August 2017
Monday, 1st of August
Iron Dwarf practice at Gardy's. The flame is well tended. The songs burn, impurities flare and vanish, our focus increases and the red becomes blue becomes white fire. We are ready to record again, and will play in the streets to keep warm over winter.

　


Saturday, August 5th
Drum class at Belly Dance Arabesque

I wonder what keeps my students coming back, I think to myself that the classes have lost momentum, that these monthly workshops are not enough to really improve anyone's skill, that I am wasting their time and they are wasting their money.

Then, when I am in the studio and I scribe the rhythms for the day upon the whiteboard, and I see the earnest, serious faces of those who have come to class, a little of my doubt falls away. Today we play Sufi rhythms, Tunisian, Persian and Iraqi rhythms, and somewhere between HayAllah, Wahiida and Quaddaam, all my fear vanishes.

The music these people create, and the individual expression they have created for themselves out of the formula of traditional rhythms awakens my passion for teaching and I remember that no-one is wasting anything, not time, not money. Instead, together we lay waste to apathy, to insecurity and doubt, we are made rich by our involvment in music and culture. By our engagement with each other and by careful and practiced listening we cultivate an atmosphere inside ourselves that we carry out of the class and into the world. Everywhere, rhythm, harmony, melody and the grand purity of silence make of the mundane world a beautiful woven tapestry of experience. Like fingers entwine in holding hands, like capilliary water moves through the dark earth, like the wind outside is the air inside the house is the air inside our lungs.

The thing that keeps my students returning is the same thing that keeps me teaching...the opportunity to join with others and defy the solipsistic ideology of our individuated world, to be more than a lone drummer tapping secret codes in the middle of the night, timing beats to the crackle of the fireplace. We come together to learn, and to share our knowledge with each other, teacher and student are interchangable titles. In order to teach, I must learn. My students show me every month the importance of humility, dedication, persistence and unrestrained joy.

Together, we bow before the altar of music

* * *

There was a fire in the flophouse, the ruined building beside the dance studio. Ash has settled in drifts upon cooled layers of molten plastic and charred timber, and beneath everything, the unburned relics of throwaway lives. A harry potter DVD crunches beneath my boot as I explore the now dangerously unstable ruin, ceiling beams cracked and charred thin by the fire which consumed the floor and climbed the walls to eat away at the roof. The once warm piles of garbage and sleeping bags and filthy underwear have burned away to nothing, leaving only the blackened shapes of foam mattresses and glass bottles.

The main wall is now supported on the exterior by a fresh timber framework, preventing collapse out into the carpark, but nothing has been done to prevent inward collapse. Police tape declares the area a crime scene, yet the rear entrance remains accessible, unblocked by beurocratic yellow tape.

It is with cheerful sadness that I say goodbye to this cursed building. I have been haunted by its decayed beauty for long enough, the ghosts of its despairing tennants have whispered their secrets to me and now even their dead aspirations must depart. I expect the building will soon be demolished, for despite its Heritage listing, in this stage of advanced collapse, it cannot last much longer against the urban forces of civilisation.

I must find another hidden place.

　


Sunday August 6th
A day in my pyjamas, writing all morning, later I play uke in the kitchen as I wait for the kettle to boil, making tea. I build a huge underground pyramid playing Minecraft with Arky. We play crazy eights, poker & black-jack after dinner as we listen to Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy', (the 1978 radio play). All day the storm has blown furious, the driveway slowly fills up with rain, the creek flowing.

　


Tuesday August 8th
Mixing session with Stompy at LB Studio.

　

An evening of listening, of feeling. Stompy arrived, guitar case in hand from a day playing music, on the street, and at TAFE which he is now attending to study singing. The evening is ripe, we listen as Mark and Stompy mix tracks for my album, gradually sculpting each individual sound, from the egg shaker to the marching drum, and navigating the subtle relationship between ukulele and tabla. I listen to them listening, noticing our ears pricking up at the same moment as the tone of a wooden drumstick on the steel rim of my doun doun shifts from one of plastic lo-fi nagging, to a resonant, reverberating snap of timber on steel.

We talk, we laugh and then I get a txt message from Heather Osmond, my last boss at the Peechabella farm, telling me that her husband Peter has died. He had suffered for nearly a year from a brain tumor. He was only in his sixties. I had known him and worked with him for two and a half years. Moved to sudden tears, I let go and let my sadness have its say. I explained myself briefly to Mark and Stompy and together we just kept right on going, listening through the tears.

I cook dinner, beef with vegetables and chick peas. I open wine and serve cheese with black pepper crackers. I think there is an instant difference in the way people behave when they have a wine glass in their hands. Their posture when holding it becomes relaxed, the liquid weight has an odd pendulum against which the world may swing. Wine stimulates, subdues, sublimates and substantiates.

We listen more and more.


　

　
Saturday August 12th
Just home from Casablabla...if i thought last month was noisy, I was kidding myself.

The street was packed as I pushed my sack-truck laden with instruments to the venue. The same homeless guys camped outside the seven day store, the same staggering early drunks crawling between pubs, youth everywhere finding themselves, and everyone lost in the crowd of each other. In the club, pulsing already with intoxication and hot with raised voices in conversation, heads turn as I enter, I cut a different space in the thick air. Each person enters a room with a different purpose, and this purpose shapes their energy in the room, the patterns of their movement, the paths of their perambulation. The table staff with alacrity and martial precision weave through the inconstant tides of the crowd, bartenders dance elaborate duets, re-enacting the alchemists opera that turns lead to gold as their trade plys the people with the voodoo juice needed to ensorcel them into becoming golden versions of themselves. Besotted with the truth that wine makes us Gods, and in that godliness we can witness and experience that which is blocked from us in sobriety. No cristicism to ascetism. To each his own, for sobriety can become its own intoxication, if one is willing to look deep enough and break through the walls of mundanity that surround the conventional boundaries of sober thinking. Yet it is sober thinking and careful meticulous action that burns in the retina as I watch the staff operate the great machine of a club of this size, and between the great turning wheels of their industry, the dancers spin iridescent, illuminated by the invisible light of eyes that stare and heads that turn and in the interruption of their conversations I can see a young girl stare dumbfounded, holding her mother's hand, watching a belly dancer balance the broad heavy blade of a falcion upon her head.

Beside the bar I play darbuka, harmonica, then setar, and from the mezzanine two of my brothers watch me. It has been more than a year since the three of us were together. The Philosopher, the Artist and the Musician. The noise of the room is overwhelming, I turn my amp up almost to its limit, and I feel somehow that the louder I play, the less anyone can hear anything, pressed between the din of conversation and the ringing tones of my setar. Between sets my brothers and I raise glasses of fine scotch whiskey and toast the brilliance of the moment, this rare convocation in the busy night.

Monday, August 14th.

Rose thorns in my fingertips, it is painful to write, and I cannot play my ukulele...NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

　


Tuesday August 15th
Today in the cafe I improvised a lot on the setar, and I played harmonica better than I have all year, people dancing where they sat with cups in their hands. A young girl, perhaps 3 yeras old, jumped with excitement as I played my setar. Outside the steady rain washes the dust from the world, the air is clean and refreshing, mothers push prams through the rain, men walk their dogs, families gather for coffee. Tomorrow I will work in the rain, pruning roses and pulling weeds. Today I write, play music, deal with centrelink, drink coffee, read a book (Plutarch, The Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic), and tonight is Iron Dwarf band practice.

* * *

Iron Dwarf Rehearsal

It has been nice to just rehearse over winter, no gigs, just the three of us (and my son), in that little room, making the best music we can, and putting everything we've got into those precious minutes and hours we have together. The new set...

　


Thursday August 17th
The rain hammers down, flood warnings for this evening. I only managed to get out of the farm by a slim margin today, the river was lapping at the underside of the bridge as I drove over it at 2pm. Five meters deep and flowing very fast. A car was swept away on that same river, the Bremer (Meechi), only yesterday when the rains really began here, some unlucky fool trying to cross it at a low ford. Langhorne Creek was half submerged at midday, by now the water would be washing up against the sandbags that no-one seemed to put back in the shed after the February flood. I see cows standing in shallow lakes, grapevines knee deep in muddy water, the road closed through the centre of town.


leaves upon already fallen leaves have lain

and still the rain beats down upon the rain.

Gyodai



Saturday 19th of August

I sat in the studio courtyard garden before drum class today. The abandoned building still stands as it did, but something of its life has been evicted, and I do not feel the draw that I once did to sit amidst its ruin. Instead, I warm myself in the sunshine playing flute upon the second floor fire escape platform, surverying from atop the steel stairs the awkward shapes of rooftops and carparks and fences behind the studio. In the distance a lady walks to Saturday morning church service, hobbled in a tight skirt and high heels, a gray shawl wrapped about her shoulders, she could have stepped from a time machine sent from the 1950's. I take a moment to sit in the studio garden, a tiny serene courtyard hidden behind a tall steel fence, Jasmine climbing and flowering, succulents in pots decorating the coffee table beside me as I recline in a large wicker chair, my class notes open before me. Tunisian and Iraqi rhythms today, all sewn up with the sufi rhythm HayAllah, the beginnings of a new song I am calling, The temple of my familiar.

In the evening I play setar, inspired by the music of Hossein Alizadeh, a recently deceased master of Persian classical music. With my tax money this year I will pay my car registration, get new Ukulele strings, and have a few lessons with Sina Aria, the setar teacher in Adelaide. Ah dreams of wealth...like grasping at steam.

　

　


Saturday 26th August

This is almost my last entry. With the recording process now complete, all that remains is the insular and rather slow process of mixing, mastering, album art, promotion and the launch. This document has always been intended as the liner notes to accompany my album and it is important I keep that in mind. This was never to be an open ended, ever unfolding episodic blog about the life of a musician. It was, and is, about the nine months of intense recording and performing that preceeded the album release. And a release it shall be. I have held this music inside me for a long time, developing that which to me is the most important creative endeavor of my life. I have shared this story with you as a way to let you in, a way to break the invisible barrier between artist and observer.

So...since last Saturday's drum class, a few things have happened.

Iron Dwarf went into the studio to record two songs (Red Fox Reggae, and Garde VS the Jungle Bunny), an evening filled with cinzano, beer, laughter, chicken and some amazing music. Stompy told me that he has waited his whole life to put this band together, and that he is hearing his musical dreams made real. It is an interesting thing to see the ways that the Dream World and the Living World overlap. It is like waking up with sand in your shoes and the stolen magic wand of the faerie queen in your hand. Making art is exactly like bringing the magic of the Dream World back with you when you wake.

This week I also finished the second draft of my novel, The Hangman Tree. It has taken about seven years to get this far. 215 pages. So I bound it with string and now I will read it cover to cover to make sure that the story in my head is the one I put on paper, then the third draft can begin. It is the legend of Djinnee, Shaman of the Red Sands, and slowly, word by word it has made its way from my dreams and now it is in my hands. It is the fourth book I have written, but the first that I have devoted so much time and attention to, devoted to the idea that this novel is THE ONE. My other books, (Recurring Nightmare, The White Tribe, and Spider on my tongue) are all first drafts, each about a hundred pages long. Good story ideas, but essentially I consider them to be the practice neccessary to get good enough to write The Hangman Tree.

Lastly, I bought new strings for my Ukulele, the first new set since I got the instrument three or so years ago. Spring is almost upon us, and I can feel the energy pushing up through my body, the transformation both physical and spiritual that will carry me forward into my new life.

The Music of Invisible Enclaves is almost here.

