(En)chanting beats

While recently in Bali, I got invited to hang out in a spa one morning. Now as far as spas go, you can argue not a lot changes in facilities; usually a sauna, a steam room, hot and cold plunge pools, a larger swimming pool, areas to lounge and relax. The Istana in Uluwatu even has cryotherapy and oxygen chambers, a yoga area and an infra-red sauna, but it was pretty much all of the rest.

Until you walk in to the sprawling lawn area that cradles around the swimming pool and a large, circular henge-esque fire pit area. You are magnetically allured to the view that splays before you, sauntering over the lush grass feeling under your bare feet to the high cliff edge, and just simply look out. The Indian ocean stretches out before you and for a moment, it is enough nourishment to just stand there and gaze, take it in - the flat, shimmering vastness infront of you, only creased with the precisely spaced out lines of the waves as one by one they break in to crisp, white surf. You are caught in a moment where everything else around you can gently tip-toe backwards away from you, slip in to the background and slowly disappear with the ocean breeze. It would be an almost natural instinct to take a photo or a swiping landscape video, but you aren't allowed to take your phone in there, you have to leave it at reception.

At reception, where you pay to go in of course. So you snap out of your moment, turn around and step in to the pools. It's 30 degrees celcius outside, but the sweat of the sauna feels just right regardless. Everything is very much spa-like until you step in to the steam room.

Making your way through an outside door, to close in to blackness for an inner door to open, a steaming pool of light rises from the ground in the middle of the room to give the only indication of where to step as your eyes adjust to the three-row, terrace like benches that encircle it. It is quite full of bodies and we sit on the bottom bench and let the steam slowly hit you as your breathing slows and you relax and sink in to the wood. 

Until within a couple of minutes from up and behind my right shoulder, someone with a shaved head, sat upright and cross-legged starts humming. Steadily, building, gathering tempo and a musical form with each bar that leaves his lips, rising deep from his diaphragm. Then someone else joins in the same tone from the other side of the room, again from the top bench. My immediate reaction is almost of dread: 'Oh bloody hell, I'm in a room full of Hare Krishnas'. I am too quick to judge. I am so, so wrong.

As others again on the top row join the jam, it layers with tessitura, their choral octaves come together and then it flows. The lead guy over my shoulder then adds some bass beats as I hear his voice drop with a chest pound from his own hand. Some fingers click. It builds with each bar, getting louder, my breathing quickens in line with the bpm. It is exactly that: a beat, a groove, and I get locked into it, deep in a trench cruising along like an X-Wing fighter in the battle to blow up the Death Star in Star Wars.

And then I am taken back to 1991 and the club I worked in with the downstairs soul, acid jazz and funk room. My coming of age, where I was musically educated and discovered my love for beats, grooves and basslines that inbed themselves in your inner being forever. I suddenly remember singers I discovered, like Omar with his 'Nothing Like This' EP, and the acapella song on it - 'Fine' - where he sings along mixing voice and chest hand slaps to enhance bass sounds, and claps, clicks of fingers and flicks of the underside of his chin and cheeks for the treble. 

I don't want to look over my shoulder and stare, but I need to double-check that it really isn't Omar sat there. The steamy haze helps and I sneak a quick peek to see him pound his chest lightly with the palm of his hand on a lower note. He is steering the groove. The little drummer boy in me has risen, I want to be sat behind my kit or on a cajon, I close my eyes and feel it awash over me like the steam and I feel connected, I am in the middle of this mantra, this (en)chanting beat. I can feel my kick drum foot start tapping. I start imagining where I would open the high-hat to drop that timely tsst.

I have no idea how long has passed. "You wanna go back outside?" she asks.  

"Yeah, sure...but no...I mean I do, but I wanna...well, keep on grooving in here, and I really wish I had my phone to record this...and also a loop pedal."

We walk back outside in to the daylight energised with the hum inside me lingering. As it would do for the rest of the day. As it does as I write this.