Barbelith Underground > Radio & Music

As far as I'm concerned NLP has got nothing that a well-stocked MP3 player and some willpower won't provide.

If this were Temple I'd get twitchy about a lot of suppositions and some of the words there, but as we're in music I'll just ask you for an example so I know what you mean.

Both Lyrical Synchonicity and a musical album acting as a Hypersigil are topics worthy of their own discussion I think...

I think they are both worthy of discussion, yes. And I agree with Rizla that I'd like to scratch a little deeper to find something magically… useful. Because I've become a rabid utilitarian as I near my thirties.

Regarding lyrical synchronicity, or musical synchronicity (as much of the music I listen to has no words) I agree there are powerful correlations, and yes this is accessible by anyone but shouldn't necessarily be taken as synchronous. I'm reminded of the cautionary tale that we were told in prophetic training in church, about the man who was looking for a sign from God about where he should go to do his missionary work, believing that the Lord would speak to him through the first thing he saw that stood out to him. Which turned out to be a Mars bar.

I recently had a conversation in the pub about considering a move to California if I could find a means of legitimately living and working in the country, drunkenly joking about finding an American woman to marry (an off hand comment my Dad had made last time I visited him), at which point California Girls by the Beach Boys came on the jukebox. Now lets think about that… to marry someone for dual citizenship is a deeply, deeply problematic and practically insane plan. I'm not going down that route based on a song that seemed to refer to a pissed up piss take conversation.

Man, the Beach Boys are fucking amazing.

And right now as I type this Arthur Russell is singing a bunch of "songs," all with the lyric "California here I come." But this is a CD I've purchased, it's not like it's on at random. This stuff just happens. But admittedly I'd really like to live in the Bay Area, so…

If synchronicity is defined as thought interacting with external stimuli, then these occurrences lend credence to the inner-connectivity of the inner and outer world

Let's think about that definition. It's impossible to experience the world directly; we do it through our bodies and our senses. Every waking thought you'll ever have is an interaction with external stimuli, and arguably the lion's share of one's dreaming is material that you've processed via your senses while awake. Yes, I agree that the stuff that I might sometimes on a whim call magic is accessible by everyone and is just the stuff of life. That's a baseline, but as Rizla's said we need a little more to make this conversation interesting.

A synchronicity, at least in the manner that Jung used the term shortly after he coined it, has to come with that Eureka! moment, that point at which the world aligns and makes sense and sheds light on something that would not otherwise have been understood. It's transformative. It's loaded with meaning. I think a perfectly valid question to ask anyone who has experienced something they call a synchronicity is to ask, "How did it change you?" Or maybe better, "How did that experience compel you to change when you wouldn't/couldn't previously?" As an example, here's one of my own musical synchronicities and how it compelled me to change.

I would hesitate to call anything without that kind of transformative and directing power a synchronicity because it's so everyday, it just bubbles along in the background of your life and is often forgotten quite quickly. It's nice, it's comforting, it feels like the universe is just that little bit more on your side, but it's like turning over in bed, the brief opening of your sleepy dust eyes before drifting back into sleep rather than the sudden jolt into being wide awake, alert, self possessed and energised.

I guess I may be overstating my case here, they're certainly experiences of the same type. Ish. But the magnitude, the feelings you have when they happen make them feel utterly different, the sense of the scales falling from your eyes. It's like a Deus ex Machina, divine intervention. Just you try to not make changes in your life when you get a major synchronous event… you'd feel like you were putting yourself in prison.

Personally I find the songs that come into my head out of nowhere and get stuck there really interesting, especially if I haven't heard them in a long time. Why is that in there, what is it saying to me, why am I fixating on this today? It might be a two line loop without the rest of the song. Use all your dream interpretation skills on it, dwell on it, let it tell you what it needs to.

On the concept album as hypersigil idea… I can see where you're coming from, but hypersigil is such a specific term in which a creative work is imbued with specific intention. Most writers I've chatted to have experienced weird hypersigil-style phenomena when writing regardless of whether they're into magic or not, I think it has a lot to do with how we've trained our minds to narrativise our lives. But they're more often than not engaging with that mess of fiction without clear aims on what they want it to do to them, they don't have an objective in mind and they may not know how to direct and control the phenomena. Not that I've encountered a *magician* who has really been able to deal with what they call a hypersigil without it biting them on the ass in some way. But I guess my resisitance to picking up and running with this term when it is applied to Dark Side of the Moon is that I don't know enough about Pink Floyd's intentions with the album, whether they wanted to bring about specific results with it, and what results they got having made it. Yes, it's powerful and has changed many people's lives and continues to sell bloody well. But surely if we're looking for this kind of thing then The Wall would be a better example, a record with characters and a narrative, even a character that Waters seemed to be inhabiting that commented on much of his own life? A record that seemed to have a specific intention to destroy the ego and defenses of its creator and expose all their raw needs, pain and prejudice. Can we say it's successful? How can we judge?