　


Sunday 27th of August

　

Writing all this has given me the opportunity to see myself, and to see the life I have chosen, with all its faults and flavours. I worry that I worry about money too much, that my suffering in this regard is my own fault. So much of life is governed by one's attitude and perspective. I have grumbled the most when I have expected music to provide me with money. Much of my complaining is of course the result of unrealistic expectations, and my attatchment to imagined outcomes. This all leads me to consider that I have been asking the wrong questions. I should not be asking how I can make money, I should be asking in what way I may serve.

How may I serve music?

I cannot expect music to provide for me, I must provide for music. In a world torn assunder with war and the bitter conflicts of right and left, I make space for the kindness of music. I cannot say what problems it solves, but in the morning when I wake, it is there singing to me, and in the day while I work, it is there, practicing melodies and rhythms, and in the night we meet hand in hand.

Brother turns against brother and the rivalry of religious doctrine makes fools of us all, but music whispers that all ideologies are insecure, and in the silence it grants us, new pathways to peace may be found. I have moaned about the crooked economy of the arts, I have whinged that my efforts to make money with music only leave me poorer than when I began, but there is something so much bigger at stake than money.

Being a musician is an act of service.

I serve you who listen.

I serve the musicians who came before me, and those who will follow.

I offer these melodies and these rhythms up before the altar of my God and I pray that one day I might know peace through this meditation.

　

　

Monday, 28th August

I listen with ever increasing attention to the subtle differences in acoustics as I shift my hand position or posture over the sound board, or as I tilt my head up to look around the cafe. Dividing my attention between listening to the instrument and listening to the room, I can let go and let my fingers listen to my ears, and let the room take control of how each song will be played.

Four cab drivers who meet here regularly for breakfast, dressed in crisp blue uniforms, epaulets adorned and coats trim braided, tell stories of customers and roads and crowds and for a flash I am transported back to any time at all in our common ancestry, listening to carriage drivers talk about their horses, their customers, the roads and the crowds. I've said it many times before, the medieval simplicity of this cafe evokes common themes played over and again in human gathering places where food is served. This cafe has no nooks, no booths, no quiet spaces to hide aloof from the commoners. We are all commonners, of the common, of the heath, the hill and dale and valley and even of the plains, we are plain people eating bread from the grains baked by a local baker. And in the corner, a local musician plays instruments from half a world away.

　

　

　

　

　



　

JULY

July 1st, Saturday

Government funding. People talk about it like we have a right to be paid by the government for being artists, like grant money should be given to us, like the government has a responsibility to fund art in this country. I can't quite see it. Businesses exist in the world because of their ability to support themselves, if artists are struggling to make ends meet financially because people aren't willing to pay for art, then art has no value. We have become irrelevant. The service we provide is no longer worth money, and whining about the lack of money being made, and wishing the government would pay us for being unsuccessful seems both spineless and deluded.

If a bakery failed to make money selling pies, should the government just give them money to support them in their failure? That hardly seems rational. That is just pouring money down a hole. I know that governments bail out banks, insurance companies, mining companies and other big business, but that seems a natural form of self defence, since their collapse would threaten the very money and power that keeps the politicians in power. It is a corruption that makes sense. Nepotism is popular because it works.

Governments build roads, start wars and construct monuments to themselves. That is what governments do, it is what governments have always done. The poor must fend for themselves while their hard work and tax money pay for the lavish lifestyles and extravagant fantasies of the leadership. If you disagree, go read a history book...any one will do, they all tell the same story.

What right have we to expect the government to pay us to be artists? We generate no economy, our industry produces hundreds of thousands of failing, debt riddled businesses with more expenses that can ever hope to be paid for through sales. Our actions stimulate dissent, even sedition, we encourage people to question their lives and their government....we actively campaign against the very organisation we seem to beg money from. Like we want to be paid to bite the hand that feeds us. Expecting to be paid by the government for being an artist seems contradictory at best.

We have chosen to opt out of the standard and popular culture of industrial work. Complaining that we can't pay our bills as a result is childish. If art has no financial value any more, then we must make our money in other financially viable industries. Do we bail out blacksmiths who can't make any money because horse-shoe sales are down this century? No, it would be ridiculous to expect any government to pay for the production or provision of a service that no longer has financial relevance.

How does the government benefit from the development of my middle eastern ukulele style? They don't. The people who do benefit from it are also irrelevant to the government, the little people who are comforted, inspired or even emotionally transformed by my music mean nothing to those in power. Governments thrive on creating division, and then exploiting the conflicts that arise as a result of the ignorance it creates. What possible good would it do any government to fund a musician who promotes cultural exchange and understanding, who identifies with the beauty, poetry and music of our enemy in this ongoing war between Islam and Christianity?

If I sang campaign songs in support of the Liberal Party, then it makes sense for the government to pay for a service that supports their goals. But feeling entitled to government grant money to produce art that actively disputes the policies, attitudes and actions of the ruling class is ridiculous. We chose to be poor when when chose to become artists, and if we cannot even convince the public to pay to be entertained by our art, then we and our work, are irrelevant and deserve no more money than the baker whose pies are tasteless, or the blacksmith whose horseshoes are no longer needed.

Now, with that said, I must also say that there are two kinds of value at play here. Economic value, of which most art seems to have very little, and personal value, of which art is literally made. The personal value of my own music is immesurable. If I did not have my music I must assume that I would have died many years ago by my own hand, either directly or passively. If I and thousands of others did not have the artistic outlets that we use to manage our own passions, then it is fair to say that there would be far fewer of us today. Once again, this is not a problem for the governent. If the population of artistic people incapable of generating taxble income shrinks, then the economic burden they place on the government is eased. Also, the scarcity of surviving artists would increase the value of the art that remains, so it is actually in the interest of the government to promote despair among poor artists. Then the money the government invests in high art would see realised profits much sooner, and the resultant reduction in articulate dissent among the poor would benefit them as well. Fewer poets means less dissent.

But like I said, there are two values at play. The values of those with power, and those without. For those of us producing art, belonging to the powerless classes, the value of art is a matter life and death survival. It is the force that we can pin our hopes to (however delusional), and through it believe that tomorrow will be a better day and that somehow, we as people have value because of the beauty we create for ourselves and those around us. This hope is more valuable to us than money, (since we have none), and so we must invest in beauty in the hope that it will keep the wolves from our door (which it won't).

What it does do is provide the illusion of meaning. If our suffering can be the wellspring for art, then our poverty has a purpose, and we can continue living in the belief that we make the world a better place, both for ourselves and for those around us. This is the illusion of meaning.

I suspect that art does not make the world a better place.

Art numbs the pain of life by replacing it with the heartache of love. If our unrequited desires for peace and prosperity can find voices through art, then our grief becomes a shared paradigm. Our suffering is no longer lonely, it is shared and in that sensation of commmunal grief, we find relief from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, even if by opposing them we find no end.

Yet...try to imagine a world without art. Try to imagine a world where the poor cannot treat the symptoms of their suffering with the beauty of their souls. Try to imagine the almond blossom, and the crane in flight, and the ordinary, ugly, beautiful and inexplicable dance of humanity, passing by without comment, without expression beyond their physical and temporal experience. Try to imagine a society without architecture. A socety without music. Where flowers were never printed on dresses, and where dresses did nothing but cover the skin. Try to imagine what would stand in place of the art gallery, or the theatre...try to imagine shopping malls, office blocks and factories, forever.

...

So Art does make the world a better place, and by its creation we raise ourselves out of the mud of our common ancestry and do more than create the illusion of meaning. We create the story of our existence. By the qualities of our narration, the human paradigm is built. By the methods and sincerity of our self reflection, beauty is made from suffering through the instinctual transformation of wordless experience into meaningful art, capable of communicating concepts otherwise impossible to describe.

Without art, without poetry, song, dance, painting, theatre and all the new forms of self expression being born with every generation, we could not understand or even appreciate the achievements of our rational, mathematical, scientific and economic lives. The human race could enjoy no satisfaction for the work of living.

Imagine the perfect violence of an insect colony.

If our suffering can be the wellspring for art, then it has a purpose, and we can continue living in the belief that we make the world a better place, both for ourselves and for those around us.

The imperfect meaning of love.

Human love.

　

So, why do we think the government should pay us to make art? We will make art whether we are rich or poor, we will make art rather than eat, we will rip off the bandage and dance in the blood. We are crazy for art, and it happens in us whether we are paid or not, often to our own detriment. Governments are self centred cults, interested in preserving power and manipulating economies. Stability through controlled agitation I suppose you could call it. Art is not controlled, it is an agitation that works continuously to erode the restrictions of convention, assumption and power. It works to these ends within the people who create it, and it works the same way among those who experience it.

Why on earth would any government fund Art?

　


July 2nd, Sunday
Ok, so I was a bit upset yesterday. But I think my question still needs an answer. Why do governments fund art? Of course governments do more than build roads and start wars, governments also build hospitals, schools, art galleries, museums. Although it seems that every year funding for these public institutions is reduced, while wars increase, politcians paycheques increase and the homeless flood the streets, governments still do fund art.

Winston Churchill said something along the lines of, 'If we don't continue to fund art and education, even in wartime, then what are we fighting the war to protect?'

I wrote yesterday of governments as if they were a single minded beast, one mind, one purpose, but of course this oversimplification is a falsehood. Governments are made up of people, people who need education, healthcare, roads, and even art. So I guess that in the scheme of things, art gets funding for the same reason anything else does, because people demand it. Public education is a rather modern phenomenon, as is public healthcare, both of which only exist because of the active participation in goverment by people who care enough about these things to demand their inclusion in society. In a way, Art is another kind of healthcare, a branch of the public health department. It is certainly a thermometer for public opinion and any wise government would fund art as a means to gain deeper understanding of the standards, beliefs and desires of the public. I suppose that if people have a thriving art community, it acts as a kind of pressure release valve. Generally, people will communicate their feelings through art first and only resort to petrol bombs as a last resort. Having said that, it was only ten or so years ago that a man self immolated on the streets of Sydney as a protest against the war in the Middle East.

So why fund art? I suppose the alternative can be seen in many parts of the world where people are forced to live by the dictates of their governments, instead of the government serving the will of the people. Art is the opposite of war. It's all tangled up in the idea of free speech. Even if the government ignores everything we say, if we have the freedom to say it without being imprisoned, we are less likely to cause trouble on the streets. Hakim Bey commented that in some countries, poets are imprisoned for their opinions, but in America they are ignored and it is hard to say which of the two is more punishing. Some years ago I read that in Iran, heavy metal music is illegal, and its performance can result in prison terms for the musicians. To me, this kind of heavy handed cultural police action is a backwards way of maintaining control over people. Funding music schools, even for subversive music, seems a better way to prevent frustrated and angry young people from letting their violent feelings, transform into violent actions.

So if art is the opposite of war, then funding art is funding peace. It is a multi-faceted investment into public health, societal cohesion and cultural development. Art promotes education, it promotes community involvement, it promotes active participation in life, both socially and politically. This definitely causes trouble for those whose active interests are maintained through the concentration of political power, but it is a kind of trouble far preferable to petrol bombs.

Am I proud of Australia? I suppose the peace we have enjoyed for so many decades is something to be proud of. Even our dull, backwards, racist, sexist politicians are preferrable to the maniacs that seem to rule other parts of the world. Is the peace we enjoy a direct result of the funding and support given to art? It might be. Will we see an increase in violent conflict if art funding continues to shrink? Is investing in art, investing in peace?

I think it is.

I have invested my life to this purpose. Every dollar I have has gone into my participation in art, I put my money where my mouth is, and while it has not kept me well fed, it has fed the peace, beauty and happiness of my community. It has fed the imaginations of young and old, and in turn, I have been nourished by the artists I have been involved with. My loneliness, madness, and frustration have continuously been transformed through the steady application of art, into beautiful music, paintings, poetry and fiction. I have never made a petrol bomb (a few home made fireworks for sure....but no actual bombs), and my years of protesting in the streets has always been accompanied by the playing of drums and the holding of hands in solidarity with the refugee communities with which I identified, sympathised and supported.

