Coordinates: sitting in socks, shorts, and cashmere sweater in perfect 72 and sunny Oaxaca
[music] Ian Chang does something with drums on his Spiritual Leader album that I can’t even imagine how he pulls off. What is this amazingness? How does it tickle my brain so good? His band, Son Lux, most recently scored the multidimensional magic film, Everything Everywhere All at Once.
[music] Gamelan music puts me in a pleasant altered brain state faster than just about anything. Need a five-minute trance-out? This Balinese orchestra hooks you up.
[music] Look at his face and be happy.
[dance] I have one word for this: osmosis. Let this jam soak into you like jelly.
[music] The edge of distortion as described by electronic music pioneer Brian Eno — “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.” His album with David Byrne from 1981, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, still sounds fresh and inspires me to make my weirdest weirdo music
[mystery] Brown University classics scholar Brian Muraresku doesn’t take drugs, but you wouldn’t know it by the masterwork he’s penned about them. Pythagoras was initiated into the Eleusinian mystery rites and went on to found his own mystery school of math. According to Plato, "the ultimate design of the Mysteries ... was to lead us back to the principles from which we descended, ... a perfect enjoyment of intellectual [spiritual] good." Disclosing mystery secrets was prosecuted by the state. This is the criminally unknown history of the foundations of Western philosophy, math, and science.
maiden voyage : microdosing
Contemporary and friend of Ram Dass, Dr. James Fadiman wrote the seminal book on our fungi friends, Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide. Here’s a recent talk about the latest evidence on microdosing.
RESOURCE: a list of pharmaceuticals which have no reported adverse interactions with psilocybin and LSD
Besos from Oaxaca,
Cris and Team Dragon