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https://eastforest.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-mushrooms-a-soundtrack-for-the-psychedelic-practitioner-2019
"Music For Mushrooms: A Soundtrack For The Psychedelic Practitioner" is a five hour, fully connected journey designed to musically guide a group or individual through an entire psilocybin experience, start to finish.
This album aims to forge a new shamanic path — one that is birthed of our musical tools and the technology of our time while also honoring and inspired by the rich history of our human relationship to psychedelic plants and fungi.
My album's compositional shape guides the arch of the ceremony experience. The music of the current psilocybin public research therapy playlists (like those offered by Johns Hopkins and Imperial College) is an amalgamation of tracks by different composers - none of the songs were originally intended for psilocybin. Further, most of these songs are comparatively short. The songs of "Music For Mushrooms: A Soundtrack For The Psychedelic Practitioner" have a slow and gentle growth, an organic progression that aligns with the waves of feeling and experience in the psychedelic journey. This progressive unfolding allows the journeyer to enter into sonic and emotional worlds gradually, to explore the psychic depths with peaceful transitions that allow for time to integrate the experience before moving into the following song or space.
Additionally, "Music For Mushrooms" integrates original nature field recordings throughout the composition. Field recordings of “that which is still wild”, provides a soothing synthesis of nature into what might otherwise be a staid and sterile therapeutic setting. Sounds of nature can unlock memories, calm our senses, and contain a texture that welcomes our most ancient self home — whether a chorus of crickets or a gentle mountain breeze.
As mentioned, "Music For Mushrooms: A Soundtrack For The Psychedelic Practitioner" was recorded and improvised live, inside ceremony. In this way, it contains the ‘energy of the medicine’.
The new album is intentionally conducive to the psychedelic experience in a variety of additional ways, like avoiding lyrical content so as not to spark the language centers of brain. The record employs falsetto vocalizations throughout, utilizing a non-lyrical language composed primarily of improvised vowels. This allows for the benefits of vocals without the potential language triggers of lyrics. With the live looping technology I employ harmonies and a full choir can develop.
I’ve always intuitively felt that the solutions our world needs will not come from the top down. Rather, the answers we’ve been looking for will come from the inside out. By exploring our interior landscape to heal our traumas, to root out shame, to learn to love ourselves, we empower our ability to make positive changes that echo out into our lives and the world around us.
-East Forest
The album reached #1 on iTunes charts in May 2019.
All music written, mixed & performed live by East Forest
Mastered by Taylor Deupree
Artwork by Daniel F. Birch
Recorded live in upstate New York
Disclaimer: The composer and author of this album do not condone the use of any substances illegal in your jurisdiction. The author expressly disclaim any liability, loss, or risk, personal or otherwise, that is incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of the contents of the album.
- Genre
- Shamanic