Somewhere in the wilds of England, Wales, and Iceland, Steve Hubback, percussionist and maker of custom gongs and metal art, walks with purpose.
He moves, perhaps with the remnants of an ale inside of him, tuned. He is resonant with the metals of the Earth and they inform his feet. Hubback is a magnetically charged human being, hearing deep within him the sounds that are deep within the metallic rivers frozen inside our planet; silver, copper, and bronze flows that call to his mind and hands.
The flows called to him and said, you need to form me, to hammer me, to make me into a new form that can heal with sound.
And he heard them, these metal rivers as they spoke, and he put his hands onto the soft earth and pulled the metals out into his hand, supernaturally, as he delved into their molecular structure, and then like an ancient European deity, forged a tool for Sound Healers, what he calls a Shaman Stick.
How Steve describes it:
The wood is a special oak that I found in an English garden. I strip the bark and cut the desired lengths and gently work the surface of the wood. The shells are forged in B8 bronze which is an amazingly sonorous alloy.
See Steve play the Shaman Stick in the first 30 seconds of this video.