• elephant songs #0 – surprise prologue (1/17/2012)
• elephant songs #1, bangalore – today and tomorrow! (1/11/2012)
• congratulations in india (11/17/2011)
• udaipur rooftops (11/13/2011)
• poha! (11/11/2011)
• till the cows come home (11/10/2011)
• test ride day one – my way is the highway (11/9/2011)
• siddhartha’s way (11/8/2011)
• mountains! please? (11/6/2011)
• lalala – a week in katmandu (10/31/2011)

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Musicians gather round an elephant. Touching it.
They all feel different parts of the elephant – the head feels like a pot, the tip of the tail could be a brush. The back a mortar, the trunk a plough. They’re all partly in the right, and together they compose the elephant. If their parts add up to an elephant, that is. Could be a bulldozer. A dead rabbit. A christmas tree, or an Enfield 350 cc motorcycle from 1979.
Elephant Songs is the optimistic inversion of the old story of the blind men and the elephant. Everyone experiences music differently, but as improvising musicianis we can always create a piece of music together, whatever we call it and wherever we come from. Each fresh combination of musicians plays music that is the result of a few days of working together, playing tunes from Robbert’s elephant songbook and pieces brought by the other members-of-the-moment. The music plays with odd metre rock grooves, filmic melodies, South Indian rhythm games, homespun harmonies, and an imperceptable balance between composition and improvisation.

the bike

Fourteen countries, 15,000 kilometres on a 1979 350 cc Royal Enfield Bullet motorcycle. From Madras and the deep south via India’s west coast up to Amritsar, crossing into Pakistan at the Wagah border. After Lahore, Quetta, and the somewhat nervousness-inspiring Baluchistan desert, I’ll cross into Iran, and ride up into Armenia and Georgia after passing through Kerman, fairy-tale Isfahan, and Tehran. At the Sarpi border into Turkey, following the northern coast. After Istanbul I’ll ride northwest in Europe: Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Germany, and into the low lands.
I’ll bring my drums and a list of musicians on the way. I’d like to play with with two or three musicians at the time, in a previously not existing combination. We’ll all bring something to work with, and come up with music together. Perform – in someone’s living room or on a brightly-lit stage – and record it.
After each session I’ll post a track on my blog nocount.org , and I’ll use the recordings to make an album after the trip is over. More sound and text and image can be found on my blog.
Of course all musicians have their own version of music. Music is not the universal language, it’s a phenomenon like music: it’s everywhere, and wildly different from place to place. But since it’s sound rather than words, we can meet and use our own idioms while working together. I think that when we share our musics, we all create parts that together form the elephant. While our perspectives may differ, the elephant is the combined effort of all the parts. Sometimes we may not know in advance, or even while we’re creating it, what exactly our elephant looks like, or if it even is an elephant. But you’ll find a song there.