Doubtless I’d been staring very pointedly at the old drums fitted with ancient yak skin and equally ancient wood when our monk chaperone (partly motioning) asked if I’d like to hit some. There were small frame drums and ones large enough to crawl inside standing and hanging all around the small temple space also housing hundreds of brightly painted busts of past lamas and thousands (it seemed) of Tibetan scrolls in nooks and cavities reaching to the ceiling like loculi in a catacomb.
The monastery is reputed to be 800 years old, situated on a hillside above the present day village of Braka in the Manang Valley in the Himalaya. Old enough to reach back past the newer more streamlined and abstract surfaces of modern Buddhism to the unruly, uncanny past where mythic monsters and hellish underworlds co-existed with starburst visions of heavenly bliss. Awed by the sacred weirdness of the place I hesitated, although it was a living temple in use and these drums were being struck in service and ritual it was also a living museum and these instruments were old.
Would I be doing something utterly gauche and insensitive using the sticks and beaters lying everywhere to strike these drums I desperately wanted to hear? And perhaps worse record them to add to my collection of field recordings for use in something (who knows what) in the future as samples, as textures? Was it any different to taking a picture when you’d been giving express permission to take that picture? It felt like it, these weren’t a surface you could take in at a glance, an image memento or document of a place. These were the signature sound of the place, resonating literally with the walls and voices that had chanted and sung in there.
Did I hesitate long? Perhaps a second, before I had my phone out and the voice notes app up recording seven of different sizes and shapes. Glorious resonant complex tones, the dryness of the high alpine air had crystalized the skin and wood into unique hypnotic voices, gnarled and strange with age.
Later in the studio editing and tuning them in the sampler they gave themselves to braiding together as simple tonal melodies, the soft attack and huge tail of textural body in the sounds meant a little went a long way. They weren’t acting as drums or percussion per se but as almost synthesized textures too complex to layer or form into chordal harmonic shapes. They are still sitting in my library and I still feel uneasy about using them not primarily through any fear of cultural appropriation, though that is of course present. But more that inside a larger work or composition they’ll dissipate in an example of contextless attribution decay lending the energy they contain without bringing any attention to themselves as markers of a place and a history.
A lot of what I’m doing over the last couple of years encounters this concern, things collected from specific places and times woven into visual and sound compositions that decontextualizes them in service to the extreme subjectivity and aims of wherever I’m headed at the time with the piece in question. There doesn’t in my mind seem like there is a blanket attitude I can take to this way of working similar as it is to the way memory and influence themselves work in building a more general approach to art making. Except to consider the aesthetic ethics on a case by case basis.
So the drums for now sit in a folder tempting me to use them until my attitude shifts in one direction or another or enough time passes that I start to feel the charge they contain getting buried under new layers of working and experience.
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