Debut EP: what they took

There's not a lot to show for my tinkering with primal music composition over this last year. There was more, but my house was broken into and my laptop was stolen along with several microphones and other assorted recording paraphernalia. I didn't have most of my songs backed up, so those are gone.

But there were three songs that made it onto my SoundClound page. These were supposed to be demos, works in progress that I would continue to fiddle with, probably forever. But without the master files, all I had was my rough stereo mixes.

The burglary forced a decision. I decided to master the songs and release them as is.

Recorded using only frame drum and voice, the EP is called what they took and it's my first release as sansfife. The title is a nod to the burglars, but also to the loss of our collective voices, something I touch on here, here, and here.

Have a listen:



Downloading the EP is free. You will be asked to name your price. You can pop in $0 without offending me. I'll get your email address, so it's even.

Excellent Primer By Rowan Storm

I have a lot of respect for Sister Rowan.

My family and I have sat in on a few of her classes and we always have a great time. She is nurturing, intelligent, worldly, wise, and incredibly talented. She's a wonderful coach and can really bring out the best in people. And her Thinline drums are the best thing going for new drummers or people that want to get in some serious practice time without getting hurt.

Maybe we can one day arrange for a women's frame drum clinic with Rowan at Zawiya Perspective, but until then enjoy this collection of short tutorials.

The Cruel Wars

Celtic punk band, The Dreadnoughts, know how to kill a shanty. I've got their version of Randy Dandy-Oh and Old Maui here.

They do it again with this amazing rendition of Cruel Wars. Listen for the bodhran, the Irish frame drum:

Rock Power

My forays into primal music composition invariably turn up rock. I'm not sure what I thought I might come up with with all my banging and hollering. Indigenous people around a fire, pow-wow drums, African polyrhythms, prisoners singing a trench- all of that rattling around in my head and chest, but it all just comes up rock.

A lot of it is in working alone. You can't really sound like a tribe by yourself. And a lot of it is in the composition. Line by line. Hit on a nice rhythm, mumble nonsense, find the hook, vocal patterns coalesce, memories and ruminations find their way into my mouth and I scream.

And it's all rock.

I send songs to a friend of mine. He's an amazing drummer, a wonderful songwriter, and just a really good guy. I'm working on primal music, I tell him. He tells me it sounds like rock.

I send songs to another friend, maybe one of the best singers I've ever heard. "You sound like you need a guitar, a band."

It got to where I was apologizing. I sent another song to another friend, a classically trained singer who grew up to spin records as a DJ before growing up again to stop listening altogether. "I'm sorry," I said. "I know it sounds like rock."

"Don't apologize. It sounds like you."

He's the one I go to when I need clarity, God bless him.

I sound like me. And that doesn't sound like whooping African caterwauling or medieval Arabic chanting or Native American night-shrieks. I came from none of those places. I was born in the 70s, raised on Joan Baez, Peter, Paul, and Mary, a touch of Willie Nelson, and much later, when these things began to matter, Metallica.

It was 1988. I was going on 14 and I heard somebody mention a radio station that they liked. I tuned in and heard music I'd never heard before. Dark and abrasive. It had a forbidden feeling. These people sounded angry. I'd never heard an angry song.

It became a tonic. My parents had recently divorced. I didn't know what made sense or where I belonged, except maybe with these angry people. The first CD I ever bought was Metallica's . . . And Justice for All. I remember playing the opening strains of Blackened for my brother. It was like nothing we'd ever heard. I'm not sure that we liked it, but we were tied to it by a strange gravity.

We went on to buy their other albums. And we met people. Angry, disaffected people. People that smoked cigarettes and drank. They'd been dealt a raw deal. They weren't like all of the smiling, toothy people on billboards and walking through malls. Our new friends shared other songs, other records, and we learned about punk, the early 80s bands that we had missed. And then we fell in love with Minor Threat. Later, Fugazi. To this day, I check up on Ian MacKaye. What's he doing? What's he saying?

And our sense of community grew. We were skateboarding now, rolling around and carving up surfaces made for gentler things, listening to loud, angry people, people that made so much more sense than all of the candy and glitter. But it wasn't enough to listen. We had things we wanted to say. We were angry, too, and we wanted to scream.

Mom took us to a music store. We promised good grades and I got my first electric guitar. My brother got his first bass. Later we found a drummer. We made a lot of noise and called ourselves Fury.

There were other bands, shows, records, and eventually we were signed to a local independent. And it was all rock.

There's nothing else I know. Not like I know rock.

Rock and roll represents the first real fusion of black and white culture. Way down south, white country music came up against black swing, rhythm, and blues. The only people to get it were the kids, on both sides of the color line. Right out of the gate, rock was the voice of youth and rebellion. When rock becomes the status quo, it isn't rock.

Which makes what I do even more rock.

Free to Choose?

I live in America where choice is marketed pretty hard. Here, we are free. We have options. Nobody tells us what to do.

Except maybe the tax collector. Or the police officer. Traffic lights. The boss. The regulatory agencies that govern business. The divorce lawyers that bleed for alimony. The terms and conditions on your blender’s warranty. The academic standards of whatever institution of higher education you happen to find yourself in. The selection at your local dress shop that boxes you in to whatever colors and hemlines the fashionistas have determined to be the rage this season.

And there are other limitations.

We’re only so tall. Our visual acuity is what it is. Can’t seem to hear frequencies much below 20 Hz and not much more than 20,000 Hz. We’ve only got so much money in the bank and the temperature outside doesn’t really care how we feel about it.

And then there’s the whole mortality thing. We get sick, most times without our consent. And no matter how careful we are, there’s always the other guy- the drowsy pilot, the buzzed driver. My life could very easily end at any moment without a whole lot of input from me.

