On Rhythm

These words were condensed and translated in December 2020 in Ukraine.

On rhythm.

First attempt at allegory.

I wanted to write about this for quite a while, and finally here I go.

Four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence together comprise 273 seconds. Each of them is identical to the next, or the previous, and is already somehow predefined. You gotta use some consensus definition of a second, whether you like it or not, or you wouldn't get that exact amount of seconds otherwise. Any debate about perceived expressiveness of this whole period of time essentially boils down to a debate about the duration of a single second, how it is subjectively perceived or subjectively measured, but never about whether a particular second could somehow differ from others. If everyone is walking around with their own definition of a second, what kind of life would that be? But let's put seconds away for a while. The alterations of dusks and dawns, repeated passages of moons and stars across the night sky do not stay unnoticed by our attention. They siphon through memory to a subconscious junkyard, and from there they are upcycled into "conclusions" and "superstitions", two different names for principally the same results of processing collections of observed distinctions, not unlike how "perception" and "cognition" are different names of the same process.

The practice of playing drums without a metronome has various merits, but here's an important one. Instead of locking you into strict terms of what a second and therefore tempo are (which are defined by somebody entirely other than you elsewhere), it makes you listen to and observe your own body, so you can calibrate the feeling of (and thus define) the minimum amount (quantum) of time that you need to produce any sound at all. Spatial placement of drums and cymbals plays a big role in this. Should you move an instrument just an inch or two from position that is "comfortable" to you, your limbs would be out of sync right away (and would stay like that until you'd fix it).

You prepare a series of actions while aiming to produce a series of sounds. These sounds may be perceived as random noise by somebody else, but that doesn't eliminate your inner metronome, because it is always on, always with you. Regardless of what you're planning to perform, the faster you want to play, the more difficult it will be, because there's a speed limit on neural signal transmission and muscle contraction, which you won't be able to break. Decoordination and the necessity to pay attention to about ten points of control at a time just complicate things further. Here, center of balance is not about static equilibrium, but about cyclical switching between limb control and body positioning so you don't lose balance and tempo, or your rhythm would break apart and stop triggering head nods. Hits on instruments differ only by their number, secondary details of sounds produced, and distance from each other along linearly perceived forward-moving time. If you manage to maintain equilibrium in short moments between your limbs moving to hit another instrument, to you it feels like balance, and to an outside listener you look like a drummer (or even a tonal instrument player), and maybe whatever you're doing will be called "music" somewhere, somewhen.

But there's nothing here that balances anything.

There are only oscillations, cycles and counts.

There is only rhythm.