Dance Away Your Demons

There exists nothing on earth that touches me like music. My relationship with it is sacred, essential, perhaps predetermined. Music is, in my view, the most divine phenomena on earth.

I was around nine when I wrote my first song. A little later, at age twelve, after watching a live performance of Bob Marley singing Iron Lion Zion, I knew exactly what I wanted to do in life: that! - what that dreadlocked, sweaty Rastafarian icon was doing on stage, whatever that was. I didn't really understand what it was he was doing, I just knew that I wanted to do that.

I’ll be twenty-four in fifteen days. I signed a record deal a year ago and I’m still waiting for the technicalities to iron themselves out before even experiencing my music released - but time is ticking and I’ve been waiting since boyhood. Soon, I keep telling myself.

Three hundred days in a year I would say I dance and imagine I’m performing. I have done this since I realised what a wonder it is to move the body in synchronisation with melodic sound. When did I realise this golden reality? When I first took MDMA.

I was seventeen, bored, curious, — not a dancer — aware a large dose of the drug had been stashed away by my older brother. He had told me many stories of his own of going out to gigs and festivals, but that was all I had, stories with no experience to give them sense and real integration, as of now they were mysterious myths to me, for I had no conception of the sensations felt under the influence of this drug, that is until this fateful evening.

Boredom had struck me with a vicious vigour; I was going to try that drug.

In the same manner I’d witnessed elders around me do so, I wrapped up a small portion in cigarette paper and swallowed… And waited… After an hour had passed I started to consider myself immune to this substance and sighed dismally, comically. Then suddenly the song I was listening to, which was Little Red Corvette by Prince, I perceived as the most impressive piece of music I’d ever stumbled across. I was utterly befuddled; I thought all the rush and euphoria was a result of this one particular song! I thought such for about a minute and a half until I recognised the real catalyst for my rapture: the drug. I recall that moment preceding a projection into a heavenly realm related to each song I played.

Through dance I became the music; every word in every lyric electrified me as though it was specifically regarding myself, my life. It was one of the most beneficially altering experiences I’ve had, and one of the most distinct too. I maintain that my experiences with MDMA, many that there were after that first, audacious dive, were rituals of worship to the divinity of music, or the divinity to which music alludes. (MDMA, for me, is a tool to amplify the ritualistic process of musical experience.) Smoking cannabis usually, but sober, too, I do the same as I did that night, everyday more or less. More so now than ever I am aware of what it is I am doing. Nowadays it is much more clear to me what Bob Marley was doing on that stage when he was swinging his dense locks and jiving and singing. Music sonically and melodically represents to us the nature of the universe, for it is the symphony of patterns, a dramatic synergy, and an indisputably fantastic phenomena! I love it!

So, to complexify myself a bit I'll admit something: I don't enjoy live music, but my dream is to perform live. Performing is not bopping your head in a crowd, okay? It's certainly not standing in the crowd resentfully wishing you was the guy on stage with the microphone in his hand. Call it narcissistic but I feel I belong on the stage, not in the screaming group. I went to see my favourite band once and left early, it was annoying.

To be meditative does not mean to be still. When my neck is jerking and my hips are grooving and my mouth is moving you might as well see me as a motionless buddhist; I’m exactly where I should be. My zen has an appearance of ferocity and flamboyance, that’s undeniable, and yet taking into account the fact that it remains the most potent form of relaxation I've come across in life, it is more than just a means to relax, it is a medium for me to express who I am.

Music! I love you! Your intangibility, your undeniable influence, your tremendous power! I am genuinely unable to conceive of a world without you.