I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found the terms for electronic music — electronica, techno, trance, ambient, New Age, experimental — to be ill-defined and in need of thorough reworking. Is electronica, for example, its own genre or is it everything that is not ambient or techno? Can techno be defined as electronica within a certain range of beats per minute? Is trance music ambient music for dancing or techno for people on psychedelic drugs? To accommodate more and more distinctions, the terms multiply: “psybient” for psychedelic ambient, “psytrance” for psychedelic trance, “ambient house” for ambient plus acid house, and so on. And how is ambient distinct from New Age? Although New Age music tends to rely more on acoustic instruments such as zithers and flutes, both genres have ultimately drawn inspiration from the tabla and tanpura of the Indian raga tradition. It might even be proposed that all electronic music, with the exception of experimental music, which derives from modern classical music, derives consciously or unconsciously from Indian classical music.

Perhaps because I’ve always sought to classify things in my own way in order to make sense of the world, I’m going to toss everything out in favor of a fresh scheme that reconceptualizes and consolidates the received categories under four functional rubrics: music for massage, meditation, sex, and psychedelics. However these rubrics are considered, they are too protean to be pigeonholed and are not meant to be discrete but continuous and overlapping. If there is one term that can accommodate all four rubrics, it would be the “music of the future.” By this I don’t presume to map out the future of music but only to outline a discernible trend. My contention is that the genres falling under the electronic music umbrella are more innovative than any other music at present, which is precisely why they are so hard to categorize. All this bustling innovation entails a burgeoning audience, one that is expanding at the expense of pop and rock audiences. The latter, however, are in no danger of being supplanted but will merge and hybridize with electronic music in multiplying crossover styles and genres.

The table below organizes the four rubrics’ distinguishing features by posing a pair of corresponding questions for each. The “A” questions are more straightforward and easier to answer; the “B” questions more exacting and discriminating. I discuss each in detail in what follows.

I. MUSIC FOR MASSAGE

A: What music can accompany massage?

Before discussing music and massage, let’s consider the notion of setting (from LSD guru Timothy Leary’s term “set and setting”). To get oneself into the proper mental framework for a massage — one’s set — the setting or environment should be conducive. New Agers were ahead of the game on this. Have a look at the shiny oiled flesh laid out on sheets and rugs in the hippie living rooms of Gordon Inkeles’ 1971 classic, The Art of Sensual Massage (trigger alert: those providing the massages are naked too). For all the book’s lavishness, Inkeles is vague on choice of music: “Something easy and smooth. Flutes, Classical Guitar, Slow Blues, a Raga or Chant.” That’s because you wouldn’t have found much in the New Age bin at the record store in those days. Not until the 1980s did New Age music begin to find its groove, or even become a category, after years of experimentation with outer-space effects and Indian classical rhythms, mostly coming out of the Cosmic Music (Kosmische Musik) movement in Germany. Deuter’s D (1971), Aum (1972), and Kundalini Meditation Music (1975) — the latter with a picture on the cover of the notorious Indian sex guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (aka. Osho), with whom Deuter collaborated — were forerunner albums but a bit too rough-edged to upholster a massage (more on this indefatigable musician shortly).

Today in most commercial massage venues etiquette, and regulations as well, require careful draping with a sheet; in Asian countries you’re handed a towel or a pair of disposable boxers. The standard Asian-themed massage decor, perfected on the U.S. West Coast, has spread everywhere. Even mainland China has gotten up to speed in recent decades. Prior to that, trappings were starkly functional: blank hospital-like rooms with at most a meridian body map on the wall, where so-called therapists, stern-faced in their white smocks, roughed you up with a rapid slapping and pounding regimen. The idea of music would have been as incomprehensible to them as asking permission to light up a joint. Nowadays the better Chinese venues are softly lit and inviting. A few even remember to put on music, and not just any music but some of the best massage music around: the guqin, a Chinese zither similar to the Japanese koto but gentler and more textured, as sensuously tactile as fingers plucking flesh. To connoisseurs, the guqin’s expressiveness might be thunderous and disruptive of a massage, but to unfamiliar ears it’s a subdued, elegant instrument. By contrast, the canned music you get at Western massage shops, such as the Oriental-Arabic mishmash clogging the pores at a Massage Envy venue I once tried out, is outright tacky.

New Age music is often conflated or confused with ambient music. Both are generally intended to promote relaxation. Beyond that, we can sort out the differences by considering the functions with which they seem naturally aligned — the former with massage and the latter with meditation or contemplation.

Music suited to massage must unfold slowly over the course of a massage session, which typically lasts an hour or an hour and a half. Like the massage itself, the music must seem to stop time. Massage is as much a psychological as a physical experience; the mind and muscles relax in tandem. Not just any New Age music will do. Short, song-length tracks with their starting and stopping, or sudden eruptions and shifts in tempo, create distracting junctures. The music should be unassuming, slightly sweet perhaps, but not saccharine. Consider this Amazon customer’s effusive description of the Irish New Age singer, Enya, which could serve as an appropriately prolix definition of New Age music generally:

Few singers can heal the soul & elevate the spirits as beautifully as Enya can, as hers is the voice of Heaven, dreamy, ethereal & sublimely hypnotic as it is, amongst the loveliest & most amazing of all time. Music like this induces a euphoric bliss that is as indescribable as it is intoxicating, bringing forth a rapture that is as divinely healing as it is sweetly irresistible. Because of Enya music itself has been brought to a higher, more transcendent & addictive dimension overall. What breathtaking timelessness. (@TheRampagingGallowglass75)

A singer often compared to Enya is Canadian Loreena McKennitt, who infuses her music with Celtic and Middle Eastern tunes. A third singer-composer sometimes lumped in with these two to form a New Age triumvirate is Australian Lisa Gerrard, the female half of the group Dead Can Dance and a solo artist in her own right. We’ll return to Gerrard later, but for now let me say that Gerrard is a tier above Enya and McKennitt when it comes to the breadth and originality of her music-making and stands far removed from conventional New Age music. We should also note that Enya and McKennitt are primarily vocalists and songwriters. Songs are not recommended for massage, for the same reason they’re not recommended for studying — lyrics are distracting — though wordless singing or vocalizing (a specialty of Gerrard’s) may work well enough.

Harold Budd, an important ambient composer and Brian Eno protégé whose compositions have been likened by some to New Age music, much to his chagrin, put it concisely: “When I hear the term ‘new-age’ I reach for my revolver. I don’t think of myself as making music that is only supposed to be in the background. It’s embarrassing to inadvertently be associated with something that you know in your guts is vacuous” (this and subsequent non-attributed citations from Wikipedia). For Budd, in contrast to the supposedly more serious and profound ambient music, New Age music is cheap and tacky, a lazy, self-satisfied, prefabricated music for people who prefer pastel-patterned audible wallpaper to real music, for whom all music can be reduced to a mood-setting function. It is disconcerting to keep running into people who assess music solely on the basis of whether it’s “relaxing” or not. I recall teaching in a Japanese high school in the ’80s when a traveling salesman in a business suit appeared in the teachers’ room peddling his mood-music console, about the size of a typewriter and outfitted with prerecorded classical music and buttons for selecting a variety of moods — “sunny morning,” “rainy day,” “moonlit night,” and the like. The teachers politely heard him out before sending him on his way.

