An Experiment in Presence
'The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between' - Mozart
Good evening Sydney.
I have something to ask of you.
You could say, it’s an experiment in presence
Tonight I request that you do not applaud me
For tonight I want no praise nor celebrity
For tonight, I request that you use no phones
For I want you to be here with your eyes alone
Now, let us take you to a space
Where silence is the after taste
We will make for you a meal of wild vibrations
We will shake the air with sound information
But then be still, and know that we
are all reckoning with who we’re about to be
My show at the Sydney house was fast approaching. People would ask if I was excited. I would, of course, smile and say ‘yes’. But deep down, in that inner place of knowing, there was a resounding no. That’s how I knew something was wrong. That’s how I knew something had to change. Music was my great joy, my portal into the sacred. I would not let the demands of the touring and music industry rob me of that gift. My gift and my service. But what happens when the service is no longer serving you? It requires reflection. I have heard that frustration breeds creativity and I would add to that by saying, boredom breeds brilliance, and burnout can even birth change.
We’re stubborn creatures and sometimes we only change when we must. When it’s no longer possible to do things in the same way expecting a different result. When we’ve reached the borders of our current reality. It’s time to break the container of our lives and feel for the walls beyond these ones, in the complete darkness if we must. The thing about darkness is it demands us to reawaken lesser used faculties of sense and intuition. We must feel for our surroundings in new ways, on hands and knees (I had a great conversation with Brie Stoner about this exact analogy on my podcast here). So, in this same spirit, I set out to find a way to play the Sydney Opera House that would evoke wonder, excitement, feelings of mystery and maybe most importantly for me, a little risk.
I’ve identified that I don’t really get turned on with music if everything’s too comfortable. Don’t get me wrong, feeling ‘ease’ and ‘flow’ as a musician is incredible. But those states are not the same as comfort. For me, ease relates to sensing a little tension, but relaxing into it and establishing a trust with what is, with the great Unknowing. And what could be more mysterious, profound and fundamentally vulnerable than playing music to a room of strangers? It is why we are all so drawn to the live performance experience. Truly anything can happen and that feeling is what I live for.
So how do I get back there again? I want to share my thought process leading up to this show because I think it serves as a good metaphor for many things in my life right now. Even the reasons why I began this community.
In my times of questioning I turn to silent, contemplative prayer or meditation, whatever you like to call it. Paying Attention. Whatever you do to brings up what’s beneath… So fun, right?
It was there, in the quiet, that a voice of stillness rose calling me to a new bravery. The bravery to invite my audience into some crucial experiences I was having in my own life.
Uncertainty : I’d finished a tour with no idea if I wanted to keep going. I was fresh out of a heart-wrenching breakup with no idea how to re-establish home within myself after attaching that feeling to someone else for so long. All I I knew was, silence felt like a refuge. It wasn’t always comfortable, but always somehow supportive in its patience and resilience to withstand complete ambiguity. After all, everything eventually starts and ends in silence.
Patience: I have 3 words I repeat to myself regularly these days. I believe these words came from a very deep place within me, for my own growth, a grace of sorts, a great divine kindness. The words are: ‘There Is Time’.
I say this to myself many times a day. It calms me profoundly.
There Is Time. There. Is. Time.
I am so often in a rush to get somewhere, I know not where. Urgency is in my blood. There’s many reasons for it but I knew that one of the great patterns I wanted to break in this show (and in my life because that’s the whole point of art) was my insecurity that just being wasn’t enough. I had to do, do, do and get there quickly, so I could do more. Fast!
This was no longer serving me. I was burnt out. How could I slow down? Well, I’d have to learn how to do it on stage first. Stage has always been my rehearsal space for life. It’s where I practice fearlessness, uncertainty, risk, trusting joy, leaning into vulnerability. All with the hopes that I can better practice it off stage, which is where it really matters, of course. So here came my next task: to integrate patience into the show. However, I quickly realized the answer was still the same: Silence. That sweet Silence with nowhere to go and nowhere to be. That rich waiting.
Breaking Patterns : I have long sought to understand the patterning of my mind and why I return to certain behaviors that do not serve me or those I’m in relationship with. One of the reasons I am so drawn to rhythm is its ability to both hypnotize us and break us out of common thinking. I’ll never forget the first time I understood opposing time signatures that find each other in that satisfying syncopation of conflict and marriage. A perfect example of this is when you’re listening to a song and a simple beat begins, you lock in to it you think you’re on one path, walking along, in sync with your environment then BAM, here comes this relentless new counterpart rhythm rupturing your bubble of reality and planting you in a completely new setting! You’re forced back to Beginners Mind, searching for the beat again. Your body intuitively situates you in the space by feeling out a pulse, not with the mind but with the intelligence of a deep rhythmic intuition. All of a sudden, order emerges out of a supposed chaos.
