(In) Designing Drumming, Part 1

Drumming is an explosive happening; an occurrence of atomic forces. A metamorphic process of transformations on which time, thought and physical activity bind as a whole system of structures of order and disorder, multiplicity, instability, deviance, improvability and entropy. To explain this genuine generative power of the percussing being (the body as an autonomous animated sentient being) we must inquire in the causality of our percussive character, which is a resulting retroaction of the effects on its own causal autonomy. Drumming is not reducible to a normal play of causes and effects. The cause of percussing is the emergence of new identity principles which are the body self being, implying the re-production of self involving different levels of description, visions and intuitions about new conceptions, compositions and vocabularies. The body self being is the central figure in the causality which generates and regenerates itself by itself. When the drumming self being (embodied self) is deeply temporized and inserted in a linear duration, considered active and organizing by itself (automatized), the metamorphic process of transformation ceases, since the embodied self¹ is determined by rigid fixed known-repetitive patterns (FusionJazz-Rock-Pop drumming rely completely in this phenomena, while creative-open form Jazz drumming is free from this, to a certain extent); on the contrary, when the embodied self is spatialize on time it becomes probabilistic prone to change and continuous evolving; it goes into a continuous natural birth-death and rebirth process. The nature of drumming is an activity total organizational phenomenon of the body percussing self being, it is inherited in its molecular constitution and composed organization. Everything is active in an active system, and all the more so since it must support and maintain stationary states (like, to begin with, to be sited position while generating all sort of high degree of performative movement). The activity of drumming can be generalized as flux, equilibrium, disequilibrium, stability, instability, turnover, disorganization, reorganization, degeneration, regeneration, order, disorder, complementary, antagonisms, looping, variations, fluctuations. Everything percussing is interactions, transactions, retroactions, organization. In the ancient nature of drumming and percussing there was no ‘fixed beings’ interacting according to fixed laws; it was all natural physics of flowing chaos where order, disorder, organizing, disorganizing, generating and destroying were “thought” together in their fullest antagonistic character and unknown complementary characteristics of expression. Complementarity and antagonist moves together in a loop of activity as the fundamental generative inertial force of the drummer universe physics dynamism. So drumming is the immanent principle of organization, properly physical into everything living in human life.

¹See “The Embodied Self” in chapter 1 of The Body Has A Mind Of His Own, by Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee