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.
Thank's Peter! (in the picture: tabla family) Joel Olivé
