Dual Tongues spans two voices, a friendship, four years, two continents, WhatsApp chats, smoke breaks, long train rides, and the moments that feel meaningful in the spaces between disciplined and discursive contexts. This cross-border dialogue moves through alignments, associations and clashes that appear in our practice of mixing music frequently heard in ritual cultures.
This piece navigates musical traditions, language, as well as glossolalia and its relationship with notions of proof and authenticity; we are two voices thinking at the same time, separate but parallel.
[RITUAL | REPETITION] Actions performed according to a prescribed order
We collapse into Taraweeh prayer, pleating limbs in asynchronous rhythm. Some of us are here for reprieve, others are beholden to ritual. The rakats become surrender, become what we have always known: that which can’t be touched or described, al-īmān. It’s queer kin that have taught me what this body can remember, to disidentify and reinscribe movements that were thought to be separate from us. It’s the portability of ritual, the ability to make holiness apparate when we need it: in a room, in someone’s face, in a park, and in the tunnels. To the divine we come, to the divine we return. We offer these rakats in solemn debt to those who remain steadfast for freedom, and those who have been lost to the violence of empire.
The Marfa is a hemispherical handheld drum which is played while standing and walking. Its portability allows it to bind bodies across territories and time. The distinct Teen Maar beat has been heard on streets in Hyderabad since the eighteenth century, when musicians migrated from Yemen and served as cavalry guards for the Nizams of Hyderabad. A drum head can be used to touch and distribute effects that make crowds swing in synchrony. Its resonant membrane acts as a threshold; it’s an interface through which experiences of geopolitical movement across multiple neighborhoods, trade routes and cosmic worlds are recounted in repeated patterns of time. My interface is a digital audio workstation, where time is counted linearly on a screen. The workstation’s environment is designed to arrange a stack of samples unbound from their place of origin and beatmatched onto a common tempo regulated on a grid. A YouTube recording of Marfa played during a celebration is sliced, processed and sequenced into my very messy timeline grid. Computational precision affords a degree of freedom to sufficiently detach a recording from its source. An adequate amount of abstracting the object renders it mobile enough to traverse templatised scales and tempos, and sticky enough to register to subcultural movements that resist, unsettle and make messy political geographies hyper legible.
[LANGUAGE | SYMBOLS] Punch-drunk communication system
Vocal disfluencies and slippages have always fascinated me. In radio, we’re sometimes taught ways to remove the creases in our language, to soften the audio artefacts that are created from a fumble or dry lips opening in order to make our message clear. In Legacy Russell’s book Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, she understands a technological glitch, a moment of disruption, as a political tactic and learning. A disturbance to a system of violence, an opening to a different world. I’ll stammer to be unintelligible, to find the rhythms of opacity and revel in being unacceptable. A stutter becomes code <ums, ahs, tsk, like, err> punctuating the transmission, distorting respectable communication protocol.
The subcontinent was a launchpad for extensions of empire in the nineteenth century; fibers carrying intelligence and anxieties across oceans. The world’s electronic communication network exchanged a variety of interests and wealth, both intellectual and material, across neighboring lands: the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Australia. Meaning and authenticity of information was embedded in the operation of signals, and transmission of messages was based on efficient conversion of words into bits of sound. Over centuries telegraphic beeps started to carry the pulse of a sample, and samples began to carry musical notes. A double code of inherited and acquired meanings emerged as mythical figures, ancient and modern cities, metaphors and abstract qualities began featuring more regularly in the composition of messages. Signal operators who were trained to interpret such messages often got dizzy while translating them as per standard language protocol. Reports of symptoms ranged from fuzzy distortions and discontinuous transmissions to systemic illegibility and misinformation. A motley crew of operators met at coffee breaks, figuring out how to salvage meaning from the weird information boom. They realised that the possibility for legible communication was to hack the protocol by signaling the reports as songs sung in an unknown tongue.
[TALA | BOL] The voice as a gateway
An attempt to transcribe Sheila Chandra’s live performance of Speaking In Tongues III, 1993
Tha tha dhi kit ta tha dimi dhi kit ta tham
Tha kit ta tha ghi, tha kit ta ke tham dha gha dhi ghin na
Ka dhom tham tha dhin ka dhin a tha ka dhipi ka jherno tha ka dhipi
[SPEECH | BODY] Mouths
Unlike other holes in the body, the mouth is an organ that produces voices of the self. It animates speech that belongs to the flesh. Lantian Xie and Sabih Ahmed write a brief history of twentieth century America through the mouths of two boxers, Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson. One was portrayed as an eloquent mouth which could not be contained, and the other as a biting mouth with a lisp that turned feral. A blow expels a grunt, and a punch releases a shout. As muscles become more resilient to force over prolonged exposure, the intensity of vocalised pain changes, wherein a grunt can become quieter and the shout akin to a sigh. Memories of being touched and not being touched have effects on speech. They manifest as stutters, lisps and silences. Memories of discomfort punctuate the voice that fights scrambling. It devises methods of speaking where silences are used to float like a butterfly and stutters used to sting like a bee.
Glossolalia or speaking in tongues is when someone can commune with the divine. The voice transcends, moving beyond the plane we know to spiritually connect elsewhere. The mouth and diaphragm become a container for spirit, spilling over into sighs, shorts, trills, stutters, melodies. When I listen to Sheila Chandra’s Speaking in Tongues, her voice threads across time, weaving ancestral voices. Voice and tongue and breath braid together, becoming muscle and shape and sound and memory. In her words, the voice can move through the crumbling gateways of vocal traditions. To sing is to transcend time. Consonants trip on each other, the tongue is shaped by another conscience, the mouth utters seraphic tones, the voice escapes somewhere between the body and god.