How could I give my audience a real-time experience of this?
Worship Culture: Fame and admiration has never done much for celebrities self-esteem. We’re left with all the same insecurities, they’re just louder now. Criticism can be just as harming as praise, it seems. For example, when you are praised at a fixed point in time, it’s like the brain takes a snapshot of who you are in that moment and says ‘THIS is good’. Do this all the time and you will be loved. The brain creates a fixed identity and the audience affirms that fixed identity as good. Now, the problem with this is, we are always changing and we can never remain aligned with that picture others have us. It’s simply impossible. Here comes the tension. We are praised for being someone we ultimately are not. Maybe we were for a moment but that moment existed to get us to the next. We are always changing.
I have been on a long journey now to find self-worth within, in the ground of my own being, the divine indwelling perhaps, the place where all grows quiet and we find our non-contingent worth that depends on nothing other than being alive. How could I invite my audience into this life lesson I was working through? Well, through Silence of course. The thing about growing quiet with other people is, it becomes very intimate very quickly. You must get through the discomfort first. The awkwardness of words being shown the way out, a new presence of ambiguity emerging. We move from independence, out of codependence (I sing! you clap! I sing! you clap!), into inter-dependence. A shared reality where you and I are fundamentally connected, interwoven and interdependent on one another. We thrive in our togetherness.
The truth is, applause is exhilarating but sometimes it’s also really isolating. I think it serves a terrific purpose but I needed to see what life was like without it for a night. I’ve come to realize that I feel most at home when I feel seen, not for being special, but for activating something in someone else. When I look out and see strangers eyes carrying a world of pain, I realize, that in that moment, they are letting me in, giving me the privilege of holding that with them, using sound like a salve to their skin, bringing ease for a moment. They are giving me a gift in that moment too. The gift of solidarity and connection. I am not alone, these people echo my feelings! They sing these lyrics as their own! Aha! Because they are not my own! What joy to be freed from such Terminal Uniqueness!
We are not alone. And that’s just that.
I, like so many others, have felt tempted to point outward for my answers. I bet they have their shit together. If I do what they do, I will be okay. If I follow their spiritual path, I will experience enlightenment. There is my answer. Pointing out, out, out. Even the way we scroll through social media is an ever-pointing finger at the screen. We look outward for what can only be found within.
The adverse of this can be true, of course, too. We can stare for so long at ourselves until we cannot see what is true any longer and must turn our service outward to find ourselves in relation to the whole again. A return to interdependence.
The impending narcissism of our constant self-reflection can bring us to what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called ‘despair’ in his poem The Leaden Echo and The Golden Echo. He calls us to ‘give beauty back’ by turning outward and away from the constant reflection of oneself. These ideas was explored in my album The Golden Echo inspired by the mythology of Narcissus.
How could I bring my audience into an experience of wholeness? How could I ask all these questions with them in real-time? Again, the voice says, Silence.
Silence and Shared Attention : In a world that has become so loud with stimulus and hyper-indulgence of every possible whim and fancy, I have been drawn more than ever to the wisdom traditions of silence and contemplation. I ended my tour with such a longing for quiet. But not just a quiet at home. I wanted quiet on stage too. I lay in bed dreaming of what it would feel like to stand on that stage in the Sydney Opera House and really listen to the room. To rest with my audience. Oh to rest!! Why couldn’t I do that? Why couldn’t I use my show to nourish my own spirit and invite my fans into an experience I was craving? And could I be so bold to say, they might be craving it too?
After all, attention is our most powerful currency. We know this now. I have long identified with applause as a direct line of validation, an affirmation of my self-worth. Performers are, of course, addicted to this. It is such a momentous shot of adrenaline to bring audiences to a collective response like that. Through the simple act of clapping hands. Such a physical, embodied act. So primitive. Our bodies house our emotions and we express them by making shapes and sound that convey our experience! We are physical communicators and the alignment of joy in the spirit and movement in the body is about as fundamental and essential to being human as you can get. It brings to mind a small baby, who upon feeling great elation cannot contain themselves! They clap!
But what happens when we shift our response to something even more fundamental? Breathing.
Listening.
Not just listening to the room, but listening with the room.
This beautiful concept was introduced to me by Annea Lockwood, a fellow New Zealander and experimental composer who speaks about this in the Documentary ‘32 Sounds’ by the amazing director, Sam Green. If you haven’t seen this film, it’s a must. A mighty exploration into the influence of sound and the absence of it.
