Other Kinds of Mind There
Dancecult November 23, 2023 Trace Reddell
Psychedelic experience makes cognition in extended brain-body music systems especially agile, requiring a sonic rhetoric that emphasizes transformative agency. Drawing on the recursive listening spaces of dub, three forms of psychedelic electronica—ambient house, trip-hop, and glitch—foster an echological sensibility unique to records assembled from bits of other recordings. Longform albums in these genres serve as sonic pharmakomedia, pharmacologically activated non-human agencies that sustain psychedelic mind-machine systems. Managing set and setting through music selection is common in psychedelic research, therapy, and personal practice. The article puts indigenous shamanic practices in conversation with neuropsychopharmacology, sound studies, and music production to offer a diagnostic inventory of the sonic substance's effects.