The bamboo way
My path through world bamboo flutes
I am Thomas Goulpeau, born in 1981.
The call for travelling brought me to the flutes
In spring 2003, back from my first big trip in India where I felt in love with the Bansuri, I harvest some bamboos in France and awkwardly try to build my first side-blown bamboo flutes.
During the next 4 years, bamboo flute making is always nearby during my journeys with tools in my backpack first and bicycle bags later supplementing the small incomes from street music playing in search of a simple self-sufficient nomadic lifestyle.
Varanasi in India
My entrance gate into the flutes
The cabin in the woods
where I lived and made my flutes
inspired by the sound of the stream and birdsong.
Photo Alexa Brunet – Habitants Atypiques
In 2006, willing to improve my skills, I settled down by the Loire valley on a family wasteland where I decided to dedicate myself to the study and experiment of flute making.
What was then just a hobby became a path.
Atelier Chikudo, my ‘bamboo way’, was born at this time and became official when I set up my own business in 2009.
At the time, I was exhibiting my instruments at world music festivals and other instrument-making fairs, and diversifying my production into around fifteen models; often traditional bamboo flutes and sometimes bamboo versions of instruments usually made from other materials.
(See here the kind of flutes I used to make before !)
During these years of experimentation and study, the flutes and their music have allowed me to nourish my taste for travel in a different way.
Despite my experience, the early days were tedious, with no one to show me neither how to play nor to make it…
Gradually, I got into the strange music of this instrument and discovered a growing interest in Japanese culture in general.
So in 2010 I set off on a 3-month cycling trip, covering more than 3,000km of Japan from north to south.
cycling on the lush
island of Yakushima
Japan 2010
I soon came up against the limits of studying the playing and making of shakuhachi on my own. After another 6-month honeymoon cycling trip (2012) and the arrival of my first kid (2013), I decided to join a newly-formed shakuhachi group with the master Gunnar Jinmei Linder, whose reference book on Honkyoku I had been studying on my own.
In 2014, I moved with my family to Figeac, took part in my first European shakuhachi gathering in Prague and decided to devote myself exclusively to making and studying shakuhachi.
A large number of projects and the arrival of a second child (2015) meant that I had to work at a fairly slow pace, but being slow by nature, that’s fine by me!
I had to wait almost 10 years before finally returning to Japan (during winter 2019), this time for a trip focused on shakuhachi studies and harvesting Madake bamboo for my creations.
I’m now continuing to deepen my connection to Japanese culture through my travels, my study of shakuhachi and the language, and in a certain quest for aesthetics in my everyday life.
It’s a beautiful path that my ‘bamboo way’ has taken; it nurtures things that are quite profound and allows me to feel that I have somewhere to be in this modern world in which I see so little of myself…
And I couldn’t have achieved this without the support of all those who have accompanied me and all those who have put their breath into my instruments.
Thank you all.
