The relationship between music and psychedelics has been an intriguing bond, as the two entities have long been useful tools for humanity to alter our state of consciousness and speak long-term to our entire lives.
The bond between music and psychedelics has been known to develop peak states of emotion, meaning, and sometimes our memory. Psychedelics have been referred to as amplifiers coupled with music. Is a match made in heaven?
The rise of psychedelic music began in the 1960s, with the discovery of LSD thirty years earlier, also known as the catalyst of psychedelic culture. This later became a gateway for musicians and other artists to become part of popular culture.
The Hippie era in the 1960s was founded on “counterculture,” which was mostly based on rebellion movements regarding social injustice and living standards, which began to breed a form of “experimentation” and ‘freedom’ in the lifecycle of artists in that era, and finally, after various music experimentations, gave birth to a new genre of music now known as “psychedelic music.”
The psychedelic renaissance began to spread in the 1970s and started to ease its way into rock and other genres of music. Today we have genres of music such as psychedelic pop, psychedelic funk, chillwave, and hypnagogic pop, all existing as a microcosm of psychedelic music.
The primary objective for this genre of music was to induce a sense of a ‘trance’ or ‘rupture’ guided by the notes of music that would lead to an altered state of consciousness.
Music has also been used as a means to guide therapeutic experiences under the acute effects of psychedelic drugs. Its common use in traditional medicinal and spiritual practices, from the mushroom rituals of the Mazatec Indians to the Ibogaine rite of passage in West Africa.
As we continue to explore alternative methods to psychedelic therapy to help guide our state of emotion and find a haven to let go, we can’t ignore the importance of music and its benefits to our human psychology along with the growing experimentation using psychedelics as a source of inspiration to create therapeutic music. The evolution of how these two genres grow together is a phenomenon we are all eager to see and possibly explore, as it would be a time of great glory to see the re-emergence of more subgenres of psychedelic music, particularly Afro-psychedelic music.