I love this photo of Annea Lockwood posing in front of her 1969 installation titled ‘Piano Burning’ where she records the sound of a piano being annihilated by a slow, raging fire.
Listening to the world.
That was it. I had to do it. I had to take all the things I was learning in my own life, and bring them to the stage.
In the act of liberating myself, I will create spaces for others liberation.
Music is the deepest portal to transcendence that I know in this life. What blasphemy it would be to turn up hollow, going through the motions, burnt out and disconnected from the very thing that showed me a way out of conformity and emotional stagnancy. No. I would find a way to liberate myself on that stage. And it would come in the way I least expected it. This time, not through sound but through the absence of it.
The lights go down.
My voice goes out over the front of house announcing the invitation of the night. We finish our first song and the sounds morph into a long drone, like a meditation gong resonating through the house. Slowly the sounds disappear and our first chance to trial out the joint experiment begins.
It was eerie. Now and then, a clap would dribble through the blanket of silence. Awkward and clumsy, people would giggle then settle into the stillness once more (a beautiful real-time example of ‘breaking patterns’). By the sixth or seventh song, everyone was on board, slowly becoming more comfortable and even nourished by the new rhythm of holding.
On the subject of applause, I have a few things to say on the importance of audience involvement. I met up with musical-prodigy and close friend of mine Jacob Collier a few nights before I left for Australia to talk through the concept with him. Jacob made the brilliant point that an applause provides an audience with catharsis. He reminded me that the crowd want a chance to celebrate the performer but beyond that, they need a physical release at some point. We agreed this would have to happen at the end of the show, an invitation to break silence and rejoice together.
Now don’t get me wrong, I agreed with Jacob but his comments raised another interesting point for me. Why is silence not its own kind of catharsis? How could stillness feel like release too? This has became a challenge for my own life. How can restraint and self control become places of rest rather than just a place I inhabit momentarily until I can return to the stimulation of the senses once more? Can we grow comfortable in the inevitable seasons of waiting? Maybe that is too much to ask. I’m not sure I’m all that interested in the comfortable, frankly. I’ve not seen it do too much for humans. Comfortable quickly turns into complacency and disconnect. When things are too easy, we disengage. And engagement was exactly what I needed from this show.
He was right. The applause at the end of the show was rapturous and glorious and so meaningful after such a long time of being still between songs. I know it nourished the audience to have that moment, but, also, it fed me in new ways. Not in the same way of feeding my insatiable desire to be loved, respected and affirmed. No applause will ever fill that gaping hole that makes us so messily and delightfully human. But, it was beautiful. The applause was so weighted by what we had each experienced.
It filled me in a different way. I felt seen and known. I had shared my inner world, my inner chaos and my longing with these strangers. They had trusted me with their insecurities and resistance to something new. We had held hands through the strange terrains and now the rain was falling in the desert, and we were dancing under it together! Celebrating the quenching of our thirst for deeper presence with one another. Because we are hungry for connection. I felt that so much on the night.
They reminded me why I love live performance. It is my chance to facilitate an experience that will never happen again, in that way, in that space, in that time, in that moment. It is my attempt to bend reality into one I want to live inside. It is where I face my fears so you feel like you can too. It is true community. And it’s not all about pointing at the performer and worshipping. It’s a genuine gratitude to them for illuminating what is already present in you. Aha! The true calling of the artist.
To examine themselves in service to the whole.
To shine light on their own human condition enough to light up the lives of others. To disrupt the humdrum of daily life enough to reveal our innate wholeness. Yes. The artist must be defiantly honest and devoted to truth, not in order to be glorified but in order to glorify. Worship culture has told us the answer is always out there. But it has been said…. ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is within You.’
‘It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely ... I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is every- where.’
-Thomas Merton
Till next time,
Thank you Kimbra. I was in the crowd that night. Your performances have always been ethereal but that night was something different. I saw the applause as something that connects between each of us, it’s something consequential in an inter-audience way, like our own little world or subjectivity colliding at the sound of the applause, sharing through a natural release of something that excites us. The release in silence, I think, is something different. On that night we were like volcanoes - and silence was not the release for our erupting gratitude for your music, your art, the opportunity of contemplation you brought us. Thank you for always challenging and questioning and bringing us a piece of your world.
Beautiful words, thank you, Kimbra. I loved the audio at the beginning of the post too. It’s so valuable to hear the inner workings of an artist. Thanks for joining Substack 🙏