Critical listening and altered states


Ok, this is not a question about relaxing, but about listening to evaluate how the system (or a piece of gear is sounding).

What, in your experience, are the pluses and minuses of altering your state of mind for listening? This can include anything you've used to affect your everyday state of mind, from coffee, beer, scotch, tobacco, to much stronger — and psychoactive, dissociative — additives.

What do you gain by altering your consciousness in terms of what you notice, attend to, linger on, etc?
What causes more details to emerge?
What allows you to stick with a thread or, alternately, make new connections?

Or perhaps you like to keep all those things *out* of your listening; if that's you, please say a bit about why.

hilde45

Showing 4 responses by bolong

I enjoy my "medical" cannabis for music appreciation but in relatively small doses. Being "wrecked" on the stuff wrecks the music or rather wrecks concentration. Mild sessions wave off repetitive thoughts and other neurotic "loops" and also give the music the same sort qualities we ascribe to tube amps i.e "euphonious distortion." Weed and a tube amp in the chain are for me the best sort of musical symbiosis. Interestingly, if music does not have PRAT I can hear that whether stoned or sober; so I don't think a cannabis high is necessarily an obstruction or degeneracy.

A new discovery for me has been Lion's Mane mushroom extracts. Ingestion of this material improves focus and concentration while also relaxing you. It is like an extremely mild stone, or a very vague stone if you will that can be a bit of an oompf  for music appreciation and maybe moreso when taken with a little cannabis.

Lion's Mane Mushroom is wildly popular for enhancing cognition especially so for people such as myself who are entering their "golden years"

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01DKZZFCE?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title&th=1