untangling | unthinking | mastery
“to unthink mastery requires either a radically different understanding of what it could mean to be human or perhaps a thinking of the human that would not be human at all.”
“matter is not stable and cannot be mastered, despite the narrative fictions that enable us to imagine and engage it as such.”
I am playing on a large calf-skin bass drum with a superball. Though a simple and sometimes banal percussive technique, creating a continuous and cantabile type phrase with a superball requires an intense virtuosity that deals with instabilities. By gliding the superball along the bass drum, feeling for points of friction, I can create melodic phrases of varying spectrums that resonate at differing frequencies. It’s unknown what sonic material will emerge - I am situated in unpredictability and imperfection. Rites of listening are required, a ritual of touch is required, the finesse of the skin of the drumhead – intimacies. A landscape where one listens for intricacies and journeys.
“…listening, as opposed to voicing that which we “know.” Listening, as an act that might let each other in - psychically, physically - to another’s ways of inhabiting the world; to being entities that are always touching and being touched by others, even when we are not aware of this touching, even when this touching is entirely unpredictable.”
Listening is an act in which everyone participates in their own way. Prescribed, chosen, active, unwilling, psychically, physically - we engage in listening in different ways based upon our personal experiences. Would a world of listening rather than voicing provide alternatives to the rigid forms of value that have become commonplace within Western Art Music practices? I am bowing a crotale and striking a temple bowl. A simplistic task, yet one which requires meticulous touch. By attempting to bind temporal and sonic space, through bowing and striking, I have required of myself a dexterity of patience, a stillness of body and mind – novel rituals of time that have existed for generations.
“like the physical bodies mastered through colonization, so too were languages - both colonial and native - envisioned as bodies that needed either to be mastered or repudiated in the passage toward national independence.”
I tell myself that when I work my aim is to discover new musical forms/musical languages. But am I not just re-creating a form of mastery – contributing to the masses of alternate masteries? The realisation that history is one continual catastrophic event. I am not immune to ‘multitudes’ ‘thingification’ and ‘masterful dynamics.’ How do I engage in vulnerable readings of my sounds, so that they rewrite me, as opposed to me taking master over them? Mythical stasis. How do I maneuver different terrains of sound, requiring different levels and types of virtuosities, without resulting in conquest?
“…coherent narratives of self and mastery are always based on far more fragile materialities and psychic displacement than their narratives enable.”
Discovering fragility in sound is interesting to me. The tactile qualities of sound draw me in. Displacing narratives within my music, combing the fragile with the tactile upon a dichotomy of incoherent melodic fragments. This habit shows my ambivalence toward a fidelity. It’s vital for me to stay away from being sovereign, but to keep searching for how I engage with material relations that exceed language - to continue to search for an aurality which exceeds capture.
music performed and created by Rebecca Lloyd-Jones
photo 1,3,4 taken by Rebecca Lloyd-Jones.
photo 2 taken from: Redmond, Layne. When the drummers were women : a spiritual history of rhythm. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997.
all quotes taken from: Singh, Julietta. Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.
