How did they redefine time after the French Revolution? What is the sound of my stomach interrupting an attempt at ASMR? Is this downpitched breathwork sexy or creepy? Here’s a special radio commission, a connected interview on my regular show with a friend who is a sound healer doing mad things with tuning forks, and, after the jump, a funny couple of paragraphs about a terrifying acid trip and a case of terminal earworms that I had recently, which I decided to include here for no real reason except that I want to challenge myself to write more unscriptedly this year.
Be well little demons.
XO BB
Time is Not Real You Are / Sound Healing with Sûkün
An extended 3 hours show, TINRYA was designed as a slow sonic inquiry into time and our slippery place in it, and was aired round the clock on Refuge Worldwide during Christmas and Year 2022. The related second show was live a few days after in early January as we landed, and includes an extended interview with the artist and sound healing practicioner Nigâr, who I painstakingly (her cat, Skinny, kept wanting to be featured) recorded delivering the sound bath you hear in the first one. It has also some cheeky chat and some nice self-help tunes. Nigâr is a classically trained musician since the age of 4, who merges affinity for design and mathematics with experience as a social worker and her studies specialising in substance use disorders and addictive behaviours with really amazing results. She taught me heaps about the science of healing frequencies. Consider it your debrief.
A collective radio experiment asking whether you can you find three hours to chill the fuck out, you will need (ideally) bed and (definitely) headphones to get the most from this. It’s meant to feel like a 3 hour brain massage, and amongst mostly non-verbal music, I’ve peppered in some takes on memory history and forward motion drawn from the brains of Pauline Oliveros, Alan Watts, H.G Wells, Lola Olufemi, and weird degraded meditation tapes from the '70s, and other digital (& analogue) mystics besides. I also made some ‘music’ for it.
I hope these shows help all my cosmic jesters, future seekers, tired time bandits, those within and against the deep state / deep space, anyone craving calm or clarity. You can take some drugs to this if you want, it’ll work, but as a bonafide medical doctor I can guarantee if you keep your eyes closed these will levitate your dusty spirit w/o any assistance.
Tell me if you find something useful here:
December 2022 Time is Not Real You Are
January 2023 Sound Healing with Sûkün
The Mind Palace Putsch
I’m in the final stages of recovering from a curious little Mental Health Event unexpectedly brought on by a solo trip taken during the Festive Uncanny Valley where time is both real and not. You know it well, that period between Christmas and New Year, that Perineum of Time. (I know I didn’t make this phrase up but can’t remember who I stole it from, thank you friend.) Usually it’s my favourite moment to wash the walls on the inside of my skull, but suffice to say things went awry this time. I’m okay though and now have a renewed respect for psychoanalysis, cigars and Girls Aloud.
*
There’s a generally manageable psychological unspooling that accompanies taking acid which I both fear and crave. I don’t even do it that much anymore, which maybe is why this happened, or maybe I was just a touch too blazé with my intention-setting. At some point between pouring loads of wax on my chest, weeping into my Voice Memo app for twenty minutes and looping the same three Caroline Polachek videos (one of which might also be partially to blame) I’d become hopelessly entanged in one specific thought loop. It related to a hazy 2+2=5 style “revelation” about a dark childhood incident that, if it did turn out be an echo of anything like a real thing that happened, potentially changed everything I knew about myself. This was when things began to go south. The more I investigated this memory mystery (did this even relate to my own life? is this preoccupation more a result of the work I do? whose face is that?) and the unspecified raw-terror-feeling underneath it, the louder a weird little tune became in my head. This haunting circus melody, a real one I knew I’d sung to myself as a tiny child, was made up of a set of nonsense words that felt so clearly annunciated my head, yet my mouth could not for love nor money speak or sing it. The burning, lonely mind itch that this inability to sing the song out loud created inside me was a lot like when you hum a tune to a friend in the certainty they’ll recognise it and they just look at you like you’re a crazy person. I could only look at myself like I was the crazy person. For twenty seven hours. It only got louder. It occurred to me this might be because I had not yet properly learnt to speak when I had made this song up. It felt easy to convert to raw fact the theory that every version of our inner operating system that we’ve ever run on is still inside us, upgrades be damned. I had booted into Windows 3.1, which came out in 1992
Yes, over Christmas I’d been having some latent mostly chill but slightly doom laden reflections on getting old heading into my 37th year. These had been swept up into the acid-y hall of mirrors treatment that can sometimes be so revelatory and fun and now a very young part of my grey matter had been brought back online. Somehow the tools and nuances I was in possession of to analyse my thoughts were also limited to those I had been working with aged 6. I careened about my emotional highway like a kid with the car keys. Time collapsed in on itself, flooded by ancient referents bleached of the usual nostalgia that usually helps to date a memory. I tried in vain to recatalogue in a panic but the archive was already on fire.