To be fair, there is good New Age music out there that can be appreciated on its own terms. I don’t find the distinction to be dependent on musical quality — which is always a given — so much as instrumentation. Both New Age and ambient music make copious use of synthesized layers and backdrops. But the New Age penchant for traditional instruments and nature’s own acoustics emphatically connects one to the earth, and therefore to massage. If I may put it in a way that doesn’t smack too much of New Age-speak, in a massage you become the earth, the ground upon which hands go to work on you, and the music likewise serves to ground the massage.

I. MUSIC FOR MASSAGE

B: What music can improve massage?

Massage music need not be explicitly designated as such. Karl Schaffner and Lothar Grimm’s Meditation: Music for Relaxing (1994), for example, makes liberal use of electronic drones, yet it also grounds the music in the here and now with strummed arpeggios on the dulcimer and guitar. East Forest’s Music for Mushrooms (2019) similarly employs electronic keyboards, vibraphone, dulcimer, wordless singing, rain sticks, and recorded crickets and birds, on top of gently pulsating, synthesized drones, perfect for synchronizing with massage stroking. Ironically, this five-hour album, designed to embrace the length of a magic mushroom trip, is quintessential New Age music and more suitable for massage than psychedelic drugs (for reasons I’ll return to later).

Another New Age musician is the aforementioned Deuter (born 1945), who has followed up his 1971 debut album D with over sixty albums of original music and a dozen or so compilation albums, Mysterium (2022) being the latest. Over his half-century career, he has mastered (in his own way he admits) not only the flute, piano, cello, guitar, and banjo but instruments from around the world, often spending considerable time in countries studying with professional musicians. These include the Indian sitar, santoor and tabla, Japanese koto and shakuhachi, Greek bouzouki, Turkish sasz, Persian tar, Balinese gongs, Tibetan bells and bowls, and the Baroque viola da gamba. “Painting with sound,” as he calls it, Deuter sets these solo instruments in crystalline ambient matrices with added touches from nature itself — whale and bird song, ocean waves, trickling water, the wind.

Deuter describes his aesthetic as “creating a bridge from sound to silence”: “To create a vibration when you listen to the music, through the laws of resonance, we are all vibrating systems, and if you put one sound into another, you can create a certain frequency in the system. That frequency can bring you closer to silence” (Talks with Deuter). This is reminiscent of the Greek-born American New Age pioneer Iasos, who sought in albums such as Wave #1: Inter-Dimensional Music (1975) and Vibrational Environments #1: Angelic Music (1978) to send musical frequencies spaceward in the hope of contacting alien life. Deuter is more grounded on the planet, but for all his talk of employing sound in the service of silence, his carefully calibrated music belies this purpose in its intrinsic qualities. Reflecting the wide-open vistas of New Mexico where he has lived since 1985, it unfolds in space, stretching out the present and allowing melodies to slowly gather into climaxes of genuine beauty. The title tracks from Buddha Nature (2001), Sea and Silence (2003), East of the Full Moon (2005), Koyasan (2007), and Mirage (2019) are but a few examples.

Deuter’s music is popular with massage therapists, who recommend his albums in Amazon customer reviews, so much so that he has become identified with massage, though this was never his intention. As he once quipped, “People ask me often, ‘Do you listen to your own music?’ Of course, I listen to a piece of music maybe 1,000 times while it is still in the creative process. Afterwards they go out into the world on their own, they do their own thing. And unless I get a massage somewhere, and they play my music, I don’t listen to my own music anymore.”

Deuter’s graceful — and often glacial — musical structures are ideally suited to the slow “deep tissue” stroking with oil favored by North American-style massage. Astute massage practitioners can exploit this by stroking to the rhythm and working deep into the muscles precisely as melodies peak, fusing the music and the massage. If one is at liberty to eroticize things (with of course the partner’s willingness or patron’s consent), the fingers can work themselves into the genitals during these peaks. If done skillfully, the music is folded into the massage and effectively disappears, inasmuch as the recipient is only conscious of the massage, not the music; but the massage would not have been as satisfying without the music.

We might go so far as to say that music is essential to massage: as a technology, massage only works optimally with all four required elements in place — technique, loving hands, oil, and the right music. We’ll be returning to this idea of music serving as an indivisible component of bodily technologies.

II. MUSIC FOR MEDITATION

A: What music can enhance meditation?

The notion of “meditation music” is actually an oxymoron and misnomer. When it comes to serious, hardcore meditation, say in a Zen monastery, who would ever countenance music? Absolute silence is the only thing that is in order, or if one is meditating outside, bird song, rustling leaves, or a running brook at the very most. Or an annoying mosquito. But not music. If, however, we allow for a more metaphorical understanding of meditation, as in whatever contributes to a “meditative” or contemplative state of mind, then possibilities open up.

To return for a moment to the tricky distinction between New Age and ambient music. An early “electronic ambient” or “space music” classic, or what one Amazon customer labels “New Age/Space/Ambient music,” is Michael Stearns’ Planetary Unfolding (1981). The first track, “In the Beginning…” unfolds a sense of vastness, an unearthly mountain range. The second track, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” pays homage to The Wizard of Oz, though Stearns’ eerily sublime music again departs decisively from anything reassuringly familiar, much less a 1930s Hollywood musical. Ambient music at its best is a searching music, exploiting electronics and synthesizers to conjure up strange worlds and unheard-of soundscapes. Harmonies might be familiar and soothing, or not, but there is no pretense of representing anything other than what is electronically produced. The artifice stands out and calls attention to itself, which is why ambient music is seldom appropriate for massage. But it is not necessarily appropriate for meditation either. This is a subtle point that requires unpacking.

Upon the release of the first of his Ambient series, Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978), Brian Eno defined the music thus: “Whereas conventional background music [i.e. Muzak] is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music…is intended to induce calm and a space to think. Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” His first ambient effort was his collaboration with the guitarist Robert Fripp on No Pussyfooting (1973), a mesmerizing work pitting Fripp’s dreamy, feedback-enhanced guitar against Eno’s electronic drones. After half a century of creating ambient music, Eno now characterizes it as music that “emotionally stabilizes an environment,” to keep listeners, particularly artists and writers, “in a certain place emotionally” so as to facilitate work and concentration (Star Sessions interview). In a Pitchfork review of his Reflection album (2017), he similarly puts it as “creating a psychological space that encourages internal conversation.”

