11. Various ArtistsBali: Golden Rain
I think Bill [Nace] asked, ‘Have you ever heard gamelan?’ He played it for me and I said, ‘What the hell is this?’ My ignorance was keeping me in a much worse place. And then I was super lucky and got to go to Bali for a week. I was on the Björk tour in 2008 and there was a week in between Australia and the show in Jakarta, and it was cheaper to just keep everyone on tour rather than send everyone back home. So, I said to the tour manager, ‘Look, I promise I won’t get lost. I will show up at the end of this week. But can I stay up in Ubud? Because that’s where I’ve heard there was a lot of gamelan stuff.’ So, I saw a lot of it live. This record was the first thing I heard maybe 10 years before that, then I was just trying to find more records and to see it live and understand, which I don’t, the mechanics of how it’s played with so many people sounding like one unit, one entity. The drumming seems to connect to a lot of other things from different eras in different locations on the globe. And the ‘Monkey Chant’, that was wild, amazing.
It was just one person doing music and one person doing shadow puppets the time I saw it. And we saw rehearsals and little kids learning how to dance. I asked somebody to show me something on bamboo percussion and he was like, ‘Oh, I would need my dad here, because we play together, you know, he plays half and I play half and we alternate parts.’ That’s actually really similar to the Burundi record. It’s this trading off that goes so fast that it sounds like one person, but it couldn’t be because it’s doing something that one person couldn’t do. I need somebody else to feel this all the way through. That seems really beautiful. Because the music that I’m playing, sometimes if you’re playing with the wrong people, it doesn’t feel as empathetic as I want it to. I always want to be listening. And I always want what I’m doing to be based on what you’re doing. I want to have that connection, like a telepathic thing. And when it’s not there, it feels a little cold. Then to have a type of music that’s built on communication, where you need the rest of the band? There’s something really beautiful about that.