Do I expect government funding? No. Do I feel entitled to it, also no. I am held in place by my misguided pride in poverty and cannot bring myself to go begging for money from anyone, plus the paperwork you have to fill out for grant money is crazy. But I guess, after all my ranting, I am glad that such funding does exist, and that those who are willing to jump through the hoops to get it, are able to. This year, Ink Pot Arts, a local theatre company, successfuly applied for grant money to have an air-conditioner installed into their central office/performance space. Now those who use the room no longer shiver in winter, nor wilt in summer and the woman who runs the whole operation has an office that she can actually work in all year round without getting pnumonia or heat-stroke. It's a little thing, but every little thing helps.


July 3rd, Monday
I must be going crazy. I'm getting worked up over the meaning and purpose of art, a sure sign that I have not been working enough.

Another morning in the Gawler Street Cafe, playing every song I have on ukulele, then a couple on Setar and finishing up with a harmonica dance piece. It's as good a way as any to pay for my coffee I suppose, although I am exchanging music for drugs while I still have no money for food. I have borrowed money to pay my mechanic. Too poor to dream, too cracked in the head to earn enough to support myself, sitting in my car in the library car-park sending emails to venues I don't expect to get replies from. The Coffee Pot has closed, so I emailed the Crown and Anchor. The weather report is for rain all week and the new owner of the farm still hasn't called me and didn't answer when I rang him this morning....

Stuck in my own rut. Trying to get out of the depression caused by being a musician, by playing more music. The quickest way out of the bottom of the barrel, is through the bottom. I'm sure that if I just get good enough at ukulele everything will turn around and people will start calling me back....what a sick joke.


　

July 7th, Friday
Sitting in the Gawler St Cafe, I've been playing ukulele all morning, the place is full of customers, laughing, talking, eating. Outside the rain is falling. Winter is most definitely here, but inside this small room, warm from the wood fire oven and smelling of the mornings fresh baked bread and cakes, I play my songs like my life depends on them and the people eat like they have all the time in the world.

　

July 9th, Sunday
I find Avalanche sweeping the concrete sand from his newly laid pavers, his shed door wide open and jazz music playing on a little stero in the corner. The shed is full of art supplies and harware, a lot of pottery equipment and old paintings, but there is a neat order to the jumble. His long gray hair is woven neatly in a long pony tail, his clothes are dirty from the morning's work. Avalanches life is art, and the home he shares with his wife Carrie is the gallery of their love.

Inside, the smell of delicious roasting chicken and vegetables makes me salivate, but today I do not have time to linger as guest to Carrie's homely kitchen art. Ava finishes his sweeping and changes his clothes as a plate of chicken is laid out for him on the dining table. The nearby coffee table is cluttered with books and harmonicas and a beautiful 3/4 size guitar rests on the window seat beside the back doors. Through the back wall of broad windows, the garden can be seen in early winter bloom, a profusion great purple flowers cover the shrub closest and further back amidst the pathways and hidden beneath bushes, dozens of large ceramic heads stare hollow eyed and curious, products of Avalanche's unstoppable creative power.

He and I drive to the flop-house beside the dance studio to film some poems and music. I've said it before, but the atmosphere in that building is electric. There is friction in making art in a room where men and women have lain soaking in the despair of homelessness, drunk, high, shivering in the freezing night air, wrapped up in layers of sleeping bags upon a rotting foam mattress, burning timbers from the collapsed ceiling trying to keep warm. It seems right to bring the self love of art into such a space, and though I never see those who use this building for real shelter, I feel compassion, comraderie and sympathy for them, knowing that it is only by the luck of my birth and the love of my woman that I do not share their grim threadbare existence.

　


Flophouse Blues

　

Now hear my story
and hear it true
this tale I tell you
The Flophouse Blues

I seen the bottom
I swum the deep
the hidden basement
beneath my feet

I saw what's in there
I touched the dirt
i found I didn't
know its worth

so i gave it
all i could
gave up wanting
all the good

all the easy
things in life
i chose trouble
i chose strife

i chose the devil
i took his deal
i made music
my daily meal

I told the river
i told the sea
i told my woman
she said to me

go tell the mountain
go tell the sky
just don't bother
askin' why

I told the valley
i told the trees
they gave me nothing
for my need

i dug the iron
i lit the fire
i forged the hammer
of my desire

what i wanted
could not be seen
could not be spoken
only dreamed

I walked through water
I crawled beneath
took the crossroads
down to the beach

I told the ocean
and it said to me
go tell the mountain
go tell the tree

tell the river
tell the sky
just don't bother
asking why

You heard my story
and heard it true
this tale I told you
The Flophouse Blues
　
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsbuOjS_BGw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS-RLrR252I

Monday July 17th
Rain, rain, rain.

I have been sick for a long time, two months, three?. A lingering cold, a hacking cough of foul tasting flegm that keeps me awake at night. An asthmatic fist clutching tight around my lungs. Week after week with only glimpses of sleep each night. A broken tooth leaking a foul taste into my mouth. Two weeks ago I visited the doctor and had blood tests done to reveal what allergies I am really suffering from, the results were unexpected.

I am allergic to nothing. My blood mineral levels are excellent, my kidneys are healthy, by all accounts I am in perfect youthful health. The doctor prescribed asthma meds, which certainly help to relax my lungs, but treating the symptom is not the same as curing the cause. I have to look deeper into the cause of my stress, the cause of my anxiety and the reason I am suffocating in the relaxing atmosphere of my partner's home.

Today I finally applied at Centrelink for the Family Tax benefit, and the rent assistance that comes with it, and the healthcare card that I have needed for years, but which I have been too stubbornly proud to ask for. I have let myself fall apart, stressing day and night about my seeming inability to earn a living wage no matter what I do. My back and neck and shoulders are a roadmap of anxiety, a mountain range of knots and hard lumps compunded each night by my near incessant coughing. I gobble vitamin C, ginger and garlic, but still my body does not want to get well. The stress keeps me locked in sickness. I keep myself locked in my stress.

Sitting in the cafe again, smelling the delicious food I cannot afford. Still, I am grateful for the warm air, the comfortable place to play my music and to write. I am grateful for the free coffee and the kind friendship of the owner, Dylan. I am grateful for my loving partner who feeds me and shelters me in my poverty. Grateful for my loving children who laugh and play and tumble around on the floor with me in the evening.

　


Friday July 21st
　

A devil dressed in black, clinging tooth and nail upon my back
calling me by names profane

His brother, smoke upon the air, doubt and ever failed despair
entrap and assault my brain

Yet music hangs upon the wind, willing now to find the end
by which the means may show

The valuing of my hearts song, the melody played all along
the dancer points the way to go

A challenge hung upon the door, a footprint burned upon the floor
a sacrificial offering
a sacrificial offering
and nothing more.

　


Saturday July 22nd
My asthma is receeding, as night after night I sleep beside the fireplace and keep myself wrapped in warm robes. I meditate upon the thought patterns that lead to the suffocating feeling in my lungs, the stress that preceeds my sickness. After weeks of continual coughing, choking and hacking up phlegm I finally went back to the doctor who gave me a more powerful preventative asthma medicine, which seems to be working.

I have no work at all now. Next fortnight I cannot pay my rent. Next week I will meet with the new owners of Peechabella and discuss what job I might have in the future with them. I have been contacting friends asking about any available work, a nibble here, a nibble there, but nothing has manifested yet. So I spend my days playing music, reading, sleeping, playing Playstation. In the evenings I play cards, listen to radio plays and eat home baked cupcakes. I edit this journal, upload videos to youtube, upload writing and photos to my blog, email videos to Regan for the WOMAD application.

Every day I add a drop of water to the ocean.

　


Sunday July 23rd
Plagued by sense of hopelessness that has no foundation
Just a malingering despair
a wasted feeling that effort produces only exhaustion,
never advancement

I waste whole weeks submerged beneath doubt.
I doubt that what I think, see, hear and feel is real
that I am not real
that everything about me is delusion
that I am a fraud selling the idea of myself, to myself
and no-one is buying.

Then for one day the sun comes out and I can see my body
outlined in black, a definite drawing upon the flat-screen of reality.

I am real.
but only for a moment.

the day passes and when I awake the next morning,
I am an unconvincing story of myself
a street-corner hawker with nothing to sell
but the notes my fingers pluck from the strings

and as i watch them float away, they too fade into nothing
and I am left holding an awkward wooden box,
a silent tension of timber and string

an emptiness I cannot fill.

　

Monday July 24th

I busked outside the cafe today. The street was strangely empty at midday and I made $12 in two hours. meh. Long moments in absolute solitude, playing my music, sitting in the sunshine, sipping coffee. The manager of Hills Radio came down with a Xoom recorder and got a sample of my playing, and a short interview. This week the local council have been promoting busking in the street. Posters have been in the windows of shops and the radio station got on board to help promote and book the musicians. I got my photo in the Weekend Herald. I had a long conversation with a couple who have travelled extensively, who have seen the wonderful differences that are the most exciting part of cultural exchange. Integration is not sameness, it is sharing, adapting, evolving, celebrating. We are all one people, though we grew up in different houses, we all live together in the same world.

I Met up with Alice afterwards and played some Bridgewater Trio songs, which was simply wonderful. It is always a pleasure to speak with Alice, and to play music. We communicate very easily I think. We jammed together on one of my setar songs, and the results were surprisingly good for our first attempt, an intriguing sound.

* * *

In the studio with Gardy doing overdubs on Street Dance Karsilamas. He is a Perfectionist. The challenge of the song is monumental, not only in terms of the manic escalating tempo, but the greatest peak, nigh insurmountable, is the goal Gardy sets for himself. Polishing the dust from the gleaming edge of sound, he refines his finger movements over and over, muttering under his breath as he develops a new technique to play the melody he hears in his head. Reprogramming physics to suit his funk. He wrestles with a great beast, crocodile teeth, hooves and horns, a force perpetually greater than himself, yet to which he continually aspires.

The result is a weird Arab Jazz Funk, with a gypsy 9/8 swing. Dizzying. I think I might send it to Mat Jacob.

I also recorded Song of the South, the very first piece I wrote on Setar, and which I have been playing over and over for years without ever satisfactorily pinning down either its exact melodies, or structure. I have left it 'til last out of fear and doubt, the Setar is such a sensitive instrument that all my weaknesses are revealed through it and it has taken this long to find the confidence to record it. I also recorded The Bridge, which now means that I have recorded every song I inteneded to include on the album. There are still overdubs to do, and everything that comes after that, but tonight saw the completion of part one.

Stompy has listened to the 23 track demo I gave him, and after one week of listening he gave me this advice.


There is the album that the public wants, then there is the album that you want to release. Somewhere in between is the album that should come out.
Or something to that effect. I consider that I will need to pare the song selection back, and that the final release will be less rambling, more focussed. A more intense collection of songs, a well edited story told through music.

　


Friday July 28th
Playing at Casablabla tonight, two, fifteen minute sets plus a bit of roaming drumming with the dancers. I get free dinner and drinks, plus $80, the best pay for music work I've had in a long time. Also, I finally received confirmation from the new owners of the farm, that I will be kept on for 2 days a week as gardener, plus I got a call back from Bernard who runs a garden maintenance company, who offered me another 2 days a week work. So pretty soon, I'll be back on my feet. It's been a difficult start to winter, but I think things are finally turning around.

* * *

Later that night....

The footpath is crowded as I push a sack truck loaded with my gear down Hindley street at seven in the evening, weaving around the homeless men camped outside the convenience store, passing through thick clouds of delicious, sweet smelling smoke puffed into the cool night air by those seated outside the shisha bars who play cards or board games as they sip strong coffee from tiny cups. Music pulses through stone and earth from underground nightclubs, restaraunts are full and strip clubs are empty, a ratio that will reverse as the civil appeites of twilight give way to the nocturnal cravings of a friday night.

