When you delve into a Talayotic necropolis, in Menorca, you feel you are entering someone else's home, penetrating a world that is not yours and, at the same time, finally crossing self-imposed barriers by the yearning for presumed protection: the border between what is alive and what is not. Stone, however, forms, performs, and transforms: it beats with almost imperceptible movements that have little to do with the paralysis and silence of death. Stone sounds and the sound of geology – like that of the stars – endures beyond human limits…
For ages, the ancient inhabitants of the island would wander and investigate until they discovered enclaves where not only our voice is amplified and spreads, but the voices of the other inhabitants of the ecosystem are half deciphered – in such a way that they seem to understand each other. I think about how much time they must have spent trekking their bit of the universe with wide-open ears, listening attentively until they decided the exact place where they would set to work (chipping stone), not so much to build a shelter, but rather to open a door. A passage not secret, but made common through collective song, linking the different forms of existence, the different times.
Crickets, moles, and frogs, small owls, and blackbirds gather near the ravines where they carved hypogea and caves; falcons, finches, and shearwaters, bats, and chirping crustaceans, co-habit the cliffs where they sculpted eyes and caves that the sea cradles with resonant lows. We hear it, we record it, but, when we hear it again (when we play it back on the recording), another sound that we were unable to locate, define, or describe has vanished. Perhaps it wasn't even a sound – it was an auditory sensation, or an effect of the great improvised mix of frequencies in the context of those acoustic properties. A rebound, a reflection, a harmonic.
We fall silent inside a tomb or temple from prehistory – and, after the shiver, the mineral revelation of this vibration that connects everything. Music: the medium by which soniferous creatures (like beings with human bodies) transit earthly life, and the only one by which we will cross towards a mysterious and tuned ultra-existence, where hearts still understand each other. Where we will meet again because the action of lending an ear is practiced there and improvisation is conjugated in rhythms that are more-than-our-own; where each voice is unique precisely because it sings with the others. Where together we chip stone.
I am rewriting this article at the last minute, with Joan Roca in memory and in the present. I move from a deep sadness and with a mysterious beat, towards a new stratum of knowledge less certain and uncertainly mutating, although undoubtedly beautiful – full of possibilities. Now that the musician embarks on another path, a lithic certainty envelops me: that the notes and chords of his instruments, and the sounds of his words, already weave him forever to the life of the earth (to the living rock) and to the memory of those of us who still have to continue inhabiting it for a while.
