Animism and Music Therapy

By Nobleman Nash Hollowhill - February 4, 2010 

The magic of music therapy is indeed liberating. Though music theory consists of various rules and formalities, musical expression in its purest essence generates entirely the opposite sensation. People who do not have the ability or patience to learn these rules are not usually regarded seriously as musicians, but they can nonetheless experience the same sensation of freedom through musical expression. The expulsion of excess energy through musical means may be an effective method of mindfully eliminating restlessness in order to reach deeper meditative states. Here is a link to a 2-minute music therapy session that I conducted alone in my own home.

http://zombiemoonrobots.spirokeet.com/mp3/100.mp3

For better or for worse, this creation would not have been possible without my experimentation with LSD. Few people would choose to listen to this recreationally, because it is very disruptive. But the process was one of pure joy. To prove my point, the entire creation was fluid, and took a maximum of 10 minutes to generate the sound file. For the time spent on creation and production to be so low a multiple of the playback time of the file itself is a sheer miracle, as this number generally ranges in the hundreds to thousands. For an ordinary musician to create a standard 2 minute song, the time spent in the recording studio may take hours. A full-length album may take months or even years. I had originally started by trying to play the didgeridoo, but as I became more conscious of my Chi and the regularity of my breath, I realized I had too much pent up energy, and I needed to channel it out with unbridled yelping, screaming, jumping, trilling, and other irregular noise and motion patterns. As this process quickly ran out of steam, I added effects to the vocal tracks such as a circle phaser, wave destruction, a noisegate, echo, and reverb. The blatant and the subtle expressions of energy at the time were unavoidable but now I can easily sit, still and quiet, and do homework.

On listening to the track, many aspects jump out at me, particularly the resemblance to vocals used on Sun Ra songs, and various animal sounds. Because Sun Ra was one of the foremost pioneers of pure musical expression, the vocals often included the mock-yodeling and disorganized sound patterns displayed here. And because the human voice is one of the most versatile musical instruments on Earth (if not the single most versatile, being driven by the human mind,) it is capable of creating sounds that parallel those in nature, and some that have never been heard before. Some sounds I picked up on that reminded me of animals were apes, wolves, bears, birds, dogs, elephants, squirrels, whales, insects, and the more I listen to it, the more I hear. In my opinion, the sound effects added an outer-space feel to the sweeping atmospheres, with a sound collage similar to a rainforest or factory. In order for music therapy to be effective, it is necessary to open the floodgates to pure energetic expression and behavior, and forget the passing increments of time (unless that is your main focus.)

Animism is mainly a shamanic practice which involves the worship of spirits in all natural phenomena, and emulation of animal spirits in a religious context. It is a universal belief which mainly occurs in children, who have not yet attributed animate or inanimate aspects to the environment as separate from themselves. Because of this belief that the environment consists of animate and anthropomorphized expressions of energy, children may allow themselves to behave in relatively irrational and disorganized ways. Shamans teach themselves to be able to traverse the line between rational action and drastic, primal action without hesitation. Shamans have broken down internal barriers in their psyche which distinguish themselves as separate from the environment, and the present as separate from the past, and in this way can unleash their inner animal spirit. That is roughly the process I used to create the sounds featured in this audio file, in all its innovative beauty and puerile, disorganized mayhem.