Outisde Casablabla, the tables are full of well dressed diners enjoying the atmosphere of the restaraunt strip along Leigh street, their faces lit and the air around them warmed by tall gas fired heaters. A waiter opens the door for me as I approach and I squeeze through the narrow entrance into the tall ceilinged restaraunt. Nearly every table is full, diners dressed in fine clothes eating rich moroccan food and talking loudly, joyfully over the music played by the DJ. I set up my gear by the bar, talk to the manager, plug my amp in and arrange the microphones near the wooden chair that is brought out for me. Unzipping music cases, I put my instruments on display and when everything is ready, I go to change into my costume. Kylea and Steff arrive, two dancers who have a regular gig here, and at whose invitation I am playing. We change backstage (the ladies have the use of a disabled access toilet, I take a stall in the men's toilet, the floor sticky and the air wet with the thick atmosphere of urinie and deodorant), and then I wait in the hallway until 7:45 when I take my place by the bar and begin.

The room is very noisy. At home I usually set my amp to level 2, and it is too loud to talk above, here I keep turning the amp up, and up, and up, until my drum is set at 5 and my harmoica at 7, and it is still only just audible above the din of the crowd. Still, I see feet tapping beneath tables, heads nodding and the occasional turn of a head as the diners look up to watch me. Playing in the Gawler Street Cafe has prepared me well for playing here, the tiny gestures of attentiveness are all I need to know that I am being received, and is is for those who listen that I play. The bar staff closest to me nod in appreciation and curiosity, someone stares with careful deliberation as I play my Koncovka, their eyes watching the tiny movements of my fingers at the bottom of the flute as I bend one note into another or flutter in vibrato a rising series of trills, rolling the back of my throat as I play skipping stones across the air.

My two song set complete (nice work if you can get it...?!), the dancers slink down the stairs from the mezzanine bar at the back of the restaraunt, their recorded music pumping through the house PA as they perform amidst the swerving waitresses carrying plates of food from the kitchen. Although I have seen these dances in rehearsal, I am surprised by how different they look here, the shapes and movements that seemed so familiar in the comfortable lounge room rehearsal space, now seem difficult to follow, the shapes their feet trace on the floor are muddied among the fading footsteps of customers ordering at the bar, turning to watch, drinks in hand. Their two song set complete, I take up my Darbuka and play for them as we roam from table to table, putting on our best smiles and serenading the men and women as they eat. I take a knee and drum, looking up at these beautiful women who have devoted their lives to dance, admiring their courage and their happiness. We move from table to table, eventually exiting through the side entrance to play outside for the diners on the street, returning through the front door for a flourishing finish.

With half an hour before our next set, we sit and drink, talking about the world. I have known both these dancers for many years, but I could still count the number of conversations we have shared on one hand. We perform at the same events, but conversations are usually restricted to "What time am I on?" and "Where can I get changed?" It is lovely to sit with a tall glass of Guiness in my hand, and to tallk about something other than performing. They are both lovely women and I am grateful to be in their company.

I play my Setar for the second set, turning the amp up to 8 and hearing this usually austere, delicate instrument buzz loudly in the room like an amplified, distorted guitar. I open with Flophouse Blues, then play The first day of winter, and finish with The Bridge. With the restaraunt now twice as crowded as before, the noise is huge and it feels like rock and roll, something I never expected to experience with a Setar in my hand. People groove in their seats as I play The Bridge, and a couple waiting in line to get a table nod their heads in time to the heavy, slow blues riff of Flophouse Blues, smiling and swelling with the joy of this little moment.

The brightness of atmosphere created by a dancer in a restaraunt is so very different from that of a stage. Dance is quite surreal, the movements so removed from everyday body movements, it makes me think again of the magic of street parades. Everyday life is wrapped in uniforms, movement is linear, mechanised, to a purpose. Dance is none of these things, expressing hunger for that which is not food, expressing joy for mysterious and secret triumphs, a wordless vocabulary of both passion and pain, the rush and push and undertow pull of our emotional lives. The skin tingles and a fluttering stomach make the flesh light, the bones hollow like a bird. To watch dance is to be be moved by it, the body imagines the movements, imagines it all on its own and we who watch are moved though we are still, and I can see in the eyes of the diners who turn away from their conversations, look up from their food, who close their mouths and open their eyes and ears, who watch, and in watching become a part of the performance, I can see in their eyes the magnificent magic of dance: that the movement of one, is mirrored in the stillness of the other. Performance is both public and private. In a restaraunt, since so many people do not look up, for those who do, and for those who catch our eyes and share a split second connection, it is like a private meeting, like we are playing just for that person and that no-one else knows what is happening, a secret in a public place.

After the dancers did their second set, after our second roaming vignette, I pack my gear, we change back into our street clothes and food is brought to us. How lovely to sit and chat after a gig, to relax and enjoy the beautiful atmosphere of the restaraunt as it slowly transforms itself into a nightclub, with younger and more wildly dressed people beginning to crowd the floor with drinks in their hands. Kylea, Steff and I later walk back to our cars together, weaving slowly through the running stream of people in the street. As we pass a strip club, I see through the large glass windows to the front bar. The room is thick with smoke, only the indistinct shapes of those closest to the window can be seen, dancing slowly to the pulsing vibration of sub-woofers.

　


Monday 31st July
It's amazing just how much a good gig transforms me as a person, how it balances my mind, steadies my hands, boosts my confidence beyond all previously known levels and makes me so much more of who I am supposed to be, as a happy, healthy, creative man, making my way in the world. Playing in the Gawler St Cafe this morning, it was like watching a future version of myself play the songs, my fingers stepped with confidence and precision across the frets, my right hand felt strong, precise, knowing, almost smug at the clever little tricks and smooth strides it makes across the strings.

Rain outside, sunlight streaming through the drops

I sit by the window with my ukulele and play music for the people.

When I arrived this morning the cafe was full, but everyone was silent, staring into the middle distance, staring into their phones, reading the newspaper. I started to play and the magic of music that has become reliable stirred the monday morning sleepiness and with my wistful melodies I woke them all up. My music is not cheerful, almost nothing at all in the major scale. What uplifting sensations there are come from the rhythms, and without knowing it, people respond to the rhythm, and to my songs that do not try to tell them to cheer up on a monday morning, instead saying, let it be Monday, let it be in all our tiredness, and tight lipped half hearted smiles. I say you have good reason to be pensive and grouchy, it is Monday, let us not pretend, but instead be of good cheer to know that hot food is before us, a musician plays in the corner and coffee is on our lips. Though the day is not yet really begun, we can share this moment and be happy to be here, sleepy, bored, distracted, on a rainy Monday morning in Mt Barker.

A customer who sat at the nearest table listened closely and in a moment between songs, pointed to an article in the newspaper stating that today is "Unusual Musical Instrument Day"...so I bring out my Setar and sing for her, talking afterward of the ancient origins of the lute and the intertwining paths of development that lead to the modern 6 string guitar. She asked if the Setar was related to the Mandolin, a common question that stems from the sound of paired strings, all the better for singing with.

So I sang for her, and for all those who sat with me facing the day with varying expectations and desires. Monday in a little town in South Australia. An ordinary day.


　

June

1st of June

Recording at Stompy's
A musician goes to the home of another musician, a ukulele in one hand, a bag of hot chips in the other. A digital camera is set up on a cluttered desk. Actually, saying the desk is cluttered makes it sound much neater than it is. No surface is visible beneath the drifting topography of books, cd's records and scraps of note paper. Upon a crooked stack of books (one of which I note with some pleasure is a paperback edition of The Book of Five Rings, by Miyamoto Musashi), is the tiny digital video camera, about the size of a pocket noepad.

The room is small, three people could stand up in the tiny floorspace left by the furniture. A bed takes up two thirds, a desktop computer sits on the bedside table. Posters, photos, a chinese fan and a painting in a frame hang fixed upon the wall with blue-tac, sticky tape or string. Heavy duty guitar cases are stacked against the foot of the bed, which presses against the front of a tall bookshelf. A clothes rack stands before the frosted glass window; shirts, pants, a leather pilots cap, a trilby hat with a harmoinca shaped pin on the ribbon, leather boots and sneakers. The narrow door leads to the laundry at the back of the of the house, where more guitar cases are stacked on the floor.

Lord Stompy is a man Devoted to music. Working with him, coming to terms with our shared aesthetic, developing songs, recording, playing live - Stompy and I have worked consistently together since we met five or so years ago. Playing gypsy music on the street, writing shared poetry, recording with a travelling accordian player from Texas, forming a dirty four piece poetry band and recording an album, helping each other move house, twice each.

I have been meaning to come to his house to record some video for youtube for a long time. I finally did it, on a night when band practice was on, but Gardy couldn't make it because he was too busy rehearsing music for his school exams. So, hot chips and ukulele in hand, I arrive.

You never know how any recording session will turn out. I have gone in confident and come out defeated, I have gone in half drunk and heartbroken and come out a transformed man. Music is so much more than the music. It is a way of relating to everything, particularly it is a vocabulary for emotions which do not otherwise have names correspondent with spoken or written language. Tonight I walk in nervous, a few coffee jitters, I sit on the wooden chair, look at the small image of myself on the camera screen, tune up, hum a little.

My first take is excellent, but by the end of it my heart is absolutely racing and my hands are shaking. My mind clashes with images of an imagined audience, and the solitary eye of the camera, unblinking, unmoved, impartial and that clash is audible in the nature of my playing; at times hurried, at times restraining that haste, moments of doubt, miniscule flickers, but the music hides nothing. I take a few deep breaths, Stompy plugs my uke into his amp and sets it low, sitting it behind me by the door. I play again, only this time I imagine Regan sitting before me, and I play the song that I wrote for her. She has been such a steadying influence on me. I imagine her smile, which I always delight to see when she dances, and I sing for her. When I finish the song, my heart is steady, my body relaxed.

There are two audiences. The one in the room, and the one in your mind.

I record three more songs, each flowing out of me with ease, and the precision of that ease. I imagine that I am alone. Just me and the music.

Every tiny error I make, is preceeded by a moment of self doubt. I do not believe that I can do it, and so I can't. I doubt that the music is interesting for others who are listening, so I try to do something fancy to impress them and I make a mistake. The audience in my mind is a real enemy, and the self doubt that allows this illusion to continue haunting me, though diminshed in recent months, is a steady trickle at the back of my thoughts.

Despite the doubts, my confidence is stronger and the videos are excellent. In a few days I will upload them to youtube and await the results of public opinion.

　


June 5th

Bridgewater Trio at the Football
The Bridgewater Trio played at a football game yesteday, Panthers vs Magpies at the Hickinbotham Oval. The newsprint wasn't even dry reporting the latest terrorist attack in London. Blood in the streets while we dance in the sunshine. Everyone at the game was very welcoming, beaming smiles perhaps a little too bright, like they had all read the news and were worried about what might happen here. Three dancers from Arabesque accompanied us, Jenny, Sari and Eleanor.


Facing the amphitheatre and the members clubrooms above it, we stood on the edge of the oval, warm grass beneath us, microphones, cables, foldback speakers, the busy, eager faces of the sound techs, bespectacled before the sound desk, before the spectacle between half-time sirens. The amplified sound of our music could be heard loud and clear across to the far side of the oval, the softest tap on our drums resounding all around us and the strident voice of the violin lifting past the buildings and up into into the sky, taking us with it.