The Reflection album is notable for also coming out in a “generative music” format, a downloadable app that plays essentially the same music found on the album but in a new algorithm-generated iteration each time the app is opened. This is ideal for massage, as the music gently meanders without interruption for as long as it is kept on. The music sounds like an aural representation of the concentric ripples that form from pebbles slowly dropped in water — hence the title. It is indeed so placid and tranquil you are never sure you are hearing a new iteration, let alone one different from the album. Though the music becomes busier and more attention-grabbing in the evening hours, as designed, there are scarcely any discernible melodies or phrases pointed enough to recall. For listeners on a budget, the MP3 album is only $1.29 for the full hour of music (on Amazon), in contrast to the $31 app (Apple Store). Alternatively, you can spend $36 on the MP3 album of Eno’s Music for Installations (2018), consisting of 24 ambient pieces (originally performed live in extended generative versions) stretching to five and a half hours of music reminiscent of Reflection but with more variety and interest. Two of the longer pieces, “77 Million Paintings” (44 minutes) and “I Dormienti” (40 minutes) gain from their length to attain a stately, timeless depth. You can put Music for Installations on shuffle and achieve the same effect as Eno’s generative-music apps. Before Reflection, Eno came out with three other apps still available at much lower price points — Bloom (2008), Trope (2009), and Scape (2012). Unlike Reflection, the earlier apps are interactive, allowing you to alter the musical configurations; the Bloom app produces lovely bells that multiply when you tap or write on the screen.

What I’d like to emphasize here is that not everyone may find Eno’s ambient music, however calming and peaceful, suited to meditation. Eno’s characterization of Harold Budd as “a great abstract painter trapped in the body of a musician” applies equally to himself. When set next to one of Budd’s more cohesive albums, such as the darkly gripping Abandoned Cities (1984), Eno’s soundscapes are more subdued and unobtrusive. At the same time, they tend to shine with a steady electric-neon brightness, standing out instead of hovering in the background. It’s perhaps why his Music for Airports was only tried once in an actual airport; the music apparently made visitors nervous, contrary to Eno’s intention. Oddly, it is possible to work or study, to contemplate rather than meditate, to Eno’s music. The music serves as a kind of foil or ground against which the concentration is freed up to go to work. If we can call this music for “meditation,” it is meditation in the same sense that any dedicated, undisturbed work is meditation. The corollary is that music that is appropriate for meditation has nothing to do with meditation conventional speaking, in the sense of trying to empty one’s thoughts. This brings us to the question of how music can enable, rather than just enhance, meditation.

II. MUSIC FOR MEDITATION

B: What music can enable meditation?

The idea that music can directly engineer certain mental states has been around since time immemorial. Shamans have long employed singing and drums in combination with psychoactive drugs to put people into a trance or thrust them into an otherworldly dimension. In one crazy book, Into the Void: Psychedelics, Hallucinogens, Brain Technology Devices, & The Expansion of Consciousness (2001), Zoe Seven hooks himself up to a brainwave synchronizer (eye-set, headphones, and micro-computerized sound synthesizer) and programs it to match a particular brainwave frequency to “effortlessly and efficiently guide the user’s brain and mind into the desired state,” while under the influence of the antihistamine Benadryl (Diphenhydramine), which in large doses acts as a dissociative capable of engendering out-of-body experiences. A less elaborate setup is the “sound bath” popular among New Agers, in which an array of gongs and crystal bowls are manipulated to vibrate and resonate with the body and elicit a meditative state. I’ve tried sound baths. They are pleasant and do have an effect, weirdly and unfailingly making me so sleepy I have to struggle to stay awake. This idea of music working on the brain mechanistically, Pavlovian fashion so to speak, is not the avenue I wish to go down here.

What I wish to propose is both simpler and more radical, namely that music is at its most efficacious when it’s the object of meditation rather than an enabler of meditation. To listen to music as it should be listened to, as an aesthetic artifact, is a form of meditation. This is not meditation in the disciplined, lotus-posture sense; this is untamed, free-flowing creativity at work — enabled by music. Only by consciously attending to, meditating on, a piece of music, does meditation become creative. But again, we don’t listen to music in order to become creative; we listen to it strictly to enjoy and engage with it. Creativity is the unforeseen, unintended aftereffect. To enable this, music must be involving and interactive, not merely hovering passively in the background, opening up space for our thoughts a la Eno’s ambient canvasses, nor what is normally listened to as one’s daily “food” for singing, dancing and relaxing to. Music for meditating upon must command the attention through its unfamiliarity. The more it disturbs, even violates us, the more it shakes up and draws out the creative faculties. Admittedly, few music lovers listen to music for this express purpose, especially music of the harder, dissonant variety. The vast sea of experimental music since the onset of Modernism and the classical avant-garde right up through the present is admittedly alien and forbidding territory for many.

I’ll begin with a British musician who for three decades has been pushing the electronic envelope with his peculiar fusion of ambient and techno. If you’re old enough you may recall a bizarre album cover that came out in 1999, featuring a smiling, bearded man in a bikini sporting a pair of female breasts, the Windowlicker EP by Aphex Twin, otherwise known by his birth name Richard D. James. Critically praised albums by this elusive provocateur (he has at least nine other aliases) include Selected Ambient Works 85–92 (1992), …I Care Because You Do (1995), Richard D. James Album (1996), Drukqs (2001), and Syro (2014). Cultivating a creepy, campy persona with his over-the-top album covers and videos, James has found broad appeal among techno enthusiasts who are bored with techno. His knotty little numbers run the gamut from the danceable to the frenetically anti-techno dadaist, often twisting upon themselves and stopping in mid-air. There are occasional nods to Eric Satie, John Cage, and other Modernist forerunners, or as if Karlheinz Stockhausen had composed music for a rave. Drukqs (James claims there is no connection to drugs in the album) has a reputation for being his most unapproachable work. Syro has for me the most flow, while the Richard D. James album is the funniest. Many of the pieces on Aphex Twin’s albums sound like musical jokes, and I can’t quite tell whether the humor is intended or not.

On the subject of Stockhausen, there is this curious nugget from the latter’s Wikipedia page:

In 1995, BBC Radio 3 sent Stockhausen a package of recordings from contemporary techno and ambient music artists Aphex Twin, Richie Hawtin (Plastikman), Scanner and Daniel Pemberton, and asked him for his opinion on the music. In August of that year, Radio 3 reporter Dick Witts interviewed Stockhausen about these pieces for a broadcast in October, called ‘The Technocrats’ and asked what advice he would give these young musicians. Stockhausen made suggestions to each and they were then invited to respond. All but Plastikman obliged.

