So yeah, I spent some time at a Tibetan monastery. I don't want to brag, but it was pretty cool. You probably have an image of us sitting around moaning all day or sipping tea with the Dalai Lama. But this was a really cool monastery: we prayed hard, we played hard, and we studied the deadliest martial arts. We'd go maybe four hours in morning meditation, two hours study, break to get a bagel, and then five hours of beating each other bloody. Then we'd chant bird songs.
I can't really describe how much I learned in that time. We lived the life of the spirit and the mind. But we had some worldly conveniences: we had a snack bar in the basement, and you could shave your head with an electric razor. Movie types came through all the time-- heck, Jet Li wanted to make a film about us-- and we also had guest lecturers.
That's how I met composer, astrologist, and all around swell guy Simon Wickham-Smith. We called him the Punk Monk. He spent two years in a monastery, and he could actually speak Tibetan. (I never learned the language. It's like Icelandic-- everyone you want to talk to speaks English, so it never gets on your 'to do' list.) We weren't expecting him: he just showed up one day, climbing up the side of our mountain with a didjeridoo and an iBook laptop computer strapped to his back.
Wickham-Smith could be as serious as your ancestor's grave-- he'd hunch over that iBook for hours, composing long, intense pieces of music. But when he wasn't working it was all play. The guy liked his whiskey older than his women, and when it came to sex... well, you try catching some zzz's while someone's banging your roommate's head into a humble stone headboard all night. No wonder I failed my triple-flip-kick-in-the-jaw test for my "Flying Feet of the Gods" class.
But as I was saying, Wickham-Smith was serious about music, and he was an enlightened man of faith. He brought us an early release of his album Extreme Bukake, which he recorded on a laptop in Oxford, England. 'Bukake,' or 'bukkake,' means... well, you're online, you'll have more fun looking it up yourself. The three pieces on the disc, abstract, sometimes drone-like soundscapes that run from seven to forty minutes in length, were inspired by three stages of his religious life. Wickham-Smith grew up Catholic, and then spent a couple years with the Hare Krishnas, before joining what we kiddingly call "the winning team": Tibetan Buddhism.
Each piece reflects one of these faiths. He built the two-part "Ave Regina Celorum" around a Catholic hymn, sticking excerpts of choral singing on top of sustained synthesizer chords and jarring sound effects. The track's second part has distorted wind sounds and intermittent clicking. It sounds like he pitch-shifted one of the sopranos right through the steeple, and he distorts the vocals to make them sound near and then far, clear and distorted. Wickham-Smith refuses to let the heavenly sounds soothe us: we glimpse the "Ave Maria"/Gorecki's 3rd Symphony potential through the lo-fi rasp, but he won't give in to it. Wickham-Smith suggested this would make good meditation music, but it lasted about five seconds with our group; if I'm not serene all morning I get a neck crick.
Another piece, "Sri Guru Vandana," contains a... chant? from the Hare Krishna tradition. It blasts out at full volume with the vocals turned into a scratchy, distorted mess; they're wrapped in glitches, hiss and other sonic barbed wire. Between the vocals, Wickham-Smith inserts long notes like drones from a horn, with static and wind-like groans layered in. This, one of the record's better tracks, combines the vulgarity of the album title with 'pure' spirituality. But it's a brutal experience: Wickham-Smith claims the piece reflects the 'positive' side of his experience with the Krishnas, but if that's true, I don't want to know what the downside was.
The real winner here, though, is "The Self-Immolation of Thich Quang Duc," a representation of the inner thoughts of a Vietnamese Buddhist monk. Thich Quang Duc had himself set on fire in 1963 to protest his government. I know what you're thinking, that the piece about the dead guy is always going to be the most impressive. But this is also the shortest and most intense piece of music: it's just a glitchy beat that sounds like a heart, racing in anticipation of what's about to happen, with abstract swells representing street noises.
The day before Wickham-Smith packed up and left, I didn't have time to talk to him: that was the day of the big Monks/Ninjas game, and I'm the second-string quarterback. I regretted that, because this album left me with a lot of questions. The music itself is okay: aside from "Thich Quang Doc," it could stand to be more compelling. I think calling "Ave Regina Celorum" a 'meditation' piece is just a dodge around how slack it sounds at forty minutes.
But the ideas are fascinating. Wickham-Smith takes spiritual content and ships it under the most corporeal title possible. He sets themes about religious life in the real world-- the dedication of a spiritualist who kills himself for politics; the distortion of the abject beauty of religious music. Nothing pure gets out of this album without some dirt on it. And it's deep listening music that makes you think, instead of drift off-- way better than 'that hippie New Age shit' our guru's always ranting against.
I had a lot to talk about with Simon, but we never had a chance to discuss it. When I got back from the game, he was drunker than the sixth Dalai Lama. He had a nun under each arm and was yelling at everyone to get in the rec room: "Last one in the hot tub gets bukkaked!"