Thirteen minutes painted perfect in the sunlit spotlight, dancing the only solution we know to the war in the east. Most of the time I sink with dread and powerlessness at the thought of what is yet to come. And it is going to come. There has never been a more important time to do what we do, to engage with the culture of our enemy, to humanise the innocent who have been taken hostage by their own worst fears, just as we are being taken hostage by our own. We simple folk upon the stage are making peace, just as others are making war. We endeavour to help others enjoy the profits of peace, even as our leaders manipulate the profits of war.

"In such an ugly time, the only true rebellion is beauty."

Crimethink

　

9th June

Recording at home in Nairne
A musician goes to the home of another musician, this time, it is my home. Stompy brings his webcam, his amp, and a bundle of harmonicas. We stay up late by the fireplace, listening to music, playing music, talking. Stompy and I have no trouble talking, like a couple of old housewives, as they say.

In the morning I get my son ready for school, preparing porridge for breakfast, making his lunch, packing his bag. Wren and Stompy get along really well, they always have, taking delight in the total weirdness of each other's imaginations. I drive Wren to school then return home to light the fire and make a second coffee. We sit warming ourselves for a couple of hours, mucking around on ukulele, talking, talking, talking.

The camera sits atop a pile of books, mostly world mythology since they are the thickest hardback books I have, stacked upon a stool by my back door where the morning light trickles past the drooping wet autumn leaves. I live in a three room flat beside an old fashioned toystore, in a pioneer building made of stone with a basement spanning the underside of the entire building. The basement is full of ghosts, mice, and my landlord's old furniture, books, theatre props and a surfboard. My front steps land in the middle of the footpath and from my bedroom window I can sit at my writing desk and look out upon the street. We begin recording in the loungeroom/kitchen, shadows and light fall upon me as I take my seat and lift up my Setar.

I am getting used to the camera, learning how to look into it, how to look through it and into myself. It is a mirror. Hakim Bey (in his book The Temporary Autonomous Zone,) once suggested that the Shaman is one who puts on his spirit mask, then stands before the mirror and asks, 'what is my true desire'. Staring into the dark reflection of the lense, I seem to have become my true desire, and the mask I see tells the story of my destiny. I study my face as if I were a stranger, I try to read the lines in my skin, the flicker of my eye, the bitten lip, the crease between my eyebreows, the curve of my spine and the huddle of my shoulders. I try to understand what I am seeing, who I am seeing. I ask, who is this?

I guess that answer only comes at the end of the story, and even then it is the answer to a different question.

　


Saturday June 10th

Drum Classes at Arabesque
In the flophouse next to the dance studio, amidst the torn bags of garbage, rat eaten mattresses and dust clogged dunes of waste upon the floor, down the hallway with every floorboard flexing beneath my feet, the supporting beams rotten through to nothing, in the front room of the building, a hole in the floor opens into a cellar of utter darkness. Shining my torch down into the cavity I see only its emptiness, and the garbage bags rolled down upon rotten stairs descending. This dilapidated six room wreck has been so important to me over recent years, a place removed from everyday reality yet visibly dissolving in a reality all its own. Decades of neglect shine through holes in the brick walls, the beams of morning sunlight blinding me as I enter. In the moments before drum class I sit to write, my unhurried pen floating softly cursive upon the last page of my journal, another verse for the flophouse blues.

Soon I will return with Stompy and his webcam.

* * *

Iron Dwarf (formerly Operation Firehat) gig at the Gaslight Hotel.

The Sun has long since set as we take the stage, we three with our hearts in our throats and in our hands, ready to start again, again. It seems every day is another reason to be born, and every time we take the stage it is as different people. Tonight we took the stage and for a moment it was ours, for a moment the moment was hours, and the audience looking up at us saw us as we dreamed of ourselves being.

Week after week, months passing with slivers of the moon peeling days from the calendar of our lives, a year is gone in the blink of a summer and already it is winter again and we are on this warm stage with the freezing night outside the windows where no-one walks beneath the smoky fog-lit street lights.

Where once there were four, now there are three, and we three make the best of what we have to give each other, and honestly, we fucking rock. Our two new songs, Water Avenue, and The Mexican are our best work yet, making our prior achievments seem faded as last years roses still clinging to the bush. I am amazed at the development of our songwrtiting now that we are a three piece. Without the clouding sound from a guitar, the voice of each remaining instrument becomes sharply audible, and our devotion is strengthened by what we hear.

* * *

I feel compelled to write more about Stompy and Ryan. Stompy is a much maligned, misunderstood misfit, he is my brother, and there are very few friendships in a lifetime that can be worthy of that title. Ryan is a plainclothed undercover gnostic monk practicing his zen funk discipline in an attic room above a Parkour gym in the heart of the city. He too, I call my brother. Music makes family of us, and the trials we go through together in the pursuit of our shared goals makes us strong. Being onstage with them is the fulfillment of a dream. In red lights upon a tiny carpeted stage in the corner of an old backstreet pub, we three see a grandeur in each other that is not apparent in our humble surroundings. We are devoted to this music, it means something to us that goes beyond the songs and delves deep into our mutual need to be challenged musically. Each song calls our bluff and requires us to develop new techniques in order to play it, pushing us deeper into the real potential of this three part arrangement.

The gig on Saturday night was fantastic. I feel amazing about it. We were just an unknown three piece band opening a show in a pub that was full with forty people in it, but we held ourseves to a high standard of playing, we rehearsed thoroughly and the end result was a seven song set of our best material played with real passion and intensity. Without Nick, it feels like starting the band all over again, there is a lot of lost ground to recover, perhaps ten songs now scrubbed from our set, but we have a deep shared musical vocabulary and the trust we have built through the last year and a half is a solid foundation to base the new music on.

　


Monday June 12th

Recording with Diana at LB Studio
When Diana walked in I could see there was something different, she seemed taller, her shoulders square, lifted from within. Confidence is a cloak my family wear unconvincingly at most times; there is a story to be told there, but that is not for today.

My sister has an amazing voice, but little confidence with it. She has spent years writing songs for her children and honing her voice singing for them, and she played as Adelaide Adams in the Adelaide Theatre Comapny's production of Calamity Jane, but she has never recorded music. Last night's recording was our first rehearsal of the song, and the first time I ever heard Diana really open up with her voice. During a chorus practice run, my whole body tingled with the buzzing energy of her vocal harmony, I had to stop playing as a shiver ran the length of my spine making me drop the pick.

Then when the microphones were on, her confidence failed, her voice was overworked from practice and one flat note preceeded the next, her tone deflating with each passing verse. Music is odd this way. You could do something five minutes before, but now it is impossible. I know when to stop pushing, so we took a break, drank a shot of whiskey and started on a spoken word piece, a haunted movie scene called 'The runaway'.

We returned to the song later in the evening, but two more takes showed us that Diana had lots of ideas, but needed more time to practice the song. In the five years since the first parts of the melody were developed, the song has grown to become woven with nuance and subtle melody variations. So now Diana has a copy of the dulcimer base recording and another month to practice.

The album is almost complete. I have one more song to record on Setar, The Bridge. Then come the overdubs on Street Dance and Road less travelled, then...then...then...

　


Tuesday June 13th

Rehearsal at Stompy's

Another sesssion at Stompy's, rehearsing a new song for Iron Dwarf and editing the videos we took at my house last week. We discovered the sepia filters and other colour settings on the software that give the videos the perfect shade I have wanted to use for the Zebulon project since the beginning. One video was unusable due to the camera shaking throughout the song because of my stomping foot on the floor, but the Setar (Song of the South) and Harmonica (Dance the pain away) have both turned out very well. I will probably use the sound from these videos as the songs on the album. With almost all the songs recorded, I am about to enter phase two of the album, finalising the overdubs and completing first mixes on all the songs. Then phase three is final mixing, song selecting and ordering. Phase four is the final mastering process, balancing the volume of all the tracks and smoothing all the song transitions. Phase five is the completion of the album cover, editing of the blog (this blog you are reading) and uploading of the album to Bandcamp. Phase six is the album launch party, which is actually the part I dread the most, yet somehow also the most important part of the project and the one that requires almost as much work as the entire recording process. I should probably contact the venue now and book a date...having a hard deadline is a good thing to work towards.

　


Friday June 16th
I have had time to listen to all the recordings and put them into a test order, with the short atmospheric vignettes slotted in amongst the songs. It is like the soundtrack to a movie, each transition of the album is carried along by these scenes conjuring images of the main charater on his journey. It makes me consider re-naming the album 'The Runaway' and packaging it as if it were the sountrack to a film. So as of today, I am ready to send out the pre-release demo version of the album for review. Time to make some covers and burn some cd's.

* * *

I have finally sunk beneath the waterline. I owe money for my last car service, while my car is overdue for its next one, my income has slipped to only $490 for next fortnight while my rent is $460. I have thirty dollars in my pocket and seventy in the bank. I'm not drowning yet, but I'm holding my breath.

But...I have made contact and set a trial work day next week for another garden job in Bridgewater. Also, the new owners of Peechabella are local vignerons and I should be able to talk with them next week about my future employment, which may include working on their other properties.

So...not drowning yet, but I'm holding my breath.

 It pulls heavy on my heart that I cannot provide for myself. I feel I have failed at something fundamental in a man's life, and I have no-one to blame but myself. My life is the consequence of my choices. I chose to put money and work low on my priorities, instead choosing music and family, and it makes me poor. But when I cannot even pay my bills or feed myself and my son, I really wonder about the distance between needs and wants.

Yet I don't want to busk in Mt Barker. It feels like begging. I cringe inside when I think of standing on those streets playing music in the winter. I have a lot of mixed up feelings about poverty and wealth. I am simultaneously proud and ashamed of both qualities in myself, the dialogue between these two sides governing my whole relationship to work and money. It is a reflection of my inner struggle between wildness and civility, central themes of the human endeavour.

Yet...I must play on the street, I must use my time to earn money somehow.

　


June 19th

Busking in Mt Barker
First I played at the Gawler Street Cafe for an hour, it was busy, the perfect Autumnal weather has put a smile on everyone's face. I know that technically, it is Winter now, but the earth says otherwise. Too many leaves still on the trees and the Jonquils haven't really put on their floral show yet. In the cafe it is loud, I feel as though my ukulele sounds quiet, muffled by the crashing joyful noises of the kitchen and the customers over breakfast. The owners sit at the very front of the place, eating breakfast at the long table and talking with customers as they enter. Cafe owners are usually overworked, perpetually exhausted and drink too much booze. These guys seem as relaxed as a sunday starting with champagne.

Playing here is like going back in time, it has a distinctly medieval village feel, an atmosphere that starts with the wood fire oven and kichen completely visible from the tables, runs up the old brick walls and tall ceiling, gathers in the centre of the room at the long communal trestle table where three or four groups of people may sit to eat, a table where strangers meet and from my corner, ukulele in hand I listen to the music of their conversations, and I play my melodies all around them and all around the room I can hear them listening as they talk and laugh and eat and smile in the perfect Autumn light. A lady I know put a few coins in my uke case and said she wished she could have given me more.

When I had played my fill, I packed up and drove across town to a busking spot behind a supermarket, next to the 2 level car park. I have seen buskers stand or sit beneath the beautiful branches of an old oak tree and serenade shoppers as they cross the road. I sat on my cajon, swung my leg over my knee and smiled as I played. I observed a few things. Those who put $5 notes into my case, were a very old lady, and a young man with a plaited beard. Professional, or well dressed persons were least likely to turn their heads to acknowledge the music. I also saw a guy with the palest skin I can recall wait 20 minutes for a cab. I saw a mum with two kids and two trolleys piled high with food. I saw my old friend Damien, (he is Chantelle's father), walking with his toddler son on his one day off a week. He runs his own handyman service and works six days a week, and is having to continually knock back work.

Moments like these remind me that my poverty is chosen. I play music while others work. They earn money while I earn....well, what do I earn?