Stockhausen and his contemporary Pierre Boulez (1925-2016) can be said to represent the gold standard of experimental, avant-garde music, the limits of sonic expressivity that humans have creatively manifested over the past hundred or so years; jazz has run a parallel development over the same era and can be regarded as avant-garde from its inception. It was Boulez, himself a provocateur, who once called for “blowing up the opera houses.” He combatively refused to acknowledge any of his contemporaries, with the exception of Stockhausen, to be his peer (ironically, Boulez would turn respectable enough to become the most sought-after of opera conductors). The self-described “organized delirium” of his harshly dissonant compositions represents even for serious classical music lovers the epitome of angry avant-gardism, works seemingly composed for no other intent than to insult and turn off audiences. Yet however “wildly…crazed and uncompromisingly difficult” (Anthony Tommasini), his music unveils to the patient listener a “cold, hard brilliance, like a spray of crushed ice…dense with events” (Tim Page).

If much of modern classical and free jazz is shorn of recognizable melody, it’s to foreground a different musical priority, one that composers perennially struggle to achieve even if they don’t think of it in quite these terms, a quality more elusive even than melody, and that is flow. Flow is the configuring of musical elements into an organic whole so that the music seems to move of its own accord, in free play, like a creature or animal. Flow is not easy. It took Boulez most of his career to find it, but we see it confidently brandished in many of his later compositions. Répons (1984), for example, starts off with a small classical orchestra performing on a stage surrounded on all four sides by the audience. Eight minutes into the work, the acoustic space dramatically opens up when spotlights reveal six soloists — two pianists, a harpist, a vibraphonist, a xylophonist, and a cimbalomist (a kind of dulcimer) — positioned around the gallery who engage the orchestra in call and response. The solo instruments are also MIDI-controlled, enabling their musical phrases to be completed by computer and cast around the auditorium by loudspeakers in a haunting echo effect. More modest in scale and “conventional,” with an almost Mozartian symmetry and elegance, are Boulez’s …explosante-fixe… (1993) for three flutes and orchestra and his sur Incises (1998) for three grand pianos paired with three harps and three percussionists (vibraphone, marimba, glockenspiel, steel drums, tubular bells, crotales). All three works are thrillingly performed on video by the Ensemble intercontemporain (founded by Boulez) under Matthias Pintscher.

Some avant-garde music is relatively more accessible, even “beautiful” in a conventional sense. Paul Lansky, Professor of music at Princeton University, turns found music — traffic sounds, “kids in the kitchen,” pots and pans, chattering voices — into ravishing computer-generated textures; the cascading cowbells of Still Time (from Fantasies & Tableaux, 1994) and the tinkling piano and computer blips of Conversation Pieces (1998) are highlights. Nicolas Collins, Professor of Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, also concocts uncanny soundscapes from computer-sampled found music, homemade instruments made out of hardware materials, and in the case of It Was a Dark and Stormy Night (1992), the shimmering sound of a skipping CD, which he actually makes sound entrancing. Experimental music thrives outside the Academy, of course. The throbbing, pulsating rhythms fashioned by Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita and German ambient musician Jan Jelinek in their collaborations Bird Lake Objects (2010) and Schaum (2016) sound like nothing manmade yet are utterly magical, as if the factory of a human cell could be amplified. There are presently so many composers of electronic and experimental music around the world one simply can’t keep up. I’ll be touching on a few more below under sex and psychedelics, but I’d like to wrap up this section with a few words on the Persian composer Ashkan Kooshanejad, or Ash Koosha for short.

Jailed for an illegal underground rock performance in Tehran in 2007, Ash Koosha settled in England a few years later, where he could pursue his artistic endeavors unencumbered by government repression and censorship. Equally tech savvy and musically talented, Koosha emerged fully formed as a musical artist with his 2015 debut album GUUD. Initially sounding as if picking up where Aphex Twin left off (whose last studio album came out in 2014), his music soon veers into stranger territory. Noting Koosha’s “super cold otherworldly atmosphere,” one reviewer wondered, “Was this record produced by an alien being on intergalactic LSD while flying his spaceship at light speed through an asteroid field?” Koosha followed up with I AKA I (2016) and three more albums in 2018 that have since been repackaged as the triple album Kuusha (2023). Like Aphex Twin, Koosha’s tracks tend to be short, many only two or three minutes long, but he wields a much larger palette. He composes, and performs live, by converting musical data into 3D objects and manipulating them spatially with his hands in a virtual environment or landscape while wearing a VR headset. Every song is a distinct experiment in technical wizardry. The unlikeliest found materials — sampled bits of car ignitions, strange sucking, scraping, and hiccupping noises — are percussively rendered into the most beguiling rhythms and harmonies. The visuals accompanying such songs as “GUUD” and “I Feel That” are every bit as inventive as his music and put the latest screensavers to shame.

Koosha apparently found his own vocals, reminiscent of the soulful crooning of James Blake or Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, wanting, and lacking the money to hire professional singers, he began creating vocals from scratch. We see some experiments with synthesized voices, including a female avatar, “Yona” (“Yona 1.1” and “You’re Really Me Aren’t You?”) already in his 2018 albums and an album devoted to Yona, C (2018). By 2019, Koosha had refined the vocalizing to make a bigger splash with an album by Yona and other male and female avatars entitled Auxuman, Vol. 1 (“Auxuman” is short for “auxiliary human”), planned as the first of a series of “pop” albums not only sung but composed as well by artificial intelligence; Aux Vol. 2 was released the same year. I wasn’t expecting much before I gave them a hearing, given the awful attempts by AI thus far in creating music with convincing human warmth, much less true melodic invention. OpenAI’s Jukebox, Google’s MusicLM, and Stability AI are some of the latest unimpressive efforts, with thousands of AI-created songs you can sample in all genres and styles, even mimicking singers like Bob Dylan or David Bowie. When you click on the samples, many of the songs seem to take a few seconds to figure out what they are doing before obscurely taking form. They often sound like they are underwater, or in the words of one critic, “strange Gregorian whale noises.”

Lifelike singing is one challenge. AI software can now convincingly imitate the human voice, including any actual person’s voice based on a recorded sample. But as soon as it tries to sustain a sung tone, it sounds synthetic. Koosha’s avatars sing in a clipped style to disguise these limitations, though there is no mistaking them for real voices. These technical shortcomings, however, are not the problem; they will surely improve. The main problem is the originality gap. Like Muzak, big tech’s AI-generated songs are wholly derivative — imitative of existing music. Whether AI is able to create original songs, with only the loosest of parameters specified (e.g. three minutes long, English lyrics), is a different matter, one that Koosha has taken up. Something piqued me upon first listening to Auxuman, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 that caused me to listen again and then to purchase the albums. The melodies are both unsettling and charming. As a review in The Nation put it, they “sound inhuman, soulless, but fascinatingly so.” The nonsensical lyrics, which are evidently also AI-generated (“I want to move to America because we’re rich. I want to play. They don’t want me to do this,” laments the avatar Mony) make no pretense of literary finesse yet seem oddly germane to their awkward reality. It is as if these poor creatures are dimly aware they are trapped in their AI dimension. This lends them a poignance all their own, as the video version of Yona’s “One” uncannily demonstrates.

