Entrance Hall

There is an entrance hall to our first floor bungalow family house somewhere South of Brussels.

The entrance hall is all tile and wall.

A variety of broken whites and a dark brown entrance door.

Some light seeps in through two windows flanking the entrance door.

The hall is rectangular, five doors give way

to the basement, the night hallway (giving access

to the 4 bedrooms, a toilet and a bathroom), a kitchen, the living room and the bureau.

In that entrance hall, my drums.

The hall, all resonance and hard reflections.

It must have gotten there, the drums, around my age of 13 or 14, after me having seen an

MTV video clip featuring a drummer.

I remember still, walking to the kitchen and asking my mother for drum lessons at the music academy.

She, to my surprise, had no objections at all.

From where does one play music?

From what place?

Do we carry those sounds within us, as an imaginary acoustic space in which we pre-hear our sounds and phrases, like a soundboard preconditioning our acoustic presence in any other room, in many here and now's?

Does that hallway still reflect in the sound

of my drumming today?

Is it somehow inside of me? Still?

I do remember at a certain moment in my early twenties having to learn to play harder on the drums. I didn’t possess of a technique to hit hard. I always intuited that those early years of my playing in the entrance hall formed my drum technique and developed my sense of soft timbres and harmonics on the drums.

Me playing drums in the hallway.

Softly. Carefully matching the timbres of the drums to the hard reflections of the hallway.

Makes me think of Miles Davis who went out to the lake near his house as a kid, to play the trumpet.

One can still hear the lake in Miles phrasing.