(Room40)The composer explored psychedelics during lockdown, creating synth
music evocative enough to conjure aural hallucinations even if you’re not under the influence
In lockdown, the Chicago-based artist and composer Olivia Block began taking psychedelic mushrooms and listening with intent as a way to guide her composition. She used these sessions as both a music-making strategy and as a form of meditation on the pandemic: “The mushrooms helped me to listen somatically, pulling my ears towards low tonal patterns and the warped sounds of a broken Mellotron,” she said, describing the process as “an attempt to translate my emotions about this surreal and strange historical moment into sound”.
However, the resulting album, Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea, is not obviously psychedelic, but a deeply immersive ocean of sound, with watery, enveloping drones that ripple with a liquid tremolo and create patterns behind the eyes. During the same period, Block was reading Anna Kavan’s strange and snowy postapocalyptic fairytale Ice, and it helped frame the album as a soundtrack to the unmade film of this eerie novella.
This column’s regular author, John Lewis, is away