| |
|
Has anyone here ever worked with Coil’s Time Machines album for the psychotropic effects?
[If you’re not familiar with the album, it’s a series of lengthy drone-based pieces each named for a particular psychoactive substance, which are supposed to recreate through sound the effects of those substances.]
Here’s what Jhonn Balance had to say to Fortean Times about the album:
FT: Psychedelics must have transformed the way you approached sound. How do they relate to the Time Machines project?
JB: They did more than that. I was taking magic mushrooms from the age of 11 - a lot, until I was about 18, just at school. And they never did a bad thing, always taught me wonderful things. They taught me how to appreciate music and eventually told me to make music. As I've said before, I feel that I was brought up by mushrooms. They are teachers. Time Machines is explicitly to do with combining sounds with psychedelic tones. The Harmaline B molecule, like any other complex alkaloid, is represented as a ring, but when you take DMT, or Yage or Ayahuasca, there's also a ringing tone, a psychic tone. And with DMT there's a kind of crumpling sound. So Time Machines was inspired by Terrence McKenna's idea that Time Machines will only ever appear here once they have been made, and will come back to us.
/snip/
FT: So the intention was to create a musical time machine?
JB: Yeah, but you don't have to be on the drugs mentioned on Time Machines at all. It's an attempt to recreate some of these psychedelic states using sound. And we did extensive research, testing whether these tones would actually transport you. The ones that did we titled and put on the record.
Also, Notes from the Coil website: According to John Balance, the premise behind this release is that hallucinogens act as time machines - they can conjure up histories of yourself and/or act as predictors of the future. In any case, they can remove you from "temporal reality". These tracks on this disc are not only formulas for hallucinogens, but the tracks have been tested, retested, rejected, et cetera.
Now, the thing that struck me about this is that, obviously, the creators of the album are experienced psychedelic voyagers – that’s how they were able to generate and recognize the appropriate sounds and compare the effects, etc. They also make the point that you do not have to be on the drugs at the time for the sounds to work.
What I wonder, though, is if their testing included subjects who had never taken the substances? Can someone without previous experience of the psychedelic states achieve them for the first time through the music, or is the sound only a trigger to take the subject back to a state they have been in before?
Any thoughts or stories to share?
~L |
|
|