Eventually I ‘came to’ in the graveyard next to the Masjid.
At the point where I’d felt willed to be outdoors, I had had the idea that smoking (I do not smoke) would make my body remember I’m not actually a child, or at least that the weird always alien flavour would remind me of being a teenager and that, using the logic of the trip, I could inch my mind forward towards the present day again. I’d meant to buy menthols (like I said, don’t smoke) but had become so anxious in the späti that I picked the easiest thing I could see to pronounce, and that is how I ended up on the bench in the middle of Tempelhof puffing on ‘Rolls’ cigarillos. I quietly spoke outloud in half sentences to myself in a futile attempt to drown out the continued presence of this horrible garbled head-melody, made worse as I only had two cursed bars of it to work with. Suddenly a playlist from when I DJ’d a friends wedding in September kicked in on shuffled on headphones I didn’t realise I had in. Owing to being a YouTube rip it was lightly distorted and, in any other context, unbearably, painfully loud. Instead, I felt the old song in my head tremble against the bombast of its demented successor, and begin to subside. I hit ‘repeat.’ It kept working. I sat, awed at its power over that nasty carnivalesque melody that had felt like it might hospitalise me. I noticed as it suddenly shifted over to a more peripheral internal ear, perhaps satisfied to have met its match.
I read later that my unlikely salvation song came out in October 2004, during what would have been my Freshers’ Week at university, incidentally the same week my parents called my Nokia 6610 to let me know they’d be emigrating to Australia a fortnight later. Had the cursed circus soundtrack of young adulthood replaced the cursed circus soundtrack of early childhood in the trip’s logic or it was just finally nearly over? I found myself able to breath normally again and attributed it to Cheryl and co, marvelling at the deranged beauty of lyrics that I would later read were characterised by their own writing team as ‘total nonsense.’ At least I could sing along now.
The terror had ebbed, and the total camp of the moment struck me as I began to consider how I would retell it to Z (who had responded to my earlier distress signal with the promise of miso and valium) I laughed until I had to wipe away tears. Soon I felt strong enough to stand. I took out my phone to look at my face, overjoyed to see my eye wrinkles and ever-loosening chin for what they really are: time.
Resolute, I stopped to deposit the cigarillos in the trunk of a nearby tree as a surprise gift for the next someone who needed to remember she’s a grown-up girl, and walked on.
*
Oh, it's very new
Can anybody tell me what to do?
Oh, this feeling's very strange
Can anybody tell me what's your game?
I've been going crazy while you sleep
Searching for a language
That the two of us can speak
So Mr. Prehistoric make your wheel
And I'll breathe underwater
'Cause I like the way it feels
Your call's late, big mistake
You gotta hang about in limbo for as long as I take
Next time, read my mind and I'll be good to you
Come take my hand
Understand that you can
You're my man and I need you tonight
Come make my dreams
Honey hard as it seems
Loving me is as easy as pie, i...
I'm just a love machine
Feeding my fantasy
Give me a kiss or three….
and i’m fine.
*