lingered long after the conversation was its stark simplicity: one note, one hour before the world begins making demands of you.

A few mornings later, I tried it myself. I wake up before sunrise for one of my side hustles anyway, so what’s another thirty minutes of existential probing before clocking in? What struck me almost immediately was how quickly my mind attempted to flee the experience. Not gradually, but instantly. As though my thoughts had somewhere much more urgent to be at 4:30 AM than inside my own body. Emails. Bills. Music. Grief. The person sleeping near me. Someone I disappointed last month. Every unfinished aspect of my life suddenly clocking in before dawn.

And beneath all of that noise was another realization, quieter and far more uncomfortable: I have spent years collecting knowledge about embodiment while often remaining profoundly disconnected from my body itself.

Then, almost as if breaking the ocean’s surface, I found brief instances of quiet. Not silence, but a kind of embodied attentiveness (Woods and Davids, 2021). The lowest note, like semi-occluded vocal exercises, creates a vibration that permeates the body in waves. The sensation reminded me of standing waist-deep in the ocean, where the water appears calm until you realize your body has already moved by currents you cannot see. Or, as Amanda notes: like dropping a tuning fork into water and watching the surface reorganize itself around frequency. For moments at a time, the note stopped feeling like something I was producing and started feeling like something I was submerged inside.

Surrendered.




Recently, my buddy James sent me the article “‘You Look at an Ocean; I See the Rips, Hear the Waves, and Feel the Currents’: Dwelling and the Growth of Enskiled Inhabitant Knowledge” by Carl T. Woods and Keith Davids. James and I, despite working in very different fields, often find ourselves circling similar questions around pedagogy, attention, and perception when we aren’t talking about anime. The article distinguishes between knowledge about and knowledge of. Knowledge about is documentary. It gathers information through theory, categorization, and frameworks. Knowledge of is transformational, emerging through dwelling inside something long enough for it to alter your perception through direct experience.

That distinction has been haunting me.

Because so much of music education prioritizes knowledge about sound. Theory. Terminology. Correctness. Historical context. A mastery of accumulation. It is learning there is a river somewhere in the mountain trek because you studied the map closely enough. We become excellent archivists of feeling. Librarians of resonance. We can explain tension and release while remaining profoundly disconnected from the physical experience of either.

But improvisation has increasingly begun to feel like something else entirely.

Not the generation of material, but the refinement of attention.

Not invention…attunement.

The article talks about enskillment as knowledge gained through dwelling, through direct engagement with an environment and the people within it. That hit me hard because most of the meaningful musical knowledge in my life didn’t come through formal instruction. It came through living. Through staying after sets. Through loving and failing. Through nights in a rats nest tucked away in the rafters of a decaying church (RIP Holy Colors).  Through hearing somebody phrase one note in a way that permanently changes your relationship to time.

Through community.

Through gathering in small rooms and making sounds into honesty.

A major difference between Bahauddin’s approach to improvisation and mine is the framework itself. He said my style is like you are wading through the darkness to find the light. His music comes from complete structures that allow the performer to bring themselves into the form and expand within it. Mine has always emerged from developing the structure in real time. But lately, I’ve begun wondering if improvisation, with or without a framework, is ultimately about learning to notice.

To perceive subtle openings before they fully reveal themselves.

To hear tension entering a room before anyone has technically played anything different.

To feel shifts in collective energy, the way an experienced swimmer feels currents beneath the water before the surface visibly changes.

The article’s title kept returning to me:

“You look at an ocean; I see the rips, hear the waves, and feel the currents.”

Maybe because Paz wants me to surf. But I think that’s what awareness is beginning to feel like. Especially now, because I’ve also been on a body-healing journey, and healing, I’m learning, begins with attention.

This is terrible news if you function through strategic dissociation.



You start noticing where tension lives. Where anxiety lives in the body and how that's different than where grief does (shoulders and hips, respectively, for me). How often productivity disguises disembodiment. How much of modern life rewards separation from the body, and layers numbness over muscles until pain becomes ambiential.

But when you finally acknowledge that you need help, or that you want to deepen your connection to anything at all, you realize it has to begin with the body.

And the low note became diagnostic.

Not because it revealed anything mystical, but because sustained vibration made certain forms of disconnection impossible to ignore. Breath shortened when anxiety surfaced. Pitch shifted with intrusive thought. Resonance collapsed when attention fractured. The body responded to frequencies I had spent years learning how not to feel.

And as healing slowly began creating more room inside me, new pains and sensations surfaced alongside it.

I realized sustaining one note is not simple at all. One note became less like a sound and more like weather moving through the body in real time. A reminder that awareness is not merely intellectual, but sensorial.

“What we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system,”
                                                    - adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy.


And maybe that's where my awareness is shifting to now, increased sensitivity to currents that were always there beneath the surface.

One sustained note before sunrise.





Reads that inspired all of this:

The Killing Moon Series N.K. Jemisin

Emergent Strategy adrienne marie brown

Art on My Mind bell hooks

Anethics of Aural Ambiguity Lendl Barcelos


Next reads and other thoughts:


  • Ludic Dreaming: How To Listen Away From Contemporary Technoculture David Cecchetto Marc Couroux, Ted Hiebert, and Eldritch Priest  
  • In the Break Fred Moten
  • Sync or Swarm  David Borgo

  • What is the weight that is felt when deeply investigating your work?
  • What does my dissociation sound like?
  • What kinds of intimacy emerge through shared listening?



Current sounds:


Syro Aphex Twin

Mandorla Awakening II:  Emerging Worlds Nicole Mitchell

Sametou Sawtan SANAM

The Nightlife Honey Dijon

East Broadway Run Down Sonny Rollins




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