7-Week Class Live and Online via Zoom

$200 for Paying Patreon Members / $220 for non-members)
Tuesdays, September 17 - October 29, 2024

Please note: All classes will be recorded for those unable to attend.

This class will explore how you can use our bodies and what you have around you to explore new sonic and performance territories, with roots in your own stories and ancestries, pushing the boundaries of your imaginations with a vibrant community of extraordinary people from a range of backgrounds and disciplines.

Christopher Small coined the verb ‘musicking’ to highlight that music is an ongoing process and not an object. He described it as ‘an activity by means of which we bring into existence a set of relationships that model the relationships of our world, not as they are but as we would wish them to be’. Composer and founder of “Deep Listening” Pauline Oliveros invited musicality into every aspect of our lives by suggesting we “listen to everything all of the time and remind ourselves when we are not listening.” Spending time with our sound, music practice allows us to tune into our own bodies and environments, bridging between inner and outer, intuition, intention and action.  

In this lab you will build on your creative practices through deeper listening as a step towards transforming and healing ourselves, our community, and environment. We will also explore a range of shamanisms from around the world, drawing inspiration from them to better understand your own practices. Each student in invited to undertake their own research and create a performance and/or ritual which will be presented at the final session and made into a collaborative digital audio and video release with a PDF booklet containing text and words from everyone in the class who would like to contribute – made available via http://mhdlcollective.bandcamp.com.

This is inter-disciplinary work; music-making experience is not essential.

Schedule:

• Week One  - An Introduction to Musicking and Shamanism

• Week Two – Journeying, Intention and the Cone of Power

• Week Three  - Divination, Intuition and Improvisation

• Week Four  - Shapeshifting, Transformation and Ritual Performance / Art-Making

• Week Five – Entering the Spirit World without Dying

• Week Six – Unbinding Spells, Songs of Liberation

• Week Seven  - Sharing Ceremony

Each session offers tools, ideas and new perspectives on listening out loud, thinking through creating, including how to create, record and mix your own music, how to make and edit field recordings, sampling, practice methods for a range of instruments, improvisation, and composition techniques, as well as a range of performance practices. There will be space for collectively sharing and discussing the class material and individual / collaborative projects. You will be able to work with free, browser-based music production software which also functions as a collaborative online share-space. You are welcome to use your own preferred software and you will receive support with that, too. Technology is one of many tools that can be used, but there are plenty of analogue options too. There will be weekly prompts and exercises that will guide you towards a final output which can be in any medium (writing, sound, ritual, music, image, film, performance, dance, research, poetry etc in any combination).

The tutor will be developing new music and performance work alongside the students in this class, sharing his process throughout. The sessions will also connect to seasonal rituals, festivals and celebrations, with a particular focus on Celtic traditions.  

Mikey Kirkpatrick is a flutist, singer, multi-instrumentalist, composer, improviser, and performer who has released multiple albums and toured internationally under the stage name Bird Radio, as well as collaborated with musicians, filmmakers, poets, theatre practitioners and sound artists. He specialises in extended flute techniques such as circular breathing and voice work, and has trained in Western, Asian and Middle Eastern flute styles. He is currently exploring extended improvisations, both acoustic and with live-looping technology in parallel with reiki practice and shamanic Journeying techniques.

Mikey is also an associate lecturer in music and education at Goldsmiths University in London where he is the founding director of Alchemy, where young people in South London who are facing barriers receive professional music training and access to experienced youth workers in a safe and supportive environment that promotes listening, constructive friendships (and future networks of support) and alternatives to non-violent and violent crime. Alchemy operates with a student-led and collaborative model, with a music-based pedagogy, inspired by Paolo Freire’s ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ and bell hooks’ “Teaching to Transgress.” Top-down education is avoided, and participants are given agency and responsibility to design their learning collaboratively with professionals.

Mikey’s practice both as an artist and an educator focuses on how deeper listening and musicality can be beneficial and healing for individuals, relationships, communities, society, and the environment at large. His online classes for Morbid Anatomy ‘Music, Healing and Deep Listening’ and ‘Sonic Rites and Rituals’ have led to the formation of the MHDL Collective who regularly release albums of new material online and past participants meet regularly as The Apollo Club.

http://mikeykirkpatrick.wordpress.com