One of my reviewers wrote that "Low Entropy is likely a psychotic cosmonaut in disguise who records the ominous frequencies of subspace and plays them back for our listening pleasure". Close enough. I'm not a psychotic cosmonaut (well, I'm that too), but a psychonaut.
A psychonaut is someone who explores alternative states of consciousness and his own mind. I don't do drugs to reach these states, but for all my life I got into them "on my own", "by myself", starting in childhood and getting more extreme as I got older.
At first these states scared me (a lot) and I didn't know how to handle them; but when I encountered Hardcore as a teen, I found a way to at least gain some control and make sense of my situation with the use of this form of music.
Now, these states, and my own music production, are closely linked; sometimes I hear sounds during these states and generate similar ones when producing; but most of the time, a different thing happens: in these states I have certain sensations, feelings, ideas, and when producing a track, I try to generate sounds that create the very same ideas and feelings. For example, I might have a feeling of enlightenment, or euphoria, or ecstasy, in such a state; I then try to generate a track that has the same feeling of enlightenment or euphoria or ecstasy to me, too. It's more complicated than that in actual cases, but I try to give a rough draft here.
I must say I not only try to reproduce "light" emotions or thoughts; but also sounds that remind me of extreme feelings of anxiety, panic, depression and hopelessness, for example. So when I make a track called "There Is No Future", this not a gimmick, or trying to be dark, but how I felt at that time.
Now, for someone who is not a psychonaut, this might seem bizarre, or ridiculous, or pure nonsense: to get into "alternative states" and reproducing them with sonic means!
But, over the years, by the feedback I got, I formed the opinion it really works; for example one girl described listening to my music as "surfing dimensions and exploring areas of her brain that she didn't know existed".
My music is essentially my sonic psychonaut's diary.
Now, the big question for me has always been: is there a danger to what I do?
Spreading music to thousands of people that might put them into an alternative state of consciousness might not be the best idea in the book; it reminds me a bit of the (stereotypical) hippie plan to put LSD into the water supply of a town to make "everyone high and enlightened" which might have been catastrophic in the real world.
But there is something to say against this: I'm not spreading a substance but music, and music is abstract; there is rationality and intellect involved when processing music, so I assume the "psychedelic" content will just pass over everyone's head if they're not inclined to it anyway. A bit like time-travelling to medieval times and passing blueprints of atomic bombs to the general population; as no one in that time could understand the plans or build something out of them, this "dangerous information" would be no danger at all.
Also, those who flock to Hardcore and Doomcore and Techno, are most likely psychonauts themselves and somewhat used to and professional at "alternative states of consciousness", so a better metaphor would be "spreading LSD at a hippie session", which again is much less dangerous.
And, most of all, in the last years there have been some movies with heavy psychonaut imagery and topics, such as the "Doctor Strange" movie by Marvel, which was literally "consumed" by millions of people, and which apparently has caused not much harm or catastrophy.
But, it's a thought I can't really shake off. So maybe a word of warning is necessary. My music is based on some "extreme psychological states". Handle with care, and on your own responsibility. And for those who do: go on!
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