Despite positive reviews, Koosha seems to have shelved the Auxuman project and returned to his earlier toolkit in A Better Life (2023). When you listen to the two Auxuman albums and A Better Life side by side, however, they are all of a piece. Both contain a dizzying array of styles including the usual angular rhythms, surreal percussion, and crashing industrial; the latter album substitutes sampled media snippets, Jamaican reggae and political poetry for AI-generated voices. A Better Life is on the short side at 35 minutes, but it can be effectively paired with the companion EP, Life Is a Bamboo (2023), which packs the same inventiveness as the album into a single 27-minute-long track.

None of Koosha’s songs is a fully AI-generated product. The results are curated among many candidates and aesthetic taste is always the final arbiter. As Koosha readily acknowledges, AI is not even close to attaining full autonomy but only serves as an extension or augmentation of human creativity. As with telling ChatGPT to write an essay or DALL-E 3 to create an artistic image, a human has to give it carefully calibrated prompts. This is somewhat comparable to Eno’s “generative music” apps, where the parameters are set to allow elements to roam freely though in predictable patterns. Will AI ever be able to create music all by itself and of such originality and inspiration that people will flock to listen to it at concerts or even prefer it to human-composed music? Novelists currently ridicule AI’s silly efforts at composing fiction, but what’s going to happen down the line with the specter of Artificial General Intelligence and Superintelligence, equaling and surpassing human intelligence? All that will really be required for AI to write a novel more sophisticated than formulaic genre fiction (your usual mysteries and romances) is a grasp of human irony. It is likewise perfectly conceivable, perhaps inexorable, that once AI figures out how music acts on the brain’s neuroreceptors, it will be able to compose music, if not superior to, then more addictive than that created by human composers.

III. MUSIC FOR SEX

A: What music can accompany lovemaking?

The most famous example of sex portrayed in music is the “Liebesnacht” from Act 2 of Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, when the fated couple, having succumbed to a love potion, embrace in the throes of passion before they are surprised in flagrante delicto by King Marke. Opera productions have traditionally shown the lovers leaning against each other and holding hands or woodenly embracing (Wagner’s libretto has them reclining on a “flower bench”). More daring directors may show them lying down and crawling upon each other to mimic the act of lovemaking, fully clothed of course. No opera production would go so far as to let their robes fall open to reveal bare flesh. Nudity does indeed occur in today’s opera houses, say in bacchanalian dances, but never crosses the line into the pornographic. Yet what better way to convey to both King Marke and the opera audience the visceral shock of their act! We await bolder productions in a more uninhibited future. The point I wish to underscore here is that while the music at this juncture (the final minute of Scene 2) notoriously depicts a sexual orgasm with its accelerating, convulsing crescendo, it is not what gets the true Wagner fan excited. To isolate this “bleeding chunk” is to misunderstand Wagner’s music: it’s the entire four hours of this writhing beast of an opera that is erotic.

If you’re not planning to go to work on your partner in the opera house, there’s always Rachmaninoff’s sultry Suite No. 1 for Two Pianos. And if classical music is not your thing, how about jazz vocals by Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln, or Cassandra Wilson? Or the languorous rhythms of Egyptian music like Baligh Hamdi’s “Lahore“? Or for something even more exotic, the torrid Jaipongan dancing of Indonesia’s West Java? There is no shortage of music out there to accompany lovemaking, and everyone has their favorites. What we do not want — spare me! — is lacy underwear, scented candles, and risqué attempts at seduction. There is a paradox with erotic music. The point is to get someone in bed. Once one has accomplished that, who needs music? Isn’t any music a bit tawdry and ridiculous as a soundtrack to sex, as bad as when people smile during sex?

Among the most erotic of singers has to be Australian Lisa Gerrard, from the band Dead Can Dance (with partner Brendan Perry), mentioned above. Their musical styles go well beyond New Age music to embrace “constructed soundscapes of mesmerizing grandeur and solemn beauty; African polyrhythms, Gaelic folk, Gregorian chant, Middle Eastern music, mantras, and art rock,” to quote Ian McFarlane (Wikipedia). Gerrard herself commands a range of ethnic singing styles, including ululating, wailing, and glossolalia. Her vocals conjure up Byzantine chant (as sung, for example, by Sister Marie Keyrouz), whose melodies can be traced back to the ninth century, or a more primal, shamanistic singing of the distant Euro-Asian past. In her outcast and thus liberated status, the shamaness serves as a potent sexual symbol and as such is traditionally bare breasted. If you suspect a proclivity for male fantasizing here, consult E. H. Schafer’s sweeping study, “Ritual exposure in ancient China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 14 (1951), on naked female shamanism in a variety of cultures, not just China. Gerrard doesn’t perform topless, but her Amazonian tribal women do in the very shamanistic video of “Yulunga,” from Dead Can Dance’s Into the Labyrinth (1993). Listen also to “Indus” from Spiritchaser (1996), and “Anabasis” and “Agape” from Anastasis (2012). Gerrard’s solo albums, notably Duality (with Pieter Bourke, 1998) and The Silver Tree (2006), are if anything more impressive, each a repository of powerful songs.

One musician Gerrard collaborated with is the late ambient composer Klaus Schulze (1947-2022), who like the aforementioned Deuter got started in the German Kosmische Musik scene. He was briefly a drummer for Tangerine Dream before forming the group Ash Ra Tempel and leaving that group to turn soloist with his Irrlicht (1972) and breakout Timewind (1975) electronica albums. Schulze is one of the pioneer figures of the ambient world, along with Edgar Froese of Tangerine Dream, Brian Eno and Jean-Michel Jarre. Whereas Eno composes by subtraction, pruning his textures down to a handful of slowly unfolding motifs, Schulze composes by addition, adding layer upon layer and propelling the prismatic soundscapes with supple beats and accents. You can even dance to Schulze. His rhythms are lighter than garden-variety techno, though some can be startling and bracing. An example is the remarkable “Time Goes By” from the four-hour album La Vie Electronique 15 (2014), with its hypnotic rolling four-note phrase and keyboard flourishes skipping along the surface. There is no accurate list of Schulze’s hundreds of works and countless albums. Many were never released, were repackaged under different titles in boxed sets, or were recorded live with original compositions improvised on the spot. Many albums that were released are out of print (but can be listened to on YouTube), including at least three of his collaborations with Lisa Gerrard, Farscape (2008), Rheingold (2008), and Dziękuję Bardzo (2009); Come Quietly (2009) is still available.

