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Flag Mountain: Unification Through Music

The Arizona jam.
AdamDavis

“It sounds like the sea…”. The small boy closed his eyes, and drifted. With a stomach full of warm food and pure water, he could at last experience true relaxation; meditation…with the aid of the old, shortwave radio.

The branch of Flag Mountain I belong to arrived at the makeshift refugee settlement in Arizona about a month ago. With increased support and sponsorship, we’ve been able to extend our activities from just the supply of food, water and medicine to cultural and artistic enrichment as well.

And so Flag Mountain’s “Unification Through Music” scheme was devised; and here, we employed it for the first time.

I left the child to further contemplate the beauties of soft, white noise and admired the fruits of the UTM members’ activities. After the essentials have been supplied for, administered to and consumed by those we help, refugees of a more creative orientation came and met with the UTM team to learn music, build instruments and to just immerse themselves in beautiful frequencies. Fellow team member Gyaltso, a Tibetan, even taught Buddhist chanting!

With the refreshed, rejuvenated refugees we scouted the mounds of scrap metal and disused electronics that subsequently became the electric horn amplifiers, industrial sound sculptures, colour organs, plate reverberators and oscillators that waited patiently for the climatic audiovisual jam that night.

“With people, a dying culture can live longer; and I believe with culture, dying people can live longer too…” uttered Vena, a woman in her late teens who has spent most of her life in this camp. As she was tuning the electro-acoustic stringed instrument she made for the performance, she looked up at me as I stood mulling over what she said. It touched me greatly, as if my branch was providing people with something as important, something as imperative to survival as food, water and medicine.

I managed to convince the more non-musical Flag Mountaineers to participate that night too!

And so, when the sun finally set below the desert horizon, we, the relief workers alongside the once impoverished, were ready to be further rejuvenated. We were ready to set these vibrations free…

Nov 16


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