The Sound of Gaia
Published in spanish at: Especial Hofmann (CAÑAMO, co-produced by La Liebre de Marzo)
My
personal experience in the use of the entheogen like a D.J. and
musician, came soon, in discotheques and rave parties, without
didjeridoo nor instruments. The spirit of discovering, the turntables
and the frenetic beats took me to the LSD, MDMA and those synthetics
that were so common in the 90’s. I remember how my firsts trips begun
to make me think about qüestions that I never had before, so my
interest on the knowledge in psychedellic substances and their uses
incremented with all the information that I was able to reach. In this
little text, congratulating A. Hofmann in his centenary, I’ll try to
explain how A. Hofmann’s invention, and it’s posteriors studies have
influenced my musical formation.
A nice morning, after the
celebration of one of the bigest european rave, Borealis, and less
surprised every time for the new musical tendencies, I got in contact
with the didjeridoo. The city was almost a desert, so it was early
Sunday morning, and in a silent square called my attention the sound of
a nomad musician making sounds with a didjeridoo. The acid I had taken
the night before, together with the wet surface of the stone, in that
square of Montpellier, everything was perfect for good acustics. My
body got filled with that sound that penetrate to me, calling me from
very far, envolving my conciousness.
A new urban tribe, in part
rooted in the hippies that had taken the first LSD drops, rebirth in
the 90’s, with a psychedellic label for the electroni music: the
Trance. Coming from Goa’s (India) concept of music, it spread around
Europe and Spain, thru Ibiza, with the influence of travellers from all
over the world.
Unique festivals, like the cybernethic from Josa de
Cadí (Pirinees) or Canet Rock (the most importants in Catalan
psychedellics from the 70’s), would be replaced by raves and comercial
techno festivals (like Barcelona’s Sonar), where you cannot lisen to
more than electronics. Hipnotic rythms, searching the extasis, with
more or less power, for hours and hours, would make difficult (if not
impossible), to integrate a lisergic experience.
However we will
find that part of this music it’s being composed, according to the
mentality aquired thru the chage of vision produced by the entheogenic,
in it’s different variants. Intuitively, we can find the effects that
people seach in substances, and the different substances used by the
consumers of that music, used for many productions that apear in
electronic music (techno, house, techno-trance): aspects more or less
riches in the music, composition, inspiration, or the productive work
in the sound, like for example X-Dream, Hallucinogen or Shpongle.
But
with the time I proved how the naturality of the enthogenic effects
produced by those substances, gets a deeper dimension using live music,
or more real music. This new music, usable in the sessions to guide
modified state of conciousnes, how I understand it, enriches from the
different cultures and what trascends from them: the sacred, the
spiritual, the misticism, and it’s multiple forms. This can be
observed, for example, in the listening of Arvo Pärt, Vidya Rao,
Stephan Micus. And progressively we qüestion those values that difine
us social and culturally, when we reflexion of the impact produced by
the discovering of the entheogenic by the occidental society.
Thanks
to the wep created around the discovering of the LSD, the work in
psychiatry and psicology based in the use of this kind of substances,
it has been possible a rebirth of the ancestral healing forms, at the
same time that inovative. This carried me to study the
musicotherapeutic methodology developed by P. Hess, founded in the
clinical and ritual use of the arcaic instruments, based in the
perinatal matrices, descrive by S. Grof, coming from essays and
psicotherapy with LSD.
In the way thru time and spece of Gaia, we
will find that some music and some instruments, for it’s quality, are
more usefull than others to guide modified states of counciousnes, thru
the use of entheogens, respiration, or just music. The arcaic sound is
that used during thousands of years, and thru different cultures and
rites, and it’s made from a big quantity of armonic sounds, produced by
the selective reproduction of freqüencies, like with instruments such
as gong, didjeridoo, or voice, using the multiple possibilities of
resonance. It is proved that with some instruments we can induce to
deeper states of counciosnes. With the low and continuous sound of the
didjeridoo, and it’s richness of overtones that come out of it, what
also hapens with Tabla or Tampura, we can reproduce a similar
enviroment that we percieved in our perinatal lives. The extense work
that has been done in the field of the psychedellic in the last
decades, defenetly served as a catalizer for certain aweking in peoples
mind. There is a qüestioning of the stablished patrons (values), and
based in the disponible information we can obtain a wider point of
view. Diferent disciplines, like medicine, music, and rituals, fusion
in this aweking in the occidental world, in the same time that new
values are being stablished in our society. The investigation work, and
the recuperation of ancestral and new medical uses of the entheogen had
been in big part tge propulsors of this change, and this qüestioning of
the stablished values, of who are we and where do we go.
Comments