Schulze can sound repetitive, as if churning out so many variations on the same work over his fifty-year career. But it’s a searching music and there are many rewards if you keep digging. He’s at his best when he finds a collaborator as the crowning touch who can improvise against his foil with enough autonomy to create absorbing tension, such as the violinist Thomas Kagermann on the hour-long “The Rhodes Violin” (from Shadowlands, 2013); the cellist Wolfgang Tiepold on The Cello (a previously unreleased album that appears on the above-mentioned La Vie Electronique 15), a magnificent addition to the cello repertory; and Lisa Gerrard, whose deep, haunting vocals are well suited to Schulze’s lush soundscapes. Above all, Schulze’s music is sexy; it moves, rocks, and flows — in the groin.

This leads me to my next observation, which may be obvious or not depending on where you’re coming from: the most erotic music is none other than dance music. Dance is the oldest social ritual still widely practiced today in all societies (Afghanistan under the Taliban may be an exception). For many, dance is the only way to experience music; everything I’ve written about music up to this point is irrelevant when you can dance. It’s also how society allows sex to be expressed symbolically in public. Dance is sex with clothes on, stylized sex, though of course only certain cultures allow you to push stylized sex right up to the edge of actual sex.

Jean-Michel Jarre’s Oxygene (1976) conjures up a futuristic, space-age atmosphere in the same idiom as his German contemporaries, but a Gallic version, busier, more restless and mercurial (the French lose their temper more quickly than the Germans, observable in their films and music). I felt it to be, even in my teens when it came out, catchy but a tad cheesy. Along with Fripp and Eno’s No Pussyfooting (1973) and Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells (1973), it was my introduction to electronica, as opposed to synthesizer-heavy acid rock like Man’s Back Into the Future (1973), Hawkwind’s Space Ritual (1973), and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (1973) (a lot was happening in that year; Tangerine Dream’s breakout albums Phaedra and Rubycon came out over the next two years, but I missed the boat on those). As Jarre’s popularity took off, like a sort of musical Christo, he began undertaking outdoor concerts for massive audiences of tens, hundreds of thousands, and more (3.5 million attended his 1997 concert in Moscow), playing laser lightshows off downtown skyscrapers to the beat of his music. His fame secured him not only wealth but expensive women, working his way up from Flore Guillard, Charlotte Rampling, Isabelle Adjani, Anne Parillaud, to his biggest catch of all, Gong Li, China’s most famous actress, whom he married in 2019. Of course, it helps to be looking still trim and dapper in his seventies in his leather jacket, jeans, and sunglasses — the uniform of the rich superhip.

Jarre’s music can sound bombastic, but also nimble and sophisticated. His unexpected modulations can turn on a dime and infuse static textures with drama and suspense. I’m not sure how many would find his muscular and aggressive style sexy, but his “Neon Lips” and “Brutalism” from Oxymore (2022), for instance, pack a punch and are danceable. In 2019 he came out with EōN, an app for iOS devices modeled on Eno’s generative-music apps. Jarre’s app similarly plays an endlessly evolving ambient soundscape based on his characteristic motifs, but the musical ideas are given more latitude than Eno’s, so that each time EōN is opened the music sounds different from the last time, while never plumbing any great depths. Jarre is a driving, high-octane electronica musician who doesn’t quite sync with the ambient-techno scene, despite his many collaborations (just in May of 2024 he paired up with guitarist Brian May of Queen for a concert in Slovakia that drew 100,000). He’s too much of an independent showman, a pop as opposed to underground artist. He’s significant in crafting a vision of dance music’s future: grand, titanic, and optimistic, yet also disembodied, mechanized, and a bit ominous. I have to be in just the right mood to get into him — high on amphetamines, perhaps, though I doubt he intended his music to be listened to on drugs.

Shpongle, formed in 1996 by Briton Simon Posford (aka. Hallucinogen) and Australian Raja Ram, are crafting another vision of dance music’s future. Unlike Jarre, their music is expressly designed to be listened to on drugs — psychedelic drugs. A product of the quirky psytrance or psybient scene out of Goa, India, they are not easily pigeonholed; Posford describes their music as “like nothing you’ve ever heard before.” This is even apparent in their album covers, which all feature baroquely elaborate versions of their branded emblem, the triple-eyed mask, representing the double or triple vision caused by dilation of the eyes, as well as the elaborate visions experienced, while tripping. I discuss Shpongle here under sex rather than psychedelics because they write primarily dance music, and some of the hottest dance music around. The seductive grooves on the twelve-minute “Behind Closed Eyelids” and the twenty-minute “…and the Day Turned to Night” from their debut album Are You Shpongled? (1998) are more relaxed and spacious than the driving techno-trance of Hallucinogen’s own Twisted (1995), as Ram puffs away on the flute Jethro Tull-style, adding a human touch to Posford’s ambient matrix. But it’s “Divine Moments of Truth” (i.e. DMT), that veers in a new direction, one that defines the band’s sound. This bizarre, ingenious number starts off with Tibetan-style chanting, didgeridoo-style drones, polyrhythms, and an insistent marimba theme, before the words “DMT, DMT, DMT, DMT, do dee do DMT, LSD do DMT, LSD do DMT….” are repeated to a melody so loopy it could only have been conceived under the influence of DMT or LSD.

On subsequent albums, from Tales of the Inexpressible (2001), Nothing Lasts…But Nothing Is Lost (2005), Ineffable Mysteries from Shpongleland (2009), The God Particle (EP, 2010), Museum of Consciousness (2013), Codex VI (2017), to their latest, Carnival of Peculiarities (EP, 2021), their music weaves an ever complexly layered and cornucopian soundscape. So fecund with ideas is each album that they sound different every time, or as if they have all been fused into one. Majestic dance numbers like “Ineffable Mysteries,” which combines Hindustani vocals, shifting time signatures, and punchy grooves to be blasted loud, jostle with lush and energetic songwriting reminiscent of Philip Glass’s Songs from Liquid Days and Monsters of Grace — “When Shall I be Free,” “I Am You,” the gorgeous “No Turn Un-Stoned,” or the “holographic pyramids” of “Brain in a Fish Tank” (a tropical fishtank, metaphor for the multicolored madness of DMT). There are also lecture snippets sampled in by the psychonaut Terence McKenna on how to vape DMT, funny reactions by people who have inhaled a bit too much DMT, voices distorted to sound like Munchkins (or DMT elves), all set to virtuoso Andean, salsa, flamenco, gypsy, Indian, and Arabic rhythms (Ram fashioned a sitar out of a guitar for “Electroplasm”). An example of the band’s more far-flung effects are the tracks “Nothing Lasts…” and “…But Nothing Is Lost,” which sound like Stockhausen, not on steroids, but thrown into a blender, or hallucinatory paint thrown into the back of a fan to splatter out through the front onto you (“they are making gifts for you,” said McKenna of the machine elves in “A New Way to Say Hooray”). More of this splatter effect appears in the song “Shpongolese Spoken Here,” where the glitchy synth scraps give way to an alien tongue comprehensible only to those who have met the DMT elves.

III. MUSIC FOR SEX

B: What music can incite lovemaking?

