Mystical musician’s journey to the soul
by David Haith
Coaxing ethereal sounds from ancient bells, cymbals, gongs, chimes and bowls Frank Perry is not so much a musician – more an explorer.
The unmapped territory he visits is the mysterious world of
the mind. His quest is to uncover the link between music and the superconscious
or even the soul.
Frank 38, who lives with his wife
Christine and three children at Poulner, Ringwood, and has recorded 11 albums
which sell all over the world, has not always been a mystical musician.
Back in 1964 he was a rock drummer in a
blues band alongside the famous Paul Kossoff, who died through drugs after
hitting the big time with the cult band Free.
Frank branched off into free-form jazz
but after leading his own group in 1974 dropped out, “needing to rethink my
musical vocabulary and develop a new approach to music.”
And that’s where the gongs and chimes came in and merged with Frank’s long-term interest in ancient Eastern esoteric philosophies.
His father was a trance medium and Frank
too found he had the gift of communication with “the inner planes.”
He believes he’s in touch with beings who
were on earth thousands of years ago and is certain he’s lived 10 times before
in Tibet.
“I’m trying to get some of this expanded
consciousness into my music,” he explained. “I’m attempting to make myself a
pure channel but I’m not off into my own world.”
“I’m interested in communication and I
believe that musical sounds affect people at very deep levels.
“I’m interested in providing a door or
ladder into another world. I’m trying to materialise the spiritual.”
At the last count he had 52 antique
Oriental instruments and around 100 from contemporary China or the East – so
many, in fact, that all but one or two are safely in store in bank vaults and
are retrieved only for concerts or recordings.
He even makes his own instruments – huge
petal shaped discs he calls Petalumines and made from a special Swiss bell
metal which when struck ring for five minutes.
Most fascinating of Frank’s strange music
makers is his priceless collection of Tibetan singing bowls made from seven
sacred metals and many centuries old.
He strokes their rims with special wooden
sticks evoking a shrill, clear note. He can change the pitch and “play” the
bowl by raising it as it rings to his lips.
Some of the dishes are so sacred that he’s
anxious that no stranger touches them.
“They’re charged with psycho-spiritual
powers,” he says.
One “panic” bowl gives out a deafening
screech like scraping a blackboard and is used for exorcism.
Although his musical career began with
drums he now shuns them. He explained “Drums and cowbells have a short
resonance, meaning rhythm, meaning time. And time means worldly consciousness.
But instruments which ring on for a long period mean the listener can move into
non-time consciousness.”
If you find all this a little too way-out
and hard to take then it might also be difficult to accept that Frank has come
by many of his ancient instruments through tip-offs from “the other world.”
Once a voice told him to go to Portobello
market where he’d find some bells. Sure enough he was able to buy three
300-year-old Japanese temple bells. . . from a crockery stall.
It’s not unusual for a unknown yogi to
approach him in the street and hand over some sacred bell which he insists on
giving as part of some cosmic plan.
Other instruments come less mysteriously –
like the Chinese bell tree which he bought after spotting the five bells on the
door of a violin shop in Edinburgh.
Among Frank’s many other talents is painting – he has a wall full of “planetary mandalas,” coloured meditation patterns to help him explorer connections between colour, sound and healing energies.
He must also be the only Advertiser reader
who is an expert in the art of Mongolian Xhoomij chanting – an uncanny ability
to sing different pitched notes at the same time by varying the shape of his
mouth cavity.
To keep Frank on “the path” is Lom Phook
Trenglam, “a Shamanistic Tibetan who was upon earth several thousand years
before Buddhism came to Tibet.”
He says Lom Phook and his other
discarnate guides, including a Red Indian, are merely helpers.
He said: “I have complete free will. I’m
still an individual. I’m a co-operator with them. I’m not controlled – I’m led.”
Bournemouth Advertiser 1986
Used with the kind permission of David Haith
© Frank Perry, 1986. All of these articles are copyright. They may individually be copied and shared with others in a spirit of knowledge-sharing and fair play, but they may not be sold, printed or reproduced in quantity or changed in form without the permission of the copyright holder. None of this material may be reproduced in workshops or lectures of any kind unless quotes are credited or properly attributed.
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