Soulful Stories with Filip Alves
My name is Filip Alves, and I was born in Portugal. I connected with music from a very young age and played guitar in a school band. I’ve always been my own person and a bit of a lone character. I went to school in Lisbon but also spent much of my childhood living by the sea. I was a boy scout and enjoyed camping and climbing. I learned a lot about how to make things, like fires. I felt a need to understand how things could be made with my hands.
Fast forward a few years and I was having an energetic time, partying and a lot of growth happened between the years of being fourteen and eighteen. There were a lot of changes and transformations experienced. I then found myself in a bit of a darker place and this resulted in me making a decision to move to the UK. I didn’t know anyone, and I could hardly speak English.
I studied cinema for a while and created lots of crazy films and was attending festivals, and then something happened. I found myself in a ceremony and it was during that I heard a gong for the very first time, and it changed my world.
I’d always been a very hyper-active person, and nothing ever seemed to be able to calm me and allow me to relax, but in that space the gong showed me a whole new possibility of being able to deal with my own emotions. From this time on I was interested in gongs and tried to hear and experience as many as I could.
Life then took me to West Wales, I lived in a little van in the middle of a field and I met Bear Love who makes flumies. I ended living on his land. I was also helping him to make the flumies. Then I started to make gong stands and going deeper with my interest in the gongs and how sound and frequencies can change and transform lives.
I’ve always been a maker of things, a craftsman, and I’ve always liked to understand more about what I’m making. I started wondering how a gong could be made, and I really had no idea at this point. It amazed how a piece of metal could create such a sound, and I wanted to know how. I also didn’t want to know everything, I always want to leave space to learn more. I’ll always want to be a student and never a master.
No one really knows where the gongs come from, but I feel there’s something ancient and primitive about them, and they do something inside of us. When I make a gong I feel that everything that I am passes into the gong and that comes out in the sound.
It amazes me that every tap of the hammer changes the sound of the gong that I am making. This fascinates me. And this all began because one day I found a piece of brass in a scrap yard and I set about trying to make something with it with a hammer in a field.
This showed me what was possible because I was able to make a sound from that piece of brass. I then attended a workshop on how to make singing bowls and another on how to make gongs, and I learned a lot from that, and then I made another gong, and then another, and I was developing something and after a couple of years I discovered a sound and it’s a sound that connects me to my experience of hearing that first gong. I have now made fifty-seven gongs and each one carries something different about my growth as a gong maker.
Alongside making gongs I also started making flutes, which are also available my business Filip Alves Crafts. I like to work with commission pieces as it involves working with people, and it makes the instrument special. I worked with a lady recently who wanted a drone flute that she can play to people who are in the last moments of their lives.
When I make an instrument I normally won’t let it go straight away. I have to sit with it, be with it. It’s like allowing time for the instruments to reveal themselves. I look at all the instruments that I make as being my friends.
I now have my own workshop, and I have some tools and am living in a beautiful place still in West Wales, and I’m excited to see where I go from here.
Contact Flip at: [email protected]
