Certain Reveries
I have been thinking about viscosity.
About why some things flow and why other things ooze. Not even necessarily in comparison to anyone else, but within my own life. There are things I can begin and feel them immediately find their shape. A workshop. A piece of writing. A performance built around a particular question. Then there are other things I love deeply that seem to require me to put my entire body behind them just to move them an inch.
Bands are hard.
I don't think this is a revelation to anyone who has ever been in one, but lately I have been thinking about why they are hard for me specifically. Nothing has made me question my politics more than a four-person scheduling thread. A band is a strange agreement. You are asking several people, each with their own lives and practices and ambitions and rent, to maintain a shared imagination over time. There are rehearsals and emails and money and travel. There is the question of what the project is now, and the question of what everyone wants it to become or put into it. There is the administrative work of keeping the thing alive, which is very different from the feeling that made everyone want to play together in the first place.
I think, for a long time, I confused collaboration with collectivity.
Or maybe I believed that the most generous thing I could do was leave as much space as possible. I love improvisation because I love being forced to be present with the possibility of being changed by another person. I love listening. I love the moment when another musician makes a choice that reroutes the entire room; that reroutes my entire mind.
But I am learning that openness and direction are not opposites.
A project can be collaborative without every decision being collectively imagined. Everyone who helps make a thing does not necessarily have to carry equal responsibility for deciding where it goes. In fact, maybe asking everyone to do that can sometimes be its own kind of burden.
Some projects need to be led. Perhaps that’s why two of my bandmates, separately but within weeks of each other, have asked: “When is the Shara solo record coming?” I have no answer to that. I have fragments and sketches, like my mind right now. What I can say is that I am working on completing ideas.
I have been thinking about this while returning to Ben LaMar Gay's Certain Reveries. I keep coming back to the record's charged, expectant energy. It allows me, the listener, to wander and be lost but is directly pointing me, or pulling me. Like an incantation, the covalence between electronics, percussion, horns, and voice collects like images. It makes me think of this line from Leone Ross’ Popisho:
“Red, black, all shades of brown, making miniature thunderstorms between their fingertips, blowing themselves into huge and circular shapes, speaking so loud they could be heard in the next island, speaking so softly the insects understood them…”
(Thanks for the recommendation, Sanjeet!).
What makes it possible to wander without disappearing? What gives a musician enough ground to take a risk? What makes a project porous without making it shapeless?
These questions have followed me into my own writing practice because, for the past few months, I have also felt blocked.
This is strange because I am not short on ideas. If anything, I have too many. I have poems and recordings and voice memos. I have pedals and processors and techniques I have spent years developing. I know how to make the voice crack open, multiply, distort, mask into electronics and return wearing another face.
And still, sometimes I sit down to make music, and nothing moves. Or the same things move. Or nothing moves. Or the same things move, but feel unfamiliar. Or so familiar they look strange in the mirror.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder whether writer's block is always a lack of ideas but also an excess of possibility. A room with no walls is still difficult to live in. A room with all windows is equally difficult.
So I have been returning to melody.
Well songs, and intervals. Singing intervals. Learning phrases. Paying attention to where a line rises and where it rests. Listening to the distance between one note and the next. Working on my intonation.
I have been returning to rhythm in the same way. Subdivisions. Accents. Repetition. Feeling where it sits in the body.
It is humbling.
When you spend so much of your practice thinking about extended technique, processing, improvisation, poetry, texture, and concept, returning to a simple melody can almost feel too exposed. There is nowhere to hide. Can you hear the interval? Hold it there? Can you remember the phrase?
That is the work for the day.
I return to Certain Reveries and hear it differently because of this. I hear the smallness of the materials. Not small in imagination, but elemental and with different weight.
Gay has said that Certain Reveries and the accompanying film Balogun grew from his memories and fantasies of being inside Balogun Market in Lagos. He described the music as combining improvisation with themes derived from fabric patterns he encountered in the market (icareifyoulisten, Degroot,2022).
Dreaming…
Drifting…
The mind wandering somewhere beyond the physical, but next to it.
Maybe this is what I am trying to learn about being a bandleader, too.
I am learning that leadership can mean giving something a channel. Saying: this is the question. This is the world we are inside. This is where I think we are going. Now, what can you hear from where you are standing?
There is generosity in clarity.
As I am working on a project that deals with dreamscapes, lore, and visuals, I am searching for how juxtaposition and layering- how to bring surprise to structure. I still want collaborators who interrupt my ideas and show me things I could not have imagined on my own.
Some things flow. Other things ooze. Some things are gestalt. Others complete.
I am trying not to decide too quickly that one kind of movement is better than another. Mud moves. Honey moves. Sap moves. Some things carry the evidence of everything they have touched.
But I am also learning that sometimes what I have called patience has actually been hesitation. Sometimes what I have called openness has been a fear of making the decision. Sometimes a thing is not moving because it is waiting for me to give it somewhere to go.
Water moves because it has a channel.
I keep returning to the basic things now. A rhythm tapped against the table. An interval sung until I can feel the distance without reaching for it. A melody learned slowly enough that it begins to live somewhere below memory.
I don't know if this is how I get unstuck.
Some other dreamy sounds on rotation:
dance! skip! hop! by Tomeika Reid
Paradise Metal by π. Διονύσιος Ταμπάκης
Alternate African Reality – Electronic, electroacoustic and experimental music from Africa and the diaspora
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