Ancient Toltec Wisdom Helped Me Understand André 3000
Photos: Jordan Munns courtesy of AGNSW
‘If you haven’t been on the planet for the last thirty years, I’m Benjamin to some, André 3000 to most.’
The introduction goes, and I’m standing in just one of the two WW2 oil reservoirs, the ‘Tank’ at AGNSW, here to listen to André 3000’s debut solo album New Blue Sun brought to Australia by Volume Festival. I don’t know it yet, but in a few minutes the girl in front of me will start painting her nails in the middle of the crowd, forcing me to abandon my front-left speaker orientation that has served me so well over the years, and throughout the duration of this two-hour set, none of the album itself will actually be played. It will leave me stunned and in a religious-like stupor, and I will tell you all about it.
Having left my spot, I discovered a fan whose mother raised them on OutKast CDs. I ask if they were one of the legions who demanded a rap album from André, and how they felt about this new sound. ‘Two decades of waiting never would have matched.’ They’re right. The anticipation that led to this album was so ravenous it probably wouldn’t have even been satiated with a big old shiny rap album. I can imagine so many people around the world like their mum sitting down to this album and being confused. He broke a 17-year-long hiatus with no bars, just flute music.
The vibe in the tank is not ravenous, instead sanctimonious. Both cavernous and intimate at once, I look around and can’t deny the feeling that we, all of us here tonight- the nail-painter, fred-again devotees, mothers, lovers, strangers - are all about to embark on a pilgrimage of spiritual importance. I decide to refrain from talking to my newfound friend after they laugh, ‘I think you are a few mg’s higher than me.’
Unable to recall what I said to elicit this response, but certain it must have been warranted, I turn to the stage and like an apparition, André appears.
What followed was a succession of chirping, fizzing feelings and sounds, like cicadas, which bring you up, whilst a flute dominates the trajectory from there, escalating the energy until the whole crowd is basically in a trance state. Chanting, yelping and natural rhythms bring you back down, and the music continues in this way, meandering from moments of wind-chime weightlessness, to moments that demand a deep bass sexual seriousness. You feel the music more than you hear it.
The whole outside world could have died above us and none of us would have known - that is the level of control the sound had on us and how skillfully André, Carlos Nino, Nate Mercereau, Surya Botofasina and Deantoni Parks were able to command such a sound.
Having attended this performance, I now know what it is to be in the grotto. Each of us nymphs, like Alphonse Mucha’s or Sydney Long’s - whose painterly depictions stand in quiet darkness not a hundred metres from where we are. With the light refracting around us, I was sure each of us could have been compelled to break out at any moment into a fight or an orgy if a certain noise was made. If you haven’t been on earth for the last thirty years André says, now I’m thinking maybe we were down there for thirty years or thirty minutes. We definitely weren’t on Earth. All reason and time left.
Just a few metres further from the Longs and the Muchas, there is a burrowed theatre in the south wing where I spent every Saturday of May attending lectures by archaeologist Dr Julian Droogan about ancient Mesoamerican civilisations. It was there I was told about jaguar sacrifice and the world of the fifth sun but also about the Toltecs, who, without written language, illustrated poetry or song as a gust of wind coming from a shaman’s mouth. A speech bubble with fruit sprouting from it. I would come to think of language and music as expressions of this wind, but I only truly understood it at André’s performance.
In an interview about New Blue Sun, André described the sound the flute makes as ‘human’s wind.’ His Flute-maker, Guillermo Martinez, specialises in recreating ancient Mesoamerican flutes. André often uses a ‘Mayan Double Flute’ made by him.
As I merge from the subterranean chamber, I look down and notice I have ink all over my hands from taking notes on my spirax in the dark.
I consider the brute creation of ‘human wind’ I just encountered through a flute, and the crystal that refracted blue light beams all around us.
I look up and the stars all make the apex of such bright blue triangles.
On my notepad I (hardly) am able to read:
Everytime I had suspicions it was coming, it came
Love
Love
Love again.
Approximately 1000 years ago, in a basin that is now called Mexico, a shaman emerged from a cave under the pyramid of the sun. In the cave, standing over a bowl of jade bones and feathered serpent blood, he had made the noise of butterflies and hummingbirds and seashells.
The rattling in my sternum from the episodically growling bass flies away, taking with it, a pocket of hurt - into the human wind.