For many of us, music is food and we can’t start the day without it. Good music causes intense pleasure and makes you want to get up and dance. And when we fall in love, we want to share our favorite music with the object of our love. Music by itself, however, cannot make you hard or wet; only your imagination can. But while the musical equivalent of Spanish fly doesn’t yet exist, you can bet your blue balls there are technonerds out there working with AI on this jackpot right now, the Holy Grail of inventions: music that operates on the brain’s neurotransmitters the way drugs do — and more.

We’re not merely talking music’s capacity to release dopamine (the addiction hormone) and oxytocin (the love hormone), which has been scientifically established. Music’s effect on the hormones is comparatively impotent. Despite thousands of years of alchemists’ and chemists’ efforts, the iron exoskeleton of people’s sexual repression remains an insurmountable challenge even to drugs. The empathogen MDMA (Ecstasy), which does have a potent oxytocin-secreting effect, can facilitate social bonding with strangers, though not to the extent of inciting people to tear each other’s clothes off; it’s not a sex drug per se. What we’re talking about, rather, would be equivalent to the scent concocted by the hero of Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume, so alluring it makes a whole town to fall into an orgy in the town square (yep, there’s a film version too). This would be music so potent it directly compels sexual behavior, music that causes a person who would not otherwise do so to touch you and have sex with you. That’s why this section is short: there is no such music. However, it does lead to interesting speculations. Would such music be banned? Could those caught playing this music to others be charged with sexual harassment, or even assault, if it led to a sexual act? And could the instigator of the music be charged with assault if it’s the victim who initiated or forced the act?

IV. MUSIC FOR PSYCHEDELICS

A: What music can ground a psychedelic trip?

Rock music and psychedelics have been closely intertwined since the 1960s. LSD dramatically changed the Beatles from Rubber Soul (1965) on, evident in the trippy font on the cover. Sgt. Pepper‘s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) is said to demonstrate some of the drug’s beneficial effects on human creativity, whereas Magical Mystery Tour (1967) demonstrates some of the more deleterious effects. Nobody knows exactly what John Lennon meant with his line in “I Am the Walrus” about summoning emergency services while trapped on a piece of cereal, but he was probably having a bad trip. In the same year, the Grateful Dead’s “Black Peter” from Workingman’s Dead (1970) relates bassist Phil Lesh’s accidental ingestion of apple juice laced with a gram of LSD. One hundred micrograms is potent enough for one person; one gram thus contains 10,000 doses. There is no known lethal dose of acid so it’s possible Lesh downed all of the juice without having to have his stomach pumped (not that it would have done much good). But I honestly cannot see how he was able to perform that evening as he claims to have done. In any case, the sad, sweet little song recounts the band’s tending to him in bed afterwards while he thought he was dying. He recovered. The Belgian-Swiss rock group Brainticket came out with a whole album intended to elicit a bad acid trip, Cottonwoodhill (1971), replete with crashing sounds, sirens, the opening chords from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, panicking and screaming voices, machine guns, and the like. The authorities in a number of countries didn’t appreciate the tongue-in-cheek humor and banned the album.

It became a trope of many seventies rock acts to season their music with hallucinatory outer-space effects like synthesizer wooshes, wails, and echoes. In retrospect it is all rather clumsy and silly sounding but was pretty cool at the time. Front and center in this acid-drenched culture was the Grateful Dead. Their soundman and underground chemist Augustus Owsley Stanley III manufactured five million doses of LSD between 1965-67, dispensing them to his retainers while sitting naked on a throne. Yet apart from their famous improvisational “space” jams (a collection of these is found on their album Infrared Roses), the Dead’s music isn’t particularly druggy sounding. To the contrary, it’s about as all-American roots as you can get — mostly country, bluegrass, blues, folk, folk rock, and some jazz thrown in for good measure.

The paradox here is that no other music is better suited to psychedelics than good old Americana (or your own country’s traditional music), while music that is designed to be calming and grounding on psychedelics, like East Forest’s Music for Mushrooms may have the opposite effect. Why? Because if you are tripping hard on a potent, ego-dissolving dose of mushrooms or acid, the music itself will be shredded to bits along with your ego (check out this intense instructional video on what a high-dose psychedelic experience entails). At least with roots music, there is still something familiar and reassuring to hold onto. Even under a strong dose of cannabis I found Music for Mushrooms plastic; I saw right through it. I would rather have listened to silence. I’d almost prefer New Age composer Pauline Anna Strom’s quirky piece “Mushroom Trip” from her Trans-Millenia Music (2017), which doesn’t pretend to be anything other than spacy synthesizer effects in the tradition of Iasos. Ambient composer Jon Hopkins’ Music for Psychedelic Therapy (2021) sounds equally manufactured, though it tries hard with its calming rain showers, tropical birds, and expansive ambient vistas reminiscent of Michael Stearns’ Planetary Unfolding. But then why not just call the album Sounds of Nature and be done with it? There is a niche market for such albums. It’s good massage music anyway.

Now with Darpan and Bhakta’s Temple of Glowing Sound (2006) we have something more intriguing. Darpan is a Dutch shaman based in Australia who conducts ayahuasca ceremonies. His collaboration with the mysterious Bhakta resulted in a kind of meta-album, an attempt to describe, accompany, and enact an ayahuasca trip all in one. Darpan is a surprisingly good singer-songwriter and has released his own albums of New Age songs, such as LoveLight (2010) and the Peruvian-flavored Viva Medicina (2020), also devoted to ayahuasca. His songs are melodic and memorable and his singing seasons Temple of Glowing Sound. Reminiscent of Shpongle but minus the dancing, Darpan and Bhakta’s double album is densely and expertly layered, with otherworldly ambient effects to mimic the drug’s taking off, atmospheric jungle sounds, samplings of icaros-singing shamans, songs with titles like “Vine of the Soul” (the literal meaning of “ayahuasca”) and “DMT” (here designating “Dear Mother Tree” as well as the psychoactive ingredient of ayahuasca), and a foreboding sequence of six instrumental tracks (on Vol. 2), “Neural Pathways” through “Safe Passage,” conjuring up the darker, difficult side of the ayahuasca experience for many, before spiritual healing can take place.

IV. MUSIC FOR PSYCHEDELICS

B: What music can induce a psychedelic trip?

The distinction between music that can ground a psychedelic trip and music that can induce a psychedelic trip, which is to say between music for accompanying as opposed to music for recreating a psychedelic trip, is finally a bit ticklish. The wrong music can have the opposite effect, of intensifying instead of stabilizing or ameliorating a drug’s effects when they are already strong or overwhelming. But the question can be rephrased to mean the distinction between music to be listened to while under the influence of a psychedelic on the one hand, and music to be listened to in order to mimic a psychedelic on the other, when, that is, the music itself is the drug and serves as an efficacious psychoactive substance in its own right.