At the moment I'm listening to one of my favourite hypersigil records, one that I think is rather inarguable. It's called Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers, in which nine blokes from New York created multiple fictional versions of themselves, became millionaires, changed the music industry for black people in America and took up a position as arguably the most influential band of the Nineties. There's enough on record about their intentions, the layers of hidden meaning in the record, the religious beliefs of some members and the concrete, real world results they achieved for us to be able to make that call. Just check the interview skit between Can It Be All So Simple and Chessboxin'. They announced it all up front and then ticked virtually all their boxes. Now that's fucking magic.

Its the difference between a timeless artist and a homogenized mass marketed mediocre piece. Gourmet and fast food.

Many of my favourite cultural artefacts have been designed to make as much money as possible in as wide a demographic as possible, while also doing a lot of other stuff besides. The amount of money that something is designed to make is fairly irrelevant to me these days. Which is better, making exactly what you want to make in the way you want to make it and being poor, or doing the same and raking it in?

Here's a fun article that compares the best pop music to the glory days of 2000AD that makes particular mention of the mass-produced means of production as something that added value to the creativity of the people involved rather than detracted.

Or check out these rather preposterously extraordinary lyrics:

I am an arms dealer.
Fitting you with weapons in the form of words
And don't really care, which side wins
As long as the room keeps singing
That's just the business I'm in

This ain't a scene, it’s a god damn arms race
This ain't a scene, it’s a god damn arms race
This ain't a scene, it’s a god damn arms race
I'm not a shoulder to cry on, but I digress

I'm a leading man
And the lies I weave are oh so intricate, oh so intricate
I'm a leading man
And the lies I weave are oh so intricate, oh so intricate

I wrote the gospel of giving up
(You look pretty sinking)
But the real bombshells have already sunk
(Pre-Madonnas of the gutter)
At night we're painting your trash gold while you sleep
Crashing not like hips or cars
No, more like p-p-p-parties

This ain't a scene, it’s a god damn arms race
This ain't a scene, it’s a god damn arms race
This ain't a scene, it’s a god damn arms race

Bandwagon's full. Please, catch another

I'm a leading man
And the lies I weave are oh so intricate, oh so intricate
I'm a leading man
And the lies I weave are oh so intricate, oh so intricate

All the boys who the dance floor didn't love
And all the girls whose hips couldn't move fast enough
Sing until your lungs give out

This ain't a scene, it’s a god damn arms race
This ain't a scene, it’s a god damn arms race
(Now you)
This ain't a scene, it’s a god damn arms race
(Wear out the groove)
This ain't a scene, it’s a god damn arms race
(Sing out loud)
This ain't a scene, it’s a god damn arms race
(Oh, oh)
This ain't a scene, it's a god damn arms race

I'm a leading man
And the lies I weave are oh so intricate, oh so intricate
I'm a leading man
And the lies I weave are oh so intricate, oh so intricate

They're by Fallout Boy and they're about as ego modifying as anything I've encountered, unquestionably more so because of the popularity of the group. They can back up their braggadocio. Preposterous, yes. Preposterously good and very clearly charged with deliberate power (see Quantum's comments on the Beatles onstage above… similar, no?).

Empty words written by mere money men… no.

As an artist myself, I am admittedly biased in terms of wanting to express a unique and fresh point of view and sound that isn't designed to cater to a large audience. Or am I bitter that I don't sell out arenas?

No idea if you're bitter or not, but don't be afraid to get paid homes. A major revelation I had a few years back was that all I wanted was to play songs that made me and other people happy. There's nothing more complex to it than that, and when you see it like that money becomes irrelevant to the creative process.

Two of the most powerful musical moments I've experienced in the last year have been in anime series, in which every aspect of the show is licensed for mass marketing. You have the show, the toys, the video games, the comics, the advertising space, the cosplay, the music licensing… it's designed to make as much money as possible. Dai Sato got told to make a TV show of fifty episodes to be aired at 0700 on Sunday mornings for children and adult clubbers rolling in from a Saturday night out. It had to have transforming giant robots and it had to feature a love story. The robots were designs that had been made before he even got near the project that he had to integrate in someone (I think that's the case). Now part of me feels that if you can take those business demands and spin gold out of them then you're the amongst the best writers, very far from being a soulless corporate automaton. The series he made out of all these demands is called Eureka Seven. The fourth opening theme to the show (yes, all those opening themes got released as singles) hit me on so many levels at once, took me totally by surprise, had me cheering, laughing, crying, filled with references to a thousand other stories and songs and scripture, made me reinterpret the entire series, raised the stakes for the show and actually gave me that little bit more hope that wonder and happiness can exist in the world.