I took a break to eat some lunch I had brought from home, sitting behind the carpark, hidden from view in a sunny spot by the creek, down where the kids smoke cigarettes and break bottles. I ate fried chicken and scrambled eggs and soaked up the sunshine. I love to feel unobserved, especially on days when I play music. The isolation is powerful, it helps me re-set my balance, my sense of who I actually am, rather than who I am as a performer. I went back out, warm to my toes and played a few more songs before flexing my sore fingers and closing my case on the fifteen odd dollars I had earned for my time.

I left Mt Barker and stopped off at home in Nairne to grab my folder of notes on Middle Eastern music theory and begin transcribing the Makams I want to start learning. I have been practicing Setar for an hour or more each day, working over and over on the two songs I have left to record for my album. They are songs I have played for years, but they seem the least familiar to me. Bridge segments remain un-analysed, patterns in the syncopation uncounted, it is like studying someone else's music, listening over and over to the melody trying to get it right, exactly right. Makam study is something I have been putting off for a long time, being unable to read sheet music, and feeling daunted by the extra notation and unfamiliar language of Middle Eastern modes. Still, today I trascribed two makams into tab format, just like I have done for the gypsy and oriental scales on the uke. I am still uncertain about the correct tuning of some of the quarter notes, but I will muddle through and use my ear to find something that sounds balanced. I trust my instincts in the absence of formal instruction. Still, when I have a few dollars to spare, I must return to Sina Aria for more lessons.

　


20th June

Iron Dwarf rehearsal
We all arrive in a good mood so we warm up with The Mexican, then go on to write a new doom metal song, and a calypso reggae. I have a lot of music study to do. I'm starting to get the funk groove rhythm, listening to Herbie Hancock (Man Child, Fat Albert Rotunda, Headhunters), and today Stompy gave me a James Brown CD. He also gave me a DVD of Nina Hagen, a punk rocker from East Germany in the 70's. Tonight I gave both Stompy and Gardy a copy of my new album in its present demo form, they will be the first people to hear it in such a way.

Like a tiny whisper, I release my music of invisible enclaves into the world.


　

24th of June

(Sitting in my car before rehearsal at Raj's)
I am the saboteur of my own future. I prevent myself from pursuing my dreams by keeping myself too poor to afford to them. My pride keeps me from wealth, and now, even from basic sustenance. Too proud to beg on the streets, even with an instrument in my hand, too proud to beg from the goverment. I am trying to prove myself a man, I am trying to prove that I can support myself, that I can earn and pay my way through the world, but I seem incapable of working enough to even feed myself. I am trapped by my own inactivity, blocked. Poverty prevents me from investing in my own future, I feel guilty for putting so much time into music, for the way it drags me away from my family responsibilities. I feel guilty that I cannot earn enough from music to justify the time it takes from my family.

I actually seem to feel guilty about everything. I burned a very bad paradigm into myself during the last few years. "Everything I do is wrong." There it is. The code that I have lived by since Hannah left me. Everything I do is wrong, everything I do hurts others. My devotion to music is a slander upon my devotion to my partner. I should be working to earn money to make our home into what it needs to be in order for Wren and I to move back in.

(Solomon has arrived, time to go in and meet this new guitarist Raj wants me to meet. Another musical expense at a time when I can barely afford to feed myself.)

* * *

The rehearsal was amazing actually. The wealth I earn from music is not counted in dollars. Drumming with Solomon and Rajesh is incredible, reminding me of my earliest drumming experiences, improvised wonderment, spontaneous creation of MUSIC! Rajesh said that he would try to get us some paid work at Casablabla. I also played a few of my ukulele songs while Solomon drummed...this is the first time I have ever really felt comfortable having my music being accompanied. Solomon and I are on the same wavelength, and when he played the frame drum it was like...well, it was like finding a home I didn't know I belonged to. Such a familiar sound, it was the music I have been trying to create all this time, and now I am finally able to achieve it.

The guitarist, Sunny, who joined us later, played in a style half western, half Indian. He is Punjabi, North Indian, a region famous for its fast, (and very fast) music. Sunny played in a sweet, relaxed way, a western folk guitar style with bits of blues, rock and flamenco, as well as Indian raga influences. For a first jam session, I thought we found some good common ground to build songs upon. I got to play harmonica as well as drums, and standing before the microphone I felt myself seeing the world as Stompy sees it. The potential for my musical aspirations to see fruition with this group of people seems very real.

　


25th of June

Fiesta!
I played a few songs at the Littlehampton primary school fiesta on Friday night. My own childhood memories of school fairs and the like are of miserable, dull daytime gatherings with shitty craft stalls, shitty kids games, hot weather and everything set up in the school quardrangle where knees were grazed upon the rough bitumen-like surface. Ugh. The Littlehampton school fiesta ran from 5-9pm, there was mexican food, beer and wine, live music and dance and what seemed to be a crowd of every single family in the whole school, three hundred or so people crammed into the sheltered courtyard beside the school class kitchen. Children ran and played all around us, moustaches painted on boys faces making them seem like tiny bandits. In the darkness of the gardens, gangs of kids played among the bushes, visible only by the tiny coloured LED lights on their fingers. The crowd was thick, people pressing against each other as they mingle, burritos in their hands, mexican hats upon their heads and warm smiles on their faces.

I have been a part of many communities, some of which were little more than blind grudges and bindng by-laws, but this school community is a genuine collective, people voluntarilly working together to create a beautiful and lively environment for their children to grow up in. On the tiny stage boys performed breakdances they had rehearsed, I saw a young girl play a trumpet solo, the front office lady played the Tuba, doing a cover of 'The bare necessities' from the Jungle Book. A teenage girl of about 14 played a guitar and sang with such beauty and relaxed ease that it was like seeing a superstar being born. She reminded me of the 1960's English/Indian folk singer, Vashti Bunyan.

I played three songs, Flophouse Blues, Dance the Pain Away, and Skipping Stones, on Ukulele, Harmonica and Koncovka. Hardly aware of the faces of the crowd, I hid inside the music, glancing up briefly to see the entranced smiles of adults and a five year old girl spinning and twisting, dancing alone.

* * *

The next day, Sunday, I played at the Pig and Thistle in exchange for the most delicious poached eggs with smoked salmon and hollandaise sauce I have ever had. While playing, a six year old boy came to watch me, taking a stool right in front of me and staring up with wonder while his family sat outside eating lunch. The boy's name was Darcy, and while I ate my lunch he told me about himself and the things he likes best at school. I helped him tie his schoelaces and let him play my harmonica and ukulele. Living in a country town is great.

　

Admit something.
Everyone you see, you say to them
"Love me."
Of course you do not do this out loud:
Otherwise,
someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this,
this great pull in us
to connect.
Why not become the one
who lives with a full moon in each eye
that is always saying,
with that sweet moon
language,
what every other eye in this world
is dying to
hear.
– Hafiz



　

26th June

Recording at LB Studio
Gardy is doing his bass overdubs on 'Street Dance'....it is nothing like I had imagined. He is playing counter-rhythmic melodies across everything. My head is spinning. These half-prepared recording sessions have a divine habit of producing wholly unexpected results, and the powerful melodies that Gardy is playing RIGHT NOW...are like nothing I have ever heard.

Deva struggled with what is a very unusual song with timing changes, tempo changes and unusual rhythms, but the end result is rather beautiful. As he fought to grasp the exact measues of my melodies, he stumbled. When he played the counter rhythm that he felt with his body, when he listened to the pulse of the music, (not the beat) he played the way the song wanted to be played.

The studio is a fascinating alchemical lab, where we as musicians become ourselves through trial and error, through improvisation and experimentation. The rule seems to be, Break the Rules. Only when we really abandon the constraints of convention, assumption....(and now Stompy has showed up. The night carries on....write more later)

Gardy played, and played, played and cursed and played and played again, a hundred takes to get it just right, all the while calling himself an idiot, getting tense, never satsfied with his performance

* * *

(in the morning)
Last night's efforts from Gardy say a lot about him. He said that he was playing a new technique he had never used before, and that since he was on school holidays, he hadn't played an instrument all week. The technique comment says applies to the whole gang of musicians I am working with at the moment...the development of new techniques is the minimum requirement of every single song we write. Every song is an opportunity to develop as musicians, and no opportunity is wasted on easy material. Only through the constant refinement of our craft can we ever hope to succeed as musicians, and it is the only hope any of us has for real happiness, for none of us will ever be satisfied with anything less than mastery, and that is a concept so nebulous as to dissapate into meaninglessnes the closer one gets to it. It is a cycle perpetuated by feelings of inadequacy and alleviated only in the moment of actual improvement. Once the new technique has been grasped and practiced into routine, the feeling of laziness, deficiency and an edgy hunger for more take over and the rooms ring out with the sound a new effort bringing forth a new technique, a new mastery.

The truth is, we are amateurs, striving for a goal forever receeding, yet forever within our grasp. It is the bird in the hand, the two in the bush, three upon the wing and four about to sing.


　

June 29th
I realised today, that the story I am telling you, is the same story every artist tells. Trouble with money, struggling with depression and madness, struggling to find value in art, and to find others willing to value that art.

I slipped beneath the waterline today. Gasping for breath, I counted off my debts against the pennies in my pocket and decided instead, to tell you a different story.

　

　

The Raven and the Buddha

Not so long ago, the Raven had to enter hell. It is not known why, but it is safe to assume that he had no other choice. The gates of hell are guarded, and the keeper asks a price. At the gate stood The Blackness, Despair. The first demon.

"What price now?" The Raven asked.

"The price is for later. One day we will ask for our due, and it will be paid. That is the price."

Having no other choice, the Raven paid the price, and shook hands with The Black.

In Hell, The Raven bore witness to the furthest reaches of life without boundaries, without reserve. Everything in Hell is an extreme of itself, there is no middle ground, no passive stance, no ceasefire. There he met with a demon of Greed who asked him to deliver a message to the Buddha, inviting him to dinner. The Demon sat in a great feasting hall where every extinct species ever known upon the earth had been baked black in ovens too hot for clay, and served upon broken plates. Staring down with compound eyes, listening with compuond ears, and speaking with a compound voice, the Demon spoke to the Raven.


Take this invitation to the Buddha Take this invitation to the Buddha Take this invitation to the Buddha Take this invitation to the Buddha Take this invitation to the Buddha Take this invitation to the Buddha Take this invitation to the Buddha...

The Raven, with eyes averted, took the invitation from the Demon and left. Passsing the gates of Hell again, the keeper nodded and reminded him of his debt.

The Raven delivered the invitation to the Buddha. The Buddha laughed, not touching the paper.

"I dined with him last night, and he invites me to dine again tonight! Ha! He is greedy even for enlightenment. His mouth is full yet he reches for more."

"Will you go?"

"Of course I will."

So the Raven returned to Hell, and was told at the Gate that payment was not required a second time. The feasting hall was thick with the smoke of extinction, an obscuring haze preveted the Raven from having to look upon the Demon a second time. "The Buddha will dine with you tonight."

You may leave Was the reply.

The Raven made to leave the hall, but, obscured by the smoke, he hid himself in the caverous ceiling, and folding himself between two shadows, he lay in wait. The smoke roiled thick from the endlessly burning meat, so thick, that when the Buddha arrrived, the Raven could only see blurry shapes, and hear muffled voices as the Demon and the Saint conversed. Gradually, the smoke began to clear.

The tables and chairs were gone, the wretched, inedible death feast vanished.

Upon the floor sat a solitary man dressed in heavy robes, staring into a mirror.

The Raven left hell.


* * *
I have been writing a novel for about seven years, it is my fourth novel, but the first one I have ever considered to be really worth developing to the very end. The above tale is a story from within that novel. It feels better to share with you a myth from the pantheon in my mind, than to write another word about money.

