Personal story: bongo jando, how rhythm showed me the way

It must have been the summer of 2014. I lived in a squat, in the small industrial town of Velsen - Noord, the Netherlands. A place shared with about ten people, with an indoor BMX skatepark, a band practicing room, a music studio, walls filled with graffiti, travelers visiting, and always creative projects and other craziness going on. I was struggling to be a freelance web designer at the time, and was starting to feel more and more desperate, about my financial situation, and about my main focus in life, because I felt a need to freely express myself, and web design just didn't cut it.

the squat from outside

That summer I started to play music now and then with roommates, a crazy neighbor, and some friends. I had never learned to actually play an instrument, although I've been seriously interested in all kinds of musical genres since I was sixteen. My neighbor brought a darbuka, a Tunisian percussion instrument, and I started to play around with it. He said 'hey, you've got a feel to this, maybe you should keep it'. So I kept the instrument, and I enjoyed just improvising on it.

Usually we were doing acoustic reggae sessions, and the darbuka wasn't the perfect match for that, so we came up with the idea of just taking a small closet, sit on it, and play it like a Cajon. We called in the Jambo. I tried to just play along with the songs, although I'd never learned anything about rhythm at all.

me on the jambo, just the back a closet actually

Some weekend in June, there was a party in the middle of nowhere, and we decided to go there. At the time, I was extremely fascinated by psychedelic drugs, a passion that was already going on for about 8 years. I made myself a capsule, with 12mg of 2-CP (one of Alexander Shulgin's treasures, a very strong psychedelic), or so I thought. At the party, I took the capsule, and started to have a nice, not too crazy trip. We went home, and the next thing I know, it was morning, and I was tripping extremely hard, as in, I had no clue anymore about anything that was going on. I just couldn't get it, my world was completely messed up, I couldn't grasp to anything, like an insane whirlpool of random madness. Lying in my bed I thought there was a hurricane going on, then I thought our squat was being evacuated, then I thought people came for me to take me to an mental institution, then I calmed down, and just kind of started to walk around.

the living room, where I started to walk around

People were busy doing graffiti, fixing bikes, skating and just chilling out. I thought that this whole day was designed especially for me, to find my purpose in life. I was standing in the garden, with a tabletennis racket in my hand, just making rhythms with moving the ball up and down. Then, my friend sitting next to me said 'bongo jando', and then it just clicked. I thought, in all this extreme madness and chaos that's going on, rhythm is something beautiful to hold on to! That really was it, focus and holding on to! So I walked to the band practice room, and just jumped behind the drum kit, and when I started to play, the whole room just lightened up, with a big spotlight on me at the drum kit! And I got an overwhelming feeling, that told me, just wrapped it in my face, yes, this it it! Rhythm!

the band practice room

The whole trip lasted about 20 hours, and this trip wasn't supposed to be so extremely strong, and during the experience I've been scared to death at some points. It turned out, that the scale I used to measure the dose, was set on the pennyweight (dwt) measurement unit, so I accidentally took 18 instead of 12 mg, which is a very high dose!

My friend mentioned 'bongo jando', because we were thinking about a percussion instrument for our reggae jams. At the time we didn't know, that the bongo usually isn't used in reggae, but that it's an Cuban instrument. So that's when I dived into the world of the bongo! To be continued!

the garden where my bongo moment stroke me

@Curie