I produce sound with my fingertips. I channel things through me, through sound. My fingertips are the connection between my body and being and the objects I use to create sound and music, between my inner and outer world, a portal between the present and eternity.
The patterns we humans have on the skin of our fingertips are spirals. Each of us have uniquely shaped spirals. The spiral is one of the oldest known symbols to be used by man, in cultures all over the globe. It represents things like the cycles of life, the cycle of a year, growth, evolution, eternity…The Milky Way is a spiral. Spiritually, the spiral represents a connectivity with the divine, spiraling from the outer ego (the outside world) into the inner soul. In my perception, my fingertips functions as a microcosm that channel the macrocosm of my entire previous human experience through sound, into the macrocosm of the present.
In relation to that thought a quote by the painter Willem de Kooning comes to mind. He once said, as paraphrased by composer Morton Feldman:
“The past does not influence me, I influence it.” It is my belief that an artist will always carry the past into the future, since all the influences, inspirations, experiences and reflections that have shaped our artistic expressions will cast a shadow in front us.
At the early stage of the artistic research project that I’m now about to conclude, as I was looking for some central words to help define the frame of my the project, I came upon the words spatiality, inter-relations, ceremony and rituals as my key words. The questions I asked myself was; what happens if I focus on being consciously aware of the inter-relations that happen when I make music, the inter-relation between me and my instrument, the sound and the room, the people in the room and me, and any other inter-relation that I could think of as having a significance regarding my artistic output? Thus, inter-relations in a micro sense and a macro sense, and the feedback loops between them. What exactly did I mean with inter-relations, what is my definition of it? As I delved into the topic it rapidly grew to be somewhat infinite and intangible, and I strove to find a way to clarify the term inter-relations, to get to the core of it, for the benefit of my own understanding of it, and the people to whom I presented my project. As I stayed with the thought continually, I came to realize that all of these different relations were in one way or another connected through my fingertips, and that my real interest then could be more precisely defined as tactility. The tactile experience. Touching things that produce sound. Translating thought and emotion through touch. Objects that produce sound when you touch them. What ideas and what material would I generate if I was consciously thinking about tactility in this way?
What about ceremony and ritual, then? As I started to reflect on and analyse what my real interest in music that is connected to ceremonies and rituals, from cultures all over the world, is about, I came to several conclusions. For one, there’s the fact that the music, however abstract or concrete it may be, serves a specific purpose and function in order to create and carry the ceremony or ritual as a social interaction, and that the music creates a space for the ceremony or ritual to exist in. Not only does the music create a space for the ceremony to take place in, it also hints at something otherworldly, something other and bigger than ourselves and our world, and facilitates transcendence to a physical and mental state where the deepest experience of the ritual taking place is felt, sometimes even leading to ecstasy. The music and the experience of it becomes sacred to the context it exists in. Another thing that interest me is that in all ceremonies and rituals, certain objects that have been given a certain meaning are utilized. A mask, a cross, incense, an altar, and so on…these objects are important. These objects are portals that carry a certain energy. I like to think of my instrument a an object like that, a portal.
It’s important for me to say that I never had any intentions or wishes to try and turn my own performances for audiences into a ceremony or ritual as such. My interest lies in trying to see how I can offer a space musically that is derived from the same state of mind as described above, and how it might affect my musical ideas and my tactile experience to think about my instrument as an object, an object of sound.
As for spatiality, I will elaborate further on that as you move through this exposition.
Spatiality
Spatial (/ˈspeɪʃ(ə)l/)
- Origin: Mid 19th century, “of or relating to space”, from Latin spatium.
"Intellect is the knowledge obtained by experience of names and forms; wisdom is the knowledge which manifests only from the inner being; to acquire intellect one must delve into studies, but to obtain wisdom, nothing but the flow of divine mercy is needed; it is as natural as the instinct of swimming to the fish, or of flying to the bird. Intellect is the sight which enables one to see through the external world, but the light of wisdom enables one to see through the external into the internal world.” - Hazrat Inayat Khan
"Umberto Eco has a terrific book called "The Open Work" where he describes art as an epistemological metaphor, where there is the possibility of a unified, definitive image of our universe, where art suggests a way for us to see the world in which we live, and, by seeing it, to accept it and integrate it into our sensibility. "The Open Work" assumes the task of giving us an image of dis-continuity. It does not narrate it, it is it. It takes on a mediating role between the abstract categories of science and the living matter of our sensibility, it almost becomes a sort of transcendental scheme that allows us to comprehend new aspects of the world." - Mark Garry, email conversation, 2019.