May 2017
　

Tuesday 2nd of May

Last night was a Zebulon recording session with Mark.; A poem I wrote about two years ago now seems to be an eerie prophecy, The Man on the corner. I took my Italian harmonium, which was found on the side of the road about thirty years ago by a friend and stored in their hallway unplayed for pretty much that whole time. When they gave it to me, I pulled it apart, stripped the peeling varnish back and oiled the timber before re-varnishing it and setting it up in my own studio. Old instruments have a lovely habit of having rather unique tunings, and this one is perfect. When Stompy came in to record a harmonica part, he had to bend every single note to stay in tune with it. He said it might be tuned to A 432hz, and I suppose it's possible that it is a pre-WWII make, these Italian harmoniums were certainly around back then. The song has a xylophone part which is also in its own unique tuning, the end result being a brain twisting harmony that makes me cross my eyes and stick my tongue out, I feel dizzy listening to it. It is on the very edge of dischordant noise, but Stompy is such a master of the harmonica that it actually all works.

I also recorded three other poems, just spoken word demo's for me to listen to and work out if any music parts are needed. Whatever you do don't talk about the war, The Value of Laughter, and Crossfire. I have a sample of traffic noise which I had playing in my headphones as I recited the poems...there is something about the rhythm of rush hour traffic that helps to pace the poems, it gives me space to pause for breath. The atmosphere makes me feel as though I am speaking to someone as I walk along the road.

* * *

Nick quit Operation Firehat today. I'm sitting now at the Coopers Alehouse near Gardy's, The three who remain are meeting here to talk about the future. I guess I could see it coming. Nick has been withdrawn since the Fringe, showing obvious signs of burnout and discontent. Talking with him on the phone today was excellent. I have a sense of the bigger picture. Bands change, but the personal relationship one has with another musician is something that lasts your whole life. Nick didn't want to be associated with Stompy's more abrasive, larrikin and rude lyrics. Nick has kept this burrowing splinter to himself for a long time, and now it has come out, but all too late.

　


May 3rd
We met, we talked. We three will go on. We jammed in Gardy's room, hearing the songs for the first time without guitar...the basslines are aready so melodic that they quickly become the main melody, the leading instrument. We will try it for a few weeks as a trio and see how we feel, get back into the studio to record. It's funny, Nick never really spoke his mind out loud at rehearsals, he would always mutter quietly to me when Stompy was out of the room. Nick was oddly submissive in this way, never willing to butt heads with Stompy, the result being an unspoken grudge that festered into genuine resentment.

Huh, I'm an armchair psychologist now.

Who can really know a man's mind?

　


May 6th
A few days with no music. Just beautiful Autumn weather and a chance to get some real work done at the farm. The harvest is done, now winter can begin, all things drawing back into themselves. Towering columns of smoke rise from farms across the landscape as the first bonfires are lit. Yesterday, four Chinese businessmen flew in from Hong Kong to inspect the property for potential purchase.


One

two, three, four

five men in suits -

the world balances on a quill-tip.

* * *

I

am


Anachronistic at 37

more BC than AD

Shovel in one hand

Ladel in the other

* * *

I feel like a backwards hillbilly sometimes, clinging to the old world even as it shrivels up and vanishes. I have other friends for whom the hyper-futuristic world is an open door, an opportunity for growth. For me, the modern world is all flash and sizzle, smoke and mirrors. I am busy trying to learn the Setar, an instrument first developed around 3000BC, I earn my daily bread by pruning hedges and planting flowers, watering lawns and sweeping pathways. Although when I come home I play games on Playstation, I write my journal on a modern, sleek laptop, I listen to music stored on my mobile phone. One foot in the past, one in the future. I wonder what kind of destiny I am carving for myself, trying to live simply in a future obsessed with complexity.

　


Monday May 8th
The little things matter the most. My day off today, so I vacuumed, re-arranged the lounge room furniture for winter (making room in front of the fire place), practiced Ukulele for an hour and then went across the road to the local cafe to play music. While I was there, the owner invited me to play music on Mothers Day for the lunch crowd, paid in cash, plus coffee and food. A customer also stepped away from her coffee to photograph me for her Hills Community Facebook group. It was a good thing I shaved before going out, I was a scraggly mess this morning.

Then this afternoon I taught two teenage boys and a retired lady at the Ink Pot Arts Hub in Mt Barker. I had my son Wren with me, and during the lesson he came up to play a rhythm for us, just something that he had stuck in his head. He played it through four times with exact precision, an 8 beat rhythm, then sat back down again. The retired lady has been playing Jembe for about 8 years, mostly african stuff, and also studies Belly Dancing with Mira from BellyDance Amethyst. She recognised the names of most of the rhythms I taught today, having danced to them. Ghawazi, Ayub, Masmoodi, Wahiida, Maqsum - names of places, numerical designations, tribal names, and Baladi which simply means 'My home'.

I got my Dulcimers back from Deliah today. She is such a postive person, high spirited without being ditzy or vague. We talked about the Fringe, her show had been quite successful and had resulted in her meeting venue directors and company managers from overseas who were interested in seeing her show tour in their home countries. I told her about my post show burnout, the guitarist leaving the band, the $300 paycheck at the end of an exhausting season of rehearsals and performances. I told her that this year saw the death of my illusions about ever really making any money from performing, how I see now that I will always spend more money making music than I will ever earn, certainly in this town.

I am still quite down. I am having trouble breathing as I develop Asthma-like symptoms, waking up gasping for breath at 4am every morning. I just had a coughing fit that made me vomit in the sink, that's the second time today.

Still, I cannot give up. I push more and more, my album must be heard by more than my friends. My efforts must bear fruit. I cannot give up. Only a few months to go, then I can launch these songs into the world, these melodies that have kept me awake at night. I live in hope.


Tuesday, May 9th
Firehat rehearsal at Gardy's tonight. Reinventing our sound, re-building the old songs from the ground up. With the guitar missing each of us has to work to cover the emptiness, but it is obvious that we still have real momentum as a three piece. There is some talk of bringing in Rob Wallace as a session violin player...the future is open to us. It feels good that we are getting straight down to business writing new songs. Tonight we finished off Water Avenue, and began a Mexican-Egyptian-Gypsy song, which has the most complex melodies and arrangements of anything we have done together.

As Gardy relaxes on the couch learning and then immediately mastering this new material in minutes, I sit in awe of his focus and continually expanding skill. His TAFE music study is polishing him like a diamond. Everyone is happy, a rare state for any group of musicians, and as a result our music is better, more precise and detailed, more beautiful, less aggressive, yet still retaining the heaviness we all crave.


Wednesday May 10th
A day home sick. I was up half the night with breathing trouble, coughing up phlegm. I got some writing done around 5am though, the lead-up to the breakthrough I made today with the ending plot lines of my novel. I have been struggling to see a clear way to the end of the story, but as I began to understand the motivations, desires and goals of my characters more, especially the villain, it all began to make sense.  My brother once told me Never protect you characters and it has been sound advice throughout the story. Every time I made things too safe for my protagonist, the story failed to make sense, but every time I let her suffer the consequences of her actions, everything would fall into place. This is not a punishment complex I am taking out on my character, everything that happens to her is a consequence of the choices she has made concerning power. How she relates to her own, and that of her allies and enemies.

I'm getting ahead of myself. You'll find out when the story is done and I am still a long way from that. Ten more chapters is my current estimate, on top of the 51 that have come before. And this is really only draft number two. The first draft had a simplistic old-timey mythological ending, too neat, too herculean. As I complete the second draft, the characters are all tested, their weaknesses exploited and their strengths countered.

Played some music on my front porch. Cooked some chicken for dinner with my son, listened to Red Panda, read some books, watched some cartoons, sat in bed writing. A good day.


Thursday May 11th
Dream. A kind of family gathering, my mother had a surprise for me, a cousin I hadn't seen since I was a child was going to be there. She had an unusual name, had written a book, had black and blue hair. The gathering was happening in a converted barn, but the other large farm sheds were full of mud pits where crocodiles were being bred. They were trained to not attack people, but there was still a nervous fear about being in the room with them. The crocodile dens were dark.

The gathering also had live music, and I was doing a short set of my own stuff.

The crocodilles are interesting, I've never dreamed of them before.

* * *

It is eleven o'clock, but I don't want it to be. I have polished song transcripts and printed out copies for my drum classes on saturday. The songs play in my head, layers building like sediment, one sound upon another. Like falling dust. persistent. invisible. the bottom of the ocean. the peak of a mountain.

　


Saturday, 13th May
Drum class today. The advanced students are on the verge of something big, a growing confidence spilled over today, buoyed partly by the african classes that two of them have also been taking. Today very little was taught, but much was learned. Someone would strike up a rhythm and rapidly the whole group would begin to improvise over it, layering one upon the next, and out of the spontaneous beauty of undirected, unarranged music, each of them burst forth with marvelous new rhythms, new solo patterns. Unfettered by the limits placed on them by song structures, or time limits, they shouted from rooftops, they danced on the tiles, they threw themselves from the edge of their hesitation and landed, stepping as if guided by a hand divine, onto the platform of their own confidence.

The beginner class is a far more intimate affair with only two students, one of them new to class. It is a simple mistake to become complacent when teaching beginner material, so the first thing I always say to new students is There is no such thing as a teacher. I can show you what to do, but you must do it. You must teach yourself the things you witness in class, you must repeat alone what you experienced in the group. I am not a teacher, I am a student, teaching what I know. There will never be a point at which there is nothing left to learn, and so, there are no teachers, only students with differing experiences, aspirations and talents. 



Sunday May 15th. Mothers Day
Pig 'N Thistle Cafe.

Two kids on the couch, bored. The boy, under ten, paws at a sticky green eyeball, a toy. The girl, about fourteen, sits too bored even to fidget. Around them the cafe is alive with quiet movement, people at work in a conversational way, step, speak, collect dish, step, speak, step. Customers cluster at tables, the very old, the very young and everyone between. Mothers day, like many festival days, seems now devoted to the sharing of food and the giving of flowers, a family day. The kids on the couch are the youngest of the owner, who busilly dips between her roles as chef, maitre d'hotel, waiter and mother. Her eldest son is a kitchen hand, beaming with the pleasure of his work, while the father works as head chef.

I set up my gear and begin playing as the kids get milkshakes and come back to the couch. I start with harmonica. It's good to start with harp, people know the harp but it doesn't get played everyday like the guitar, so an audience will prick up its ears to hear one played. Some old men nod or tip their hats in seeming kinship, the instrument means something to them. Wherever you go, stories circulate about harmonica players going back generations, someone's grandad played one in the war, their uncle still plays the last post on remeberance day.

I play a gypsy waltz, the room begins to sway and the magic of sound paints everything. Everyone in the room is conversing over the music which has replaced the silence now conspiculous in its absence. People listen to the music, and I think that it helps them listen to each other. We are moved by music, it gets under our defences and affects us whether we like it or not. Like stories.

In between songs I tell a couple stories to the kids, beginning with The Tale of the King's legendary Fart, from the 1001 Arabian Nights. Kids normally love fart stories, these two weren't so impressed. But when I told them the story of the Setar, I saw their imaginations captured. It goes something like this...


A couple hundred years ago, Iran was ruled by a foreign power, it doesn't matter who, tyrrany is the same no matter who wears the jackboot. The powers that be declared it a crime to sing one's prayers and to play a musical instrument at the same time. Punnishable by death. In protest, a prominent Setar player went into the streets to sing and to play. Of course the police came and took him away for execution. After his death, luthiers began adding a fourth string to the Setar, which made the instrument even better for singing with. The instrument has become a symbol of resistance against oppression.

