Listening Skin

I found myself with two perfectly familiar strangers in the attic room of a three-storey house somewhere in the North West of England. Candles were lit ahead of our arrival, trailing wisps of burning incense wrinkled and fogged the snug room, the musk of patchouli and sandalwood licked our nostrils, and crammed into every available alcove or set upon petite side-tables were crystals of every colour and family, playing sidekick to proudly displayed statuettes of the Buddha, of Shiva the Destroyer, odes to the Divine Mother Earth and Father Sky.

Warmed and bathed in the firelight of a chimney stove, bejewelled and exotic seat cushions were laid in a circle on the floor. In the centre of these cushions, drums, cymbals and singing bowls were arranged for us as though they were instruments of war, and we were the warriors steadily piling into the room to take up our weapons of choice before entering into battle. And though we would not leave the room again for a while, it was true that we were preparing for a foray of sorts, an advance towards an undisclosed and as yet unconquered territory.

This was the rendezvous point of our shadow circle, where we would meet to continue our shamanic drumming practice; the practice of chanting, drumming and creating music together in order to release unnecessary weight and trapped emotions, to free ourselves from the burden of mental constructs and the strangleholds of egos, and if we were lucky, possibly even slip into trance-like states, where we might catch a glimpse at another face of reality, a face rarely looked upon, the counterpart to our known domains: our respective shadow dimensions.

Jameson, one of the two strangers, and a lifelong drummer who now wore hearing aids, sat down on a cushion and prepared himself for that evening’s circle. Jameson held a gibbon-stare and possessed a pair of pointy ears. He focused intently on nothing, humming a strange tune as he ran his fingers across the head of his drum, a single-headed hand drum, whom he referred to as Gruff.

He said he had named all of his drums. This one was called Gruff because the head was made of goatskin. Gruff was one of his first drums, and he spoke of it only in the present-tense and only in affectionate terms, like anyone would of one of their oldest living friends. The fact that this friend wasn’t a living one at all but an inanimate object wearing the dead skin of a goat that had long since passed out of existence didn’t seem to trouble him.

‘Skin never dies.’ Jameson barely blinked as he spoke, nor did he break eye contact. ‘It never loses its ability to absorb and respond to sound. Don’t be too hasty to label the drum as some mere lifeless thing. Gruff responds to any touch I lay upon him. Simply listen, and you’ll hear how alive he is.’

Jameson insisted that any self-respecting drum owner ought to purchase animal-skin drums exclusively as a matter of principle, they’d be robbing themselves otherwise. Manmade artificial skins were devoid of a special quality, poor substitutes for the real thing, pale imitations that fell short of delivering anything close to the sound that lived-in skin could provide.

‘Have you ever listened to a song and had it place your hairs on end?’

I nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘That’s your skin, listening and responding. The French call it frisson. The largest organ you own is reacting to soundwaves. Tingling with the vibrations of waves breaking upon it and entering it. And this organ completely envelopes you, from top to bottom, stretched tightly over your entire body, exactly like that of a drum.’

‘There is intercourse between my skin and the drum’s skin. A communion of sorts. We are two musical objects having a conversation with one another, creating and transferring energy.’

He wiggled his ears, pursing and flexing the pointed tips of them. They reminded me of satellite dishes swivelling to catch out wandering transmissions.

‘Don’t be fooled in thinking we hear through our ears alone.’ He said. ‘Sure, when I strike the drum, the sound of the initial impact travels through the ears, but the resonance of that sound carries throughout the body. Our bodies are magnificent resonance chambers, they don’t get the credit they deserve – they are the greatest devices of listening we own.’

‘We think of sound as something we hear, but in terms of physics, sound is just vibration travelling through matter. The ability of sound to affect matter cannot be underestimated, especially when it comes to our own physiologies and psychologies.’

