Practice Makes Perfect?

At 12:03pm last Wednesday I dialled in the code for my room at pirate studios. I booked myself 2 hours in the middle of a hectic week, gathered some flutes, some costume (mask, shirt) and my laptop, jumped on a lime bike and left enough time to grab a coffee on the way.

I close the door to the dimly pink-lit cell and drop my bag next to the silhouette of a microphone stand. I take off my jacket and open up my flute case, twisting the head, body and foot joints together as I have done now for over 30 years, then plug in the mic cables and laptop, and start playing back a recording of a wind storm. I have been reading a book, Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind by Lyall Watson, filling my imagination with stories of the wind while thinking about breath. He writes about psychologies, sociologies, and mythologies of the wind (and any other kind of ‘ologies’ you can think of).

‘Of all natural forces, wind is the most enigmatic…elusive, shifty, fugitive, difficult to define – and impossible to ignore. In Latin, spiritus described the intake of breath by a god, literally an inspiration…’ He then goes on to describe early beliefs of where the wind came from… sometimes mountain caves, bags and sacks, gourds and coconuts’. In all stories, it is untameable.

I am wearing the T-shirt that Stephanie McMann made as merch for her tour as solo dance support for Billy Nomates. Drop In. In her words, “Drop in means, to deepen your listening and let your behaviour affect your dancing body. No judgement of your self or another. All of you, all of it, all of the time”. Skeleton feet walk down the arms. It’s powerful to wear an invitation like this on your chest, a block capital mantra (she still has some left… go get one!)

So I sit down, take a sip of coffee, mask up, and drop in. No plan. A phrase appears and I repeat it, over and over. I pay attention to detail, making slight and subtle shifts in breathiness, tone, emphasis in the rhythm. I lean in and out, but essentially it’s a loop, a melodic lock-in with a bit of space to play. Free from beat (just wind storm accompaniment), my mind starts to drift in and out. Memories, images and ideas rise, appearing on the screen in my mind. Judgements and doubts appear too. I’m tempted to stop, but I keep going. I’ve been here before, hundreds, thousands of times, sat with my flute, playing.

But, what am I practicing for?

This is something I wrote on the train recently about flute playing:

Chemical-drenched air fills your lungs. Oxygen is absorbed into your blood. You feel your skin grow warmer. Carbon dioxide is exhaled through the airstream that passes out through the opening in your lips, shaped into a rounded hole, and meets the resistance of the lip plate. Your fingers adjust the wavelength of the tube, and your air spirals, creating vibration, which generates sound pressure waves that bump molecule against molecule until they reach surrounding surfaces that they bounce off, or get absorbed into, based on their quality. Your sound reaches your ears and your body both directly and through a multitude of reflections. You diaphragm holds your breath steady, and you ride it as though keeping a horse on track, gently guiding. Your mind, lips and fingers work together to modify the flute’s volume and pitch, timbre and tone. You listen, adjust, feel, listen, adjust, and so on.

That single sounding note contains deep memory and knowledge, wordless understanding, like eye contact. “Sounds carry intelligence,” Pauline Oliveros wrote in the introduction to her book Sonic Meditations. “If you are too narrow in your awareness of sounds, you are likely to be disconnected from your environment”. The sound can be thick, thin, red, blue, golden, solid or broken; it is like the line of a word or image, and when placed against others, a fuller, shimmering picture is formed. It hovers there, invisible, but unmissable. All of your experience is called upon as you receive and translate that sound. You are playing with the walls, the table, the chair, the clock, the window, the tree outside your window. You call upon your selves through time, standing there, turning your air into sonic shape in motion. You stop blowing, and the sound stops. You remember it, until you don’t. You are sonically vanished, save your heart beat and gentle inhale and exhale, your feet shifting weight on the floorboards. The flute is cleaned and goes back into its case, into the quiet darkness. All that is left is the sensation of having temporarily been sound.

The silent flute is in your satchel, blind and empty, a long shining zero. Lyall Watson tells how the wind inspired the concept of a zero in ancient India, a symbol to represent nothingness. As you walk, cycle, jump from bus to bus, it bumps against your hip. Arrival under the sky. Case open. It blinks its keys as the light pours in. No one really knows how much time has passed since it was last played, and it needs to be revived, warmed up, made ready. This time you are outdoors and your breath once again creates its vibration. The molecules dance and keep going out towards the hemisphere until they have no energy left in them. You hold a sphere of dream in the air with your mind. There is a pause in the birdsong for a few moments as the birds check if this is the voice of a predator or a friend. Safe? Safe. They start singing again. Brick and street lamp, bridge and river. Cars go by. Just a lone flute player who will come and go.

Night falls, and you are still playing. Just a few notes, meandering, happily lost. Pink moon and yellow clouds. If there was a score on a music stand, you can no longer see it. Rain washes away the ink. You let one note fall after the other. The flute is now leading, along with your hands. From Syrian eagle bone to silver-plated ligatures, you are the dreaming bellows, the wind itself. The image of a fountain comes to mind. Always trickling, it is plumbed into the mountainside, calling gravity upon the rainwater and fallen snow like the flute calls upon your breath. You give in. Sound pours through carved stone, once fire, staring eternally outward. You cannot see through time as it is veiled, but your breath agitates its folds and through it you glimpse a room, your self, in a state of trance, looking back.

“It is enough”.

You remove the flute from your lips, sore from playing. and look at the room; black painted walls, the cup on the floor, a coldness in the air, Doc Martens, T-shirt, drop in, 40-year-old hands holding a flute that distorts your reflection. Masked, self upon self, a pile of books. Out of nowhere you remember the hallways of your primary school. The refuge of the toilets. The smell of disinfectant. Rough paper hand towels, ceramic sink, the relief of being out of the classroom for a moment, all that expectation and pretending, looking through the window at the world of possibility outside, future pink-lit rooms. A walk in the rain. Another boy runs in, T-shirt inside out by accident. Too dropped-in to notice, or care. He runs out. You wash your hands as slowly as possible, delaying the return. Your fingers wait to fall upon the keys of the flute again. You want to be somewhere else, the same place as books and dreams, ghosts and songs. Slowly, you walk back and take your seat in front of the blackboard.

——-

When I got a flute, when I found music, I found a room of my own. There is no lock on the door, no key that will stop the hands of the clock from pointing at all the places I should or could be, the things I could or should have done, signalling to the track laid out ahead of me. But my head is in the trees far from the path, in the pages of my own books.

I look into the corner of the rehearsal room, beyond the dark swirling shadow being splashed with bass from the studio next door, (a DJ on their own voyage). I sink my eyes deep into the fibres where the sound of my flute has gathered ane speak through the wind storm.

“It is enough“.

I notice the time. 13:55. Mask off. Last dregs of coffee. Quickly dressed, light switch, fire exit, and I drop out. A short bike ride and I’m home. I find in that in the rush I had put my jumper on inside out. So, I climb out through the bathroom window of the now empty ghost school, and set off into the infinite forest, leaving the classroom far behind. And unsurprisingly, after a David Lynch tribute night a few days after writing this, a screening of Eraserhead at the cinema museum in London (followed by complimentary cigarettes by the entrance) , I found the same paper towels as those from my primary school.

So, why practice? Because the more you practice, the better at dreaming you become. Because everything connects with everything else, and when you practice, the circuit is complete And, because the owls really aren’t what they seem.

In the same spirit, I compiled my newest episode of Crookit Dreams “and the next thing I knew I am hovering inside the rings of Saturn”, airing Monday 10th February at 10pm. You can tune in here: http://mixlr.com/wildlakesradio.