I played music for the kids for almost an hour and when they left I played for the staff. The customers dined in the next room, able to hear my music, but not able to see me play it. So my audience was the staff. Once I identified my real audience it changed the way I played as I took care to study their reactions instead. The Barista bopped her head to the flute, the teenage kitchen hand smiled at the ukulele songs, the Chef liked the Dulcimer songs.

I wasn't dissapointed by my being at a remove from my expected audience. I just saw who I was playing for, and I played for them. When I had played for about two hours I ordered a short black, and was deeply satisfed by it. Oh the layers of flavour in a well made espresso. Chocolate overtones and a sweetness unlike any sugary treat known, then the earthy foundations of the coffee flavour. I had a ceasar salad, which I wolfed down in sudden hunger. I felt like an honoured guest at a family run roadside inn. A free meal is worth more than the menu price. There is something in the act of being served that delivers something else along with it. I am a parent, I am always making and serving food to others, and it is always a pleasure when someone does it for me. Knowing that my music paid for the meal is even better.

I liked playing for the staff. They were just doing their job, pleased that every time they moved from room to room, someone was sitting by the window playing music. I felt I was there to soundtrack to the moment. I hear my melodies underscoring conversations, punctuating the rhythms of speech. Replacing the silence between their breaths with glissandi, the strum and pluck of a limping waltz, the songbird cry of an Elder Flute.


Note on the history behind the Setar:


The Persian Setar originally had three strings, but a Darvish named Moshtaq-Ali Shah added a fourth one to improve the sound. That’s why this string is also known as Moshtaq’s string. Moshtaq is a well-known figure in mysticism and literature. On the 27th of Ramazan in 1792 (1206 Lunar Hejri calendar), he was stoned to death because he sang the call to prayer at the Jum'ah Masjid, while playing the Setar. His body is buried in Kerman’s Moshtaqieh square next to Mirza Hossein Khan’s tomb and is a pilgrim’s stop among mystics.

This great mystic called his instrument "tchoub-e-sagzani" - a stick to beat dogs - as a reaction against the then puritans who wanted to ban music.
 This information was sourced from several websites, but most notably from the book,

　
Al-Kimia: The Mystical Islamic Essence of the Sacred Art of Alchemy

By John Eberly

Monday 16th May
Recording with The Bridgewater Trio.

　

We meet with smiles, glad to see each other again. We chat about the wedding gig...it really does stand out from all the other gigs. It is hard to speak about it, we look away, embarrassed by our failure to adequately encapsulate the experience with words. There will never be anything quite like that night. We position chiars, position instruments. We sit in a triangle Passing like a shadow between us, Mark moves with silent precision, laying cables, plugging in microphones, then kneeling before his low desk, he gazes lamplit into the rainbow screen of the recording software. We play bits of our first song, Malfuf, remembering the parts, finalising the arrangement. I keep getting lost in the second half, fumbling with the rhythm changes.

　

We stumble, struggle, half scribble notes upon a page that isn't looked at afterwards. Alice has a stunning capacity for structural understanding. The depth of experience her classical training has provided her has not moulded her into a cookie-cutout replica of the established school, rather she seems the quinitissential student, eager, curious, critical of establlished norms in society as well as music. A thinker, but also one who understands the limits of thinking, and where feeling takes over. Balanced. That is my impression of her. Posessed of self knowledge, and aware of her own ignorance. I am continually impressed by her skill as a musician, and the quality of her humanity as a person.

　

Mark presses record.

　

I won't describe every detail. You will hear the results for yourself sometime. We recorded three songs, shared a meal of fresh fruit, vegetables, soft cheese (mmmmm, tripple cream brie......) and roast chicken. We drink good coffee and play music until ten o'clock. Solomon, during the evening, re-played a drum solo about six times, as we struggled to pull everything together for Malfuf. I have heard Solomon solo a lot, and I believe that is reveals something about him. He is very driven, a pounding beat thunders through him, sometimes overtaking him in his pursuit of power. I thought I heard a samba marching band playing through him tonight. I think his solos reveal something of his character as a man as well. His paintings hang in the Marion Gallery as a part of his latest exhibition, while he is completing paperwork for the SALA festival later this year. He paints strong, striking images in black and white, stark illustrative patterns, psychedelic. He works long hours in a cleaning job, on weekends working from 4am - 2pm, with more regular daytime shifts on weekdays. He has a daughter, 5 years old, but that is all I really know about his family. Solomon has drive, the energy and the will to pursue his dreams.

　

Myself? Tonight I heard my solos, tricky, leaping, skipping, dodging the beat to trip over themselves in a three legged race. When I get it right, it's really special. When I don't, it's a crooked man's shamble down a broken down lane, unresolved, lacking structure, ill conceived and poorly timed.

But when I do get it right...the trip becomes a stumble, and that becomes a tumble, and that becomes a roll, becomes a leap, becomes a cartwheel and a double sommersault to land, drop dead in the centre of the beat.

　


Tuesday May 17th

　
I have just listened to a radio play, The Orbiting Human Circus. It is so beautiful, the kind of story that opens you up from within, from a place before words, a story scooped from the very edge of the imagination, a story that blurs the line between reality and dream. I am at work, now in this expanded state, I feel the wind on my skin, I hear the grass beneath my feet, the music of the world is all around.

* * *

　Just back from Firehat rehearsal. There is something very business-like, reinventing the band as a three piece. The old songs sound empty when we play them as we used to, but as we listen more carefully, and find ways to evolve them, abandoning the old ways, embracing the new. We laugh about renaming the band Iron Dwarf, we make the new mexican metal song even more complex, with a new 15 beat ending melody. 123 123 123 12 12 12. Recordings on my phone, setlist scrawled on a notepad left on the floor. Just another day in a rock band.

　


Saturday May 20th

Drum Arabesque at the Body, Mind and Psychic Fair

　
There are strange gigs like this one that seem to have nothing to do with the audience. They were there, I saw them, but they were meaningless. The Body, Mind and Psychic Fair is not a place I would ever have expected to perform, but today my drum students and I played for Regan and Sarii. The crowd were there, but I did not play for them, I only saw the faces of my students, these friends of mine in drumming. I saw the faces of the dancers, the push of their movement, the hint of bare feet turning beneath their huge skirts. I heard our music, I was inside the circle of sound. I saw the crowd, but they were not really there. I played for my students, I played for the dancers. The crowd, the fair, were nothing more than a pretext. I played for the music, and when it was over I milled about with my friends, drummers and dancers all, faintly absorbing the soft afterglow of their pride.

　
The crowd meant nothing. They had not come to see us play, they were only there because of the fair. They sat down because it was a place to sit down and something was happening on a stage, something other than a psychic talking into a microphone. Though the fair was well attended, I felt a lethargy for the shiny baubles on display. Trinkets marketed within the boundaries of spiritual benefit. Meditation stools were sold as Black Dragon Seats, gemstones were Healing Crystals, Everywhere psychics plied their trade, selling ideologies and therapies, every one with expensive signs and clever slogans. The last time I was here in the Jubilee Pavillion it was to see a Roller Derby match, before that I had seen The Mars Volta, Aphex Twin, Marilyn Manson, Soulfly, Korn and plenty of other acts in the Big Day Out. 

　
Being a part of the screaming crowd at the roller derby was closer to a spiritual experience than being a part of the crowd at the psychic fair. Seeing The Mars Volta WAS a spiritual experience, crushed in the thrashing crowd, pounded into an altered state of consciousness by the massive waves of sound and the ever intensifying furor of their stage performance. The psychic fair was a shopping mall, complete with bright lights and listless wandering consumers. I used to believe in all of that stuff, so I guess I'm expressing a bitter resentment at my own youthful gullibility. They would probably say I am holding an emotional block and that I could use a healing session. 

They might be right.

They might be just another used car salesman trying to make a buck by dressing up a rusted patchwork ideology and selling it as the path to liberation.

HayAllah, God is in the room. A fancy meditation seat will not invite HIM to sit closer to me, a crystal wand will not make my magic spells more powerful. There is no priest, no shaman, no pastor, to help you out of this disaster, and scratched into the prison wall plaster, there is no God, there is no master. One cannot buy a seat in heaven. God costs nothing. Transformation costs nothing. We are born illuminated with grace, and the path to peace is a process of relinquishing the burdens of unhappiness, discontent and greed. There is no product or service that will do anything to further one along the path.

Today I played for the musicians who shared the stage with me, and for the dancers who so proudly wear our music and who, through their grace and sensitivity, make movement from sound. For so long I have craved an audience, I have chased the stagelights as hard as my body will allow, but somewhere along the way I realised that the audience have little to do with the happiness I feel as a performer. 


Tuesday May 23rd
Change. It is happening in me. At 10:30pm I sit to play Setar and a melody comes out unheard of, played by someone with hands far more confident than mine. There is someone inside me that doesn't share my insecurites, doubts, or fears. He plays so beautifully, so instinctively that I find myself listening to the song; rather than feeling that I am the one playing, it is I who am being played.

A new attitude to music, a more mature handling, less desperate, less attached.

Yes, less attached.

What is it I dreamed of when I became a musician? Big stages, bright lights, cheering crowds. I have experienced all these things in different ways. The accoutrements of music. Now I find myself playing the music, FOR the music. It's not for the crowd, even though I take to the stage to entertain them. Selfishly perhaps, now it feels that I take the stage to entertain myself, and to share in the music with my fellow musicians.


Saturday May 27th

 A few days off work, sick at first with a lingering cold, then a knee injury which has kept me hobbling around my house like an old man. Lots of time for music and writing. In the mornings I drink coffee and work on my novel, the brutal and violent conclusions writing themselves regardless of my desire for a peaceful resolution to the story. Outside the sunshine is too bright, the birdsong too cheerful to remain in the darkness of a fictional subteranean prison, so I put on my coat, grab my ukulele and limp across the road to the cafe where I sit playing in the sunshine, customers tapping their feet. The owner is very generous, offering me lunch, bringing me coffee. It is lovely to feel valued as a musician. These little sounds I pluck from a box with strings make people happy. When I cannot work it is nice to know that I can still make something of worth in the world.

My coffee done, I shift along the street, stepping into the toystore next to my house where I sit on the steps and play, chatting with the owner who is also my landlady. The music brings a couple customers in who buy little things they would not have lingered to see had it not been for my ukulele.

In the evening my friends come to visit, we listen to radio plays and play chess by the fire, talking and laughing at the grim comedy of Welcome to Nightvale. Arky is a very good chess player, and his victory over me was absolute. Seated in my old rocking chair, his careful tactical use of a line of pawns made my efforts to corner his King futile. It took less than an hour for him to put me in check-mate with his Queen and a Rook. Marvelous. I like losing at board games. I love watching a successful strategy at work, and it is even better to see the look of pride and self respect on my opponent's face. It doesn't matter what the game is, the fun is in the contest of minds.

　


Sunday May 28th

　
late at night

kept company by the silence of my home

I sweep my fingers across a three string dulcimer

lost in time and space, i imagine the prarie, warm and endlessly star lit

a land without clocks

where day is measured from horizon to horizon

and nights go on until you don't think the sun will ever come up again

　

will it ever come up again?

　

and then when the sun is high in the summer, when corn and beans and squash grow thick upon the warm earth and you wonder to yourself how could the night ever come, in a day such as this.

　

but it does come.

　

doesn't it?

　

late at night

kept company by the silence of my home

i strum the strings of my three string dulcimer

and out of that hollow darkness rested on my knees and caught taught with wires that sing, i strum and find a new song in an old one.

　

i sweep where once i did strike,

in silence where once i did sing

and in that imagining, the prairie stretching dark and endlessly star lit

i find in timelessness, in languid laziness

unfettered from need, pride and repression

the perfect way to play this song

for which my sister will sing

the words that came to me

late at night

Oh

so many

nights ago.