Stanislav Grof, grand old doyen of LSD psychotherapy who administered thousands of LSD trips to patients in Czechoslovakia and the U.S. in the 1950s-60s before the drug was outlawed for medical research, found himself in these circumstances. In 1973 he was invited to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, the mecca of New Age professionals and psychologists in the human potential movement, with which he has been associated ever since. Despite their illegality, there were clearly vast amounts psychedelics being experimented with at Esalen over the decades, particularly due to its close association with Alexander Shulgin in Berkeley and his FDA-authorized research into the tryptamines (psilocybin, DMT, LSD) and the phenethylamines (mescaline, MDMA, 2C-B); Shulgin is credited with discovering hundreds of such compounds (he’s the guy who created Ecstasy).

To maintain legitimacy in mainstream psychology, Grof developed a drug-free therapy based on Kundalini yoga called Holotropic Breathwork, which combines controlled hyperventilation with selected music to elicit genuine psychoactive effects (“holotropic” is Grof’s preferred term to psychedelic). DMT is present in most plants and animals in trace amounts, and it’s even claimed the technique can release the body’s natural store of DMT. There are many playlists on Google and YouTube put up by Breathwork enthusiasts, mostly consisting of New Age trance music (ethnic drumming overlaid with electronic effects). James Asher is a favorite, and “Tantango” and “Temple Gates” from Shaman Drums (2002), for example, groove nicely. On the whole, New Age trance tends to suffer from the same limitations as standard-fare trance and techno in being unchanging and a bit monotonous, as indeed such music is designed to be so as not to distract you from your primary task, whether it’s blissing out on the dance floor or rebirthing on a yoga mat. Other non-drug therapies designed to elicit mind-manifesting effects are Thai Taoist guru and author Mantak Chia’s Dark Room retreats, where you are plunged into absolute darkness and silence for up to two weeks at a time. The total deprivation of the senses evidently leads to powerful psychedelic-like states, including activation of the pineal gland; flotation tanks can achieve similar but more short-term results. I’m not a purist, and I don’t see why music and breathwork could not be combined with these therapies, not to mention use of psychedelic substances themselves in the same contexts.

British electronic musician David Tipper, better known as Tipper, has been exploring psychedelic themes in his music for over two decades, evident in his striking album covers, notably since his Broken Soul Jamboree (2010). This and subsequent albums and EPs such as Forward Escape (2014), Fathoms (2015), Lattice (2017), Jettison Mind Hatch (2019), Insolito (2021), and Marble Hunting (2022) feature various exploded heads and brilliantly crisp abstract designs to suggest the mindboggling and powerfully dislocating hallucinations on DMT. Tipper’s style is generally described as downtempo electronica — leisurely, dreamy beats that fall between trance and ambient music. He is more interesting and original as a downtempo composer; his uptempo albums, such as Tertiary Noise (2008), can sound too much like Aphex Twin. His beats can slow to the subtlest rhythms and gentlest pulsations, as in the utterly bewitching CoSM Ambient Mix (2019; see album cover at the beginning of this post). If there’s any music that conveys the sensation of being high on psychedelics it is this. The YouTube video features artwork by Alex and Allyson Grey, animated by Johnathan Singer (“CoSM” is an acronym for the Greys’ Chapel of Sacred Mirrors in Wappinger, New York, where psychedelic drugs are promoted as a creative agent and sacrament). A live performance by Tipper in New Orleans in 2020 entitled Saenger with Singer is of a piece with the CoSM album, also with stunning visuals by Singer. Whereas Tipper’s other albums consist of separate tracks, many quite short, these two works each present an hour of continuous, sustained, symphonic beauty, thrusting one into a mysterious mechanical jungle erected by DMT entities, teeming with alien life.

It’s logical that beats must be slowed down to a crawl with psychedelic music, for there is a fundamental contradiction between dancing and tripping. A low-to-moderate dose of shrooms or acid, or cannabis for that matter, can certainly turbocharge dancing, not to mention sex. As for a high dose, I think most would agree you’re better off being centered within yourself in a quiet interior or outdoor setting. Professional therapists insist on wearing eyeshades while listening to music. But what if you don’t like the music that they give you? What if the music is ill-chosen — too fast, incongruous or unsettling? How knowledgeable are psychedelic therapists about music? Are the people in charge of selecting the music themselves passionate about music? And is the music designed to soothe, enhance, or elicit psychedelic effects? Should the music only be that which has been written by musicians familiar with or under the influence of psychedelics? Should faster or more emotionally expressive music be played when the drug’s effects peak? I’m not the first to pose these questions. They are vital to psychedelic therapy and research has been going on for half a century; see for example, Bonny, H. L, and Pahnke, W. N. (1972) “The use of music in psychedelic (LSD) psychotherapy.” Journal of Music Therapy 9(2): 64–87. https://doi.org/10.1093/jmt/9.2.64; and Kaelen, M., et al. (2018) “The hidden therapist: Evidence for a central role of music.” Psychopharmacology (Berl) 235(2): 505–519 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-017-4820-5. We are still in the foothills when it comes to identifying the best music; the best music remains to be composed. Not only can the choice of music dramatically impact the experience for participants, but individuals’ reactions will vary enormously as well. No single playlist can possibly work for everyone. No matter how expertly curated, the music will be intrusive or claustrophobic without giving participants the freedom and ability to toggle between different playlists — or choose no music at all.

The following five playlist genres dovetail with a wide variety of moods and are by no means meant to be exhaustive. They should be equally viable under the influence of psychedelics and with non-drug modalities (psychedelic breathwork may require faster, uptempo beats to match breathing speeds of more than 100 BPM). Playlists 2-5 are most conducive to drug trips, as they serve to ground or anchor a trip. Playlist 1, by contrast, may be too intense for psychedelics and is thus more conducive to non-drug tripping. Regarding Playlist 5, there is a major limitation with music that is well known and all-too familiar. Both standard-repertory Western classical (18th-19th centuries) and contemporary Anglo-American rock and pop are readily recognized and may conjure up memories and emotional reactions that can complicate the psychedelic experience. Much less familiar even to classical music fans is the vast store of lute and harpsichord music from the early Baroque era. This gentle and intimate yet fresh music is a nice alternative to so much synthetic-sounding New Age music. Beyond these basics, I leave these playlists open, without specifying exact tracks, since they can be readily assembled from your favorite music source or streaming service:

1. Psychedelic, trippy: Tipper (or other psybient)
2. Meditative, contemplative: Eno (or other ambient)
3. Invigorating: Indian classical ragas
4. Calming, grounding: Deuter (or other New Age)
5. Calming, grounding: 17th-century classical lute and harpsichord

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More Isham Cook on music:
Pop music and the Asian face
Music and totalitarianism
John Dowland and the lost English Consort School of chamber music
Philip Glass and Tan Dun
On harpsichords and white pianos: The challenge of music in China