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Music & the Mystical Experience
"Music & the Mystical Experience" a 6-hour project for Psilocybin Therapy created from years of research into music, neuroscience, and psychedelics but recorded in the context of a community ritual.
With improvisations guided by prompt cards, projection visuals, field recordings, and pushing a world-class recording studio to its absolute limits with 28 musicians and artists involved.
This project aligns with the intensity of a psilocybin experience and is filled with musical traits which support mystical-type experiences.
Completed for Michael's postgraduate studies at Massey University in Wellington New Zealand.
Filled with Musical Traits which support Mystical-Type Experiences
An analysis by John Hopkins yielded specific musical traits which support mystical-type experiences during psychedelic therapy. We took these traits to create psychedelic prompt cards to guide our musicians during recording sessions.
Musicians randomly chose a few these card before every performance ensuring our recordings would be rich in the traits which support psilocybin therapy.
Aligned with the intensity of a high-dose Psilocybin Experience
We used scientific data to correlate our music with the psilocybin experience of the 6-hour album. Minimising the changing of music by guides and maximising musical cohesion and continuity.
Ambient and supportive music are placed during the onset/outset and intense and cinematic music at the peak phase, as per recommendations in the psychedelic literature.
Guided by Visions
The prompt cards correlated to projection visuals, meaning our projectionist could conduct the large group improvisations throughout each recording session.
Creating free-form spontaneous music guided by a visionary experience and saturated in qualities ideal for psilocybin therapy.
*Artwork included was by Alex Grey, Pablo Amaringo and Luis Tamini and solely used and adapted inside the University/Recording context to inspire the musicians*
This was also implemented to resonate with the indigenous practice of divining sacred medicine songs, music, or Icaros from the visionary experience itself.
This novel recording technique created a ritual context & framework to induce a liminal state maximise flow & improvisational cohesion for our artists.
World Class Recording - Inspired by Greatness
Recorded over three enormous full-day sessions in a world class recording studio, millions of dollars worth of modern and vintage equipment, microphones and outboard gear.
We took inspiration for our recording techniques from both Miles Davis and Pink Floyd who appear on many psychedelic playlists. Doing everything possible to ensure our music was captured in an authentic way whilst granting musicians freedom to explore and be heard in the highest quality possible.
Brain-Region Synchronisation with Rhythmic Consonance
The neurons in the auditory cortex fire synchronously with pitch and harmony, whilst the EEG patterns in brain regions to do with motor-planning, movement and the body synchronise with bpm, beat and meter.
Using musical ratios/mathematics we can “tune” our pitch/harmony to our BPM/rhythm leveraging these phenomena to harmonise brain activity across the brain. This novel musical concept was pioneered by Sutherlandsounds is called “Rhythmic Consonance”.
So much trauma is held in the body and this technique may have therapeutic benefit causing more in-phase & synchronous brain activity, and may be use-full in combination with somatic musical delivery systems such as SubPac and other wearable musical devices.
Sounds from Nature
Music & the Mystical Experience is filled with ultra-high quality field recordings. Whether from native New Zealand forests or Ocean waves to resonances from distant planets sourced from the NASA voyager probe.
All the field recordings you hear in the project, came over the performers headphones live in the studio and influenced the aesthetics of the music during recording.
Vocals Inspired by Deep Psychedelic Session Reports
Author and Professor Chris Bache took high doses of LSD (500ug) 72 times over 20 years, meticulously detailing the landscapes of ASC. This deep and courageous psychedelic work was utilised during our recording sessions to inspire and inform our vocalists.
Vocal performers were asked to read, meditate upon, and internalise these deep explorations prior to recording each track and we even aligned the themes with the music/field recordings to the session reports. Our incredible vocalists were the prisms through which these journeys are bought to new life.
For this reason many of the songs from “Music & the Mystical Experience” are named after sessions from this courageous work.
28 Incredible Musicians/Artists
We gathered some of New Zealand’s best musicians with diverse musical and cultural backgrounds. Ranging from adept classical musicians, experimental synth wizards, pop-musicians, various drummers & percussionists, indigenous music practitioners and jazz maestros.
We also had an incredibly skilled and trained group of projectionists, recording engineers and assistants, without whom the project would never have reached its potential in session.
One thing the musicians/artists had in common was an understanding of why we were there and the sacredness/importance of what we were undertaking.
