But the traditional rhythms of West African music are considered additive, a term which already gives us an indication of their fundamental multiplicity. The music's complex percussive patterns bubble up from the shifting and open-ended interaction between many different individual drum patterns and pitches. Written down, the measures that organize the repetitive beat sequences associated with each instrument can be of variable lengths and time signatures. In turn this produces permanent conversations or cross-patterns between each drum, a dialogue which is also a complex dimension of difference introduced between elements that are themselves often quite repetetive and simple. In other words, a block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component.
Every milieu is coded, a code being defined by periodic repetition.
One milieu serves as the basis for another, or conversely is established atop another milieu, dissipates in it or is constituted in it. The milieus are open to chaos , which threatens them with exhaustion or confusion. Rhythm is the milieu's answer to chaos. And with the ancient mediation of the drum, this potent play between chaos and rhythm carries us outside of theory and into the dance of lived multiplicity. Polyrhythmic music provides a primary and unusually intuitive avenue, not just to conceptualize, but to draw these heterogeneous spaces, chaotic passages and communicating milieus into our bodyminds as we weave ourselves into the polyrhythmic ensemble's fibrillating tapestry of molecular beats and criss-crossed percussive patterns.