Lately I've been obsessing over this particular topic. I've felt kind of down in life and looked to music as a form of escapism and it got me to thinking about the connection between music and altered states of consciousness. With some research I found that certain genres of music are actually made with this purpose in mind and/or are better than other genres at inducing this. Specifically, electronic music such as vaporware and witch house seem to be very good for this. Going back to older times, krautrock was also quite good at inducing altered states. I think electronic music is definitely good for inducing altered states im general because you can manipulate the mix to a desired effect. It seems to me that the production techniques that do it for me are echoes, fade ins, repetition, fuzzy sounding, arpeggio, and vocals with modulated pitching.
A particularly interesting topic in this vein is hypnagogia. That's the borderline between sleep and awakeness where your mind can start to have hallucinations and weird random thoughts right before falling asleep. One genre of music from the 2010s seeked to bring about that state. It was called Hypnagogic pop. It was in many ways a precursor to vaporwave in that it used the concept of retrofuturism and hauntology to bring about the state.
Hauntology is defined as a state of secular, historical, and existential disjunction in which presence is replaced by a deferred non-origin, represented by "the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present, nor absent, neither dead nor alive." In the context of hypagogic pop, this is manifested in retrofuturism. Retrofuturism is the ghost of a future from a past that never was. It appropriates retro aesthetics and sounds to craft an ideal image of the past, and the future it dreamed of. For example, Back To The Future predicted hoverboards in 2015. Where are they?
The future depicted in the past hasn't came to be, and so hypnagogic pop, vaporwave, and synthwave is simultaneously a mourning and a celebration of both the past and the future. The sounds used are often manipulated into sounding "floating" and "haunting" through echoes, modulation, and fades to portray that what you're listening to isn't actually the past, but merely the ghost of the past that never actually existed in the first place. This floaty feeling that induces a nostalgia for a past that none of us have actually experienced because nostalgia leads to idealization or because we were born too late, and that nostalgia can often feel dreamlike, like how we are in the hypnagogic state, because in a way it kind of is a dream that doesn't exist.
Earlier in this post I mentioned krautrock, which also tends to induce an altered state of consciousness in me. The circumstances behind krautrock are also interesting. After WW2 young Germans had to come to grips with their horrible past. Any sense of national pride was gone at that point. And so in the late 60s and 70s young German artists became wildly experimental, using minimalistic, repetitive, and hypnotic sounds that are often droning in their music. Their goal was to create something uniquely German and reclaim their national pride, and to move on from their past into the future. In a sense the philosophy is opposite to Vaporwave. In vaporwave, the artist looked to the past. In krautrock (especially the Berlin school variant of it), the artist looked towards the future and created sounds that never existed before.
And of course, these 2 genres only scratch the surface of this topic which spans many genres and involves elements of psychology, art, philosophy, science, and probably even mathematics somewhere in there. This is actually my special interest so I would like to unravel the secrets of the human mind with respect to music and art and how they can be used to experience a higher being.
If any of you have anything to add or say about this topic, feel free to comment.
26 Mar 2020, 11:30 pm