‘Music has the power to play acupuncture with our emotions, sudden and loud sounds demand our attention, activating our animal instincts irrespective of our consent, rushing floods of hormones are released in mothers the instant they hear the pitch of their babies’ cries, the shock waves of bombs can level whole buildings, and it is a well-accepted fact of reality that a single sound carries different meanings between individuals based on their own lived experience. We inhabit environments housed in an ocean of relentless sound, and we are forever moulded by them, whether we are conscious of that or not.’

Jameson plucked out one of his hearing aids and presented it in his hand.

‘The hearing aid helps those of us who are so-called hard of hearing by amplifying the world of sound that can be detected by the human ear. But the world of sound heard by the human being is an incomplete picture of the total universe of sound that exists.’

Jameson went on to explain that we human beings had an upper and lower limit to the range of frequencies we could hear. Any soundwave outside of these limits would fail to register an audible impression whatsoever.

‘Take the dog whistle. A dog hears when it is blown where we cannot. To some extent, you could say we were all deaf.’ He argued. ‘At least, that’s the case when you pass the boundaries of our known parameters. But I assure you, we might be deaf to certain zones of this world, hard-of-hearing to the total universe of sound, but we are still its recipients, daily bombarded by it, and our bodies are always listening.’*

‘But we already know this of course.’ It was at this moment that Hare, the other member of the circle, jumped in. ‘We’ve been acting as our own barometers since birth.’

Hare was a shamanic teacher, and the owner of the attic we occupied, a bespectacled woman whose hair was a beehive of endless possibilities.

‘You can feel it when you enter a room, the energy that resides there.’ She elaborated. ‘You can detect it in your insides, or as a certain air pressure, whether heavy or light, whether you can cut the tension with a knife, it’s as though you can sense the very shifting of molecules, know intuitively whether they are tightly compacted or free to roam – sometimes, there is no logical reason that some spaces feel oppressive whilst others feel liberating, but our bodies never lie.’

‘Energies fluctuate on a spectrum according to the experience as it unfolds. Both people and places are great storehouses of energy. You are magnetised to some, repelled by others. Some are more settled and consistent, whilst others are scattered, erratic and fraught between two conflicting energies at once.’

Hare leant forward and whispered, almost conspiratorially. ‘It is surmised that railway stations fall into states of disrepair so rapidly because they are constantly in a tug of war between intensely polarised fields of energy. Caught between joy and sorrow. After all, a train station must play host to joyous homecomings and hard goodbyes, partings and reunions.’

‘There is much more to reality than meets the eye or reaches the ear.’ Jameson returned, a wide smile creasing his face. ‘That’s why when I conversate with my drum, I am aware that I am committing an alchemical act, the moving parts of which might not be perceptible to me or even logically understood, but I’m safe in the knowledge that I’m working with the universe to manipulate energy to my benefit. Perhaps there are limits to what my ears will pick up, but regardless, the sound I conjure becomes my medicine. You see, hard-of-hearing does not have to equate to hard of listening.’

Jameson tucked his hearing aid back behind his ear and winked at me.

‘The problem this world has faced is that it has been so hard-of-listening as of late.’ Hare spoke, sat with her legs crossed and her eyes closed. ‘People have a habit of clinging religiously to the parameters of their known worlds, they live according to their explored boundaries and mistake their contracted perspectives for the totality of reality.’

‘The expanse of a person’s consciousness is defined by their limiting beliefs. Listening, that often overlooked and underappreciated art, is the active process of placing the constraints of our preconceptions to the side, and of focusing one’s attention on both the noise and the silence, in order to find out what is actually being told.’

 And on that note, Hare began to bang her drum, softly at first, inviting us to join. Jameson and I bowed our heads and paid gratitude for the occasion. Then, we picked up our instruments, focused our attentions and played.

The beauty of the drumming circle is that it invites strangers to come together and recognise a shared humanity. The music created is not written down or rehearsed, it wells up out of pure improvisation, played once and never repeated again, for play’s sake and not profit. Just as the cells in our bodies wire and collaborate together without instruction, the drummers respond intuitively to one another, each adapting to support and elaborate upon the other’s beat and rhythm. The only necessary requirement is the will and openness to listen.

Josh Lonsdale