Not bad for a minute long opening theme in a derided trash medium that's out to make as much cash as possible. Dylan certainly never did that to me. But then he's a cantankerous old fart who has actually gone on record as saying that no music of worth has been recorded in the last twenty years. Nobhead.

The other one was the moment in the fourth episode of Gunbuster II when… actually, I don't even want to talk about that or set a frame in your head in advance. It's so subtle that many people don't notice it. Some things are far too good to spoil. But needless to say, it's more of the same, the kind of brilliance that you hope exists but see in reality far too infrequently. If you haven't seen the Gunbusters then check the Gathering thread, you may well get a chance soon.

Bringing this back to the discussion, these two anime soundtracking moments are both examples of music that has had a deep and profound effect on me, they're deliberately intended to have that effect and they're crucial elements of two series that have made me look at my life and strive to be a better person. The money involved is irrelevant to that.

Now, next stage ; what if you are to seek out (or randomly discover) THE song that, in yr personal world, fully embodies your current state of mind and the outcome you seek.... this takes things a step beyond the standard AO Spare sigil recipe in that the song can become the sigil and the power-source of the sigil wrapped up in one totemic object that, after a bit of practice, can blast you into the magickal headspace needed to achieve your goal whenever necessary: the song in effect becomes the spell, all you've got to do to give it power is listen, harness the energy and react accordingly.

Both these anime songs have become just that to me. They're incantations. They are charged with power. That's partly down to me as what I've bought to them, but also an intention of the people who used them in the context in which I first experienced them. I use them and they change me. My life is better for having them. They are my hymns, my spirituals, and one day I'd like to sit behind a drum kit with some musician friends who feel the same way and play them to you.

Last night I blessed my living and practice space using "musical invocation" (Am I going to get jumped on for even throwing that term out? Sigh.)

Nah, musical invocation sounds great to me. I do this kind of thing all the time, so do most people I know. This stuff is universal.

I consider NLP to be primarily concerned with attitudes and behaviours and music primarily concerned with emotions

I think that's where you're coming unstuck here. If NLP were about primarily about attitudes and behaviours then there would be nothing to distinguish it from all the other models that deal with attitudes and behaviours, so in the quote As far as I'm concerned NLP has got nothing that a well-stocked MP3 player and some willpower won't provide you could just as easily have replaced NLP with… well, practically anything else.

Probably the quickest working definition of NLP is that it is the art of noticing and changing the structure of subjective experience. It is about *how* we experience, not *what* we experience (there are already a million and one tools for dealing with the *what* of subjectivity). If one were to combined NLP and music it wouldn't be so much a case of having the two compensate for lacking elements in each other. Rather it would be a case of NLP providing an infinite number of options for fine tuning the use of music in change work.

NLP takes how we experienced and represent the world through our senses as its main set of levers. Making things relevant to this thread, we could take an example of a memory in which a piece of music was a powerful factor. An NLP practitioner wouldn't be concerned with what that piece of music was or what the lyrics were, it wouldn't try to analyse what the music was "saying" in the context of that remembered experience. It would focus on *how* the music was experienced.

Any sensory channel is referred to in NLP as a modality: auditory, kinaesthetic, visual, olfactory, and gustatory modalities, and also the proprioceptive (a sub category of kinaesthetic dealing with internal sensations) and meta-kinaesthetic modalities (a sub category of proprioceptive that labels internal sensations with emotions, hence "meta" in that it is a judgement and commentary on the proprioceptive). A powerful experience of music is almost invariably described in NLP as a synesthesia, which here is used in a slightly different context to when it is labelled as a condition. A song that has a powerful effect on you would be an interplay between the auditory and kinaesthetic modalities (likely to include both proprioceptive and meta-kinesthetic) and possibly even the visual modality in some people, in that some people describe their music experience in terms such as "cinematic." There might even be the experience of music that links the auditory with the olfactory and the gustatory, you just probably won't encounter examples very often.

So far so jargon. How is this useful? Well, NLP breaks down each modality into submodalities, which are the individual building blocks of how we represent the structure of an experience with our senses in the model. Staying with music as our example, a list of submodalities for *how* we experience it would include location (specific location, surround, stereo, mono, balance, distance from sound source), volume, pitch, tone, tempo, rhythm, clarity (clear, muffled)… you might be starting to see how far this can be taken. Everyone with these tools becomes the Brian Eno, RZA, Aphex Twin or Toshimaru Nakamura of subjective experience.

