The process is always the same: play music to forget about this stupid world, closing my eyes and forgetting about things that are on the surface, I’m playing. After a while I am not thinking anymore about anything, I’m in the feel, in the patterns, thinking ahead, getting ready to land my fingers on strings and move them accordingly.
And then after a while in the Zone, somehow, my brain jumps to a memory. Often one that I never or barely thought about before. Some are insanely old, some are insignificant, but always feel real, like the exact feeling of being in a swimming pool around Lyon when I was like 13, the exact feeling of being in this small room to change clothes. Or a stormy weather over my small French village and going back home and eating sautés mushrooms when I hadn’t been even adopted yet.
These portals are only happening when playing music closing my eyes, improvising. Sometimes it’s so disturbing, so real, that it puts me out of the Zone. In some cases I was so amazed to remember something that I had to immediately stop playing, and being like “but… How? How do I remember that right now, how is that so crystal clear?”
It’s awesome and scary at the same time. Often, it gives me a sense of what I have accomplished or it gives me a sense of “wow, that feeling was so great”, even if it’s just like a memory of making a left turn on Sunset Blvd with the sun reflecting on cars windshield or sitting down in the grass in Vincennes, watching people. It’s the little things and the perspective from them.
Of course, pot enhances that feeling. Sometimes I swear, even smell and odors are almost coming back. Like I can almost get a sense of it. I cut so much information by closing my eyes that everything else gets bigger.
It’s all about spending hundreds of hours listening, I guess. Listening to music, copying notes, listening to my copy/paste play, listening to my own play, listening to my breathing, listening in general, at some point I suppose that my brain kind of gets split up in two with an half being a spectator and the other being like “btw, I have this little super HD 5.1 4K in odorama movie of you being lonely, wanna watch it?” and I’m all like, “shoot”.
But it’s not just that. I can’t count how many times I found solutions to problems by improvising funky bass lines and bam, “Jesus fuck, of course!!”, or “oh smart, I totally need to try that in fact, I’m gonna do this right now”. /puts his bass back on its stand.
Music and non-visual focus are so different from this visually over-saturated world we live in. It feels damn good.