If only we could be free! Like birds!

And then we’d only have to worry about instinctual migratory patterns that carry us potentially thousands of miles to treacherous breeding grounds to lay eggs at exactly the same time every year! But, ah! The wind through our feathers!

Alright, maybe there are some restrictions out there, but it sure seems like we’ve got at least a few choices that are under the semblance of our control. Our attitude, perhaps. The length of our hair, maybe. What we’re going to have for dinner, if we are privileged enough to have that option. Some people don’t.

Life experience should be enough to demonstrate to all but the most dense that virtually everything that comes our way has so much more to do with factors outside our control than we have been conditioned to believe. And that conditioning has everything to do with the marketplace and nothing to do with our well-being.

Restrictions are real. They cannot be avoided and the enlightened person finds contentedness within those restrictions. This involves cultivating a positive attitude and the liberal application of creativity and imagination to our respective situations. We can’t break the rules, but we can make love to them.

We can learn to see that, without restrictions, whether the laws of physics or municipal building codes, we couldn’t have crops, or running water, or buildings that could withstand earthquakes. We can embrace the utility of restriction to promote the security that allows our powerful individual energies to surge without arcing, to warm without burning, to ennoble without effacing.

So much is written by intelligent people suffocating under the perceived burden of imposed constraints. And their response, tragically, is to dismiss the constraints as limiting what would otherwise be their vast potential for authentic expression. They want to be what they want to be and the whole thing sounds fantastically romantic and sensible.

Except that there is no getting around restrictions. You’ll cast one off to find ten more. Concrete and abstract, we are limited at every moment by gravity, traffic, and the opinions of people we care about.

Quit running away, folks. There is no stepping out of the finite, limitary nature of our existence. We are preconditioned by a thousand laws- just a single chemical reaction out of sync and you’re dead or crazy.

I make music using the frame drum and my voice. I have other options, but I choose to embrace these restrictions as one way of practicing acceptance and resignation.

What other choice do I have?

Protest Drumming

There are terrible things happening in Occupied Palestine at the moment, made all the more terrible by the fact that the atrocities committed against her people are only made possible by the taxes that I pay.

That's an issue that needs to be addressed. I'll have that opportunity today, God willing, at a protest scheduled to take place at the Los Angeles Federal Building later this afternoon. I'll brings my drums and I'll bring my voice and I have invited others to do the same.

We've talked for months at our Primal Music gatherings about the various manifestations of communal music. It makes the work day easier. It helps to internalize shared values. And it can embolden us to speak truth to power as a united body.

When Africans were first brought to this country as slaves, they were forbidden to play the drum. The power of the drum to gather and unite was acknowledged and feared. Not much has changed, and so it was with a great sense of validation that I came across this treatise on the resurgence of the drum in contemporary protest.

Among the many exciting points of this article:

Drumming groups are easily organized compared with melodic marching bands. (I've discussed the comparatively divisive nature of melodic instruments here.)

Drums are most powerful when they are played sparingly and with discipline.

Drums have not quite been defined by modern society, and the media will try to fit you into a category they've dealt with before: hippies, Africans, new-agers, Hare Krishnas, men's groupies, or something "tribal" or cult-like.

Police often get agitated by things they don't understand, and they are intimidated by the sonic power that drums wield. (just like the plantation days!)

And my favorite paragraph, on the politics behind the drum set:

Have you ever thought about the origins of the drumset? The drumset is the percussive symbol of capitalist domination. Where once the percussion section united cadres of dedicated individuals to work together for a common rhythm, to communicate, to learn each other's strengths and weakness, and to come to consensus on the beat and the swing. With a drumset, you fire everybody except the most dextrous drummer and eliminate all of that beautiful social interaction. Why? Is the music any better having one person play everything? No. It is all about maximizing profit. The manager reasons, "Why pay five drummers, when I get away with just paying one!"

A man after my own heart!

There are many, many more interesting and enlightening points, and I highly encourage you read the whole thing here.

Today is my opportunity to walk the talk, to test all that I suppose about communal music. Will I find others to play with? Will I find others to sing with? And what will be the outcome of our melodic and rhythmic interactions?

I'm looking forward to finding out!

Enjoy this short clip of some rock-solid protest drumming out of New York:

Primal Music and Pain

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned some interesting studies that I came across in relation to our work with primal music. And for those of you just now coming along for the ride, primal music is music that we make together with drum and voice. It's "primal" because it is rudimentary, simple, intuitive, and engaging in the way that music should be for its full benefit to be realized.

What benefit?

You can read through some earlier posts to get an idea, for sure, but here's where we start trotting out some research to back up and build on all that has been said. And we'll start with a study that just blew me away.

People making music increase their pain threshold. This is not true for those simply listening to music. It is necessary that one be a part of the process, singing, drumming, or even dancing. All of a sudden, the work song has some real physiology behind it.

Check out this Alan Lomax recording of prisoners at work back in the late 40s:



It seems that in the making of music we release endorphins. In a nutshell, the researchers put a blood pressure cuff on participants and pumped it up until the the subject cried uncle. The researchers noted the reading. Then the various groups, a bunch of drummers, church singers, practicing dancers, and people just passively listening to music at different tempos, were rechecked with the blood pressure cuff after engaging in their particular activity. Those that were participating in the music had a notable increase in their pain threshold. Those that merely listened to music, no matter what kind, had no appreciable change in their ability to tolerate pain.

Make music together, go farther, harder, and longer.

We live in a time when academics with some grant money are the ones to tell us what's going on. I do enjoy the validation that comes from reading their work, but I should get a whole lot more from my own personal experiences.

Learning to trust that experience is a challenge.