Take a memory in which you experience a piece of music in a visceral, physical manner. Ask yourself: are the sounds far away or distant? Are they loud or quiet? Clear or muffled? Balanced in stereo or more located in one ear than another? With a flat EQ or boosted bass? Is the rhythm fast or slow? You could go on forever asking questions about these submodality distinctions.

The piece of memory I've asked you to re-experience now is of a piece of music that has a visceral, physical effect on you. That's a synesthesia between auditory and kinaesthetic, and this is what you can do with synesthesias… ask yourself: how do the physical sensations you experience change when you turn up the volume? Increase the tempo? Place yourself closer to the sound source?

That's the obvious stuff out of the way. As a generalisation for people on the Barbelith Music forum, a physical experience of music will become more intense for most people the louder and closer the sounds are, and I would be flabbergasted if you didn't already know that. More air will be moved, you might want to actually feel the bass in your diaphragm.

You could then use this with internal dialogue or negative self talk, a good example to see what else you can do. Lots of people experience they poor self image in terms of derogatory dialogue that keeps doing them down. Most people don't realise it, but many people sort it into one stereo channel, they use one ear for positive messages and the other for negative. On which side of the sound field do you most frequently experience your negative self-talk? How does your experience change when you switch it to the other ear? Is the sound source close to your ear or far away? What changes in the feelings you have that are associated with the voice when you move them further away from your ear? Closer? How do the feelings change when you speed up the voice? Now really speed it up. Now make it so fast it sounds like a chipmunk. Now so fast that it sounds like a blip. Now play the blip backwards.

Now play the voice at normal speed and if you need to change its location in the sound field so that it's coming from a place ten metres behind you. Now turn around and in your mind's eye see whose voice it is, who these words really belong to.

Back to music. That song that you're experiencing in your memory that you have powerful feelings attached to, that one that made you want to dance like a freak or stand under the window of a person you love with a ghetto blaster raised above your head. Take a section that you like, a two line phrase that seems to sum up the whole meaning of the experience for you. In your sensory Pro Tools suite in your mind's eye quickly have a look at the WAV file, locate that section and cut it into a loop.

Now remember that clip you saw on YouTube of Stevie Wonder playing that frankly awe inspiring drum solo. Let's use those drums. Oh, you're absolutely right, the sound quality is poor because of the audio compression that YouTube puts everything through, that hissy high frequency distortion. Do you want to use that? You can if you like. Why not go back to the day when that live show was filmed with some high end drum mics, maybe one for the kick, one for the snare, a couple of overheads positioned so it captures the whole kit and some of the sound of the room, play with placement a little. Got something that sounds thunderous? OK, lets take our fresh time travel recordings and make that into a two bar loop, and using our mind's eye Pro Tools let's place it over that two bar loop from that song that really means a lot to you. Doesn't fit? Try re-pitching or timestretching either loop until they do. Still doesn't fit? Try some drums from somewhere else.

Take a bassline that makes you want to fuck. I tend to like ones from Michael Jackson tunes, but really you have an infinity to choose between so choose one that really gets your cock hard or your pussy wet. Now put that in, cut it and pitch it and stretch it to fit.

Play your two bar loop with drums and bassline over the original experience.

Now stick Kool G Rap in full flow on top.

How does that change what you're feeling?

Y'see, I can use music without NLP for change work and can get a lot done with it. But why deny yourself options? Many of those submodality distinctions you can play with in the present via your home stereo, you just might not have thought to apply them to a rexperienced memory of music.

While you were playing with that experience and noticing how altering different submodalities effected the kinaesthetic sensations through the synesthesia you might have found one or two changes that really boosted the experience for you, might have made you feel on E or at orgasm. In NLP those are called critical or driver submodalities. If you notice that they usually tend to add a lot to your experience, that those aspects of the structure of the experience typically give you that boost, then that's worth remembering. Try applying those submodality distinctions to other experiences. See what happens.

If you tend to do this stuff already then nice one. Great isn't it? Have a look into NLP and see if there's anything you can learn from it that you don't already do. We've only looked at one sensory channel here, used the auditory modality as the lever. What if you were to reverse how you approached the synesthesia and used the kinaesthetic as the lever? What if you took the whole approach and applied it to a painful memory in which no music was present at the time, not necessarily bringing the music with you but the structural distinctions, the submodality map of a structure that tends to make you feel good. Now replay that painful memory via the new structure. How is that?

Hope that helps. It's the tip of a continent-sized iceberg.

Auditory Magick