ABSTRACT
This chapter describes an aesthetic present in several experimental music genres today that has a number of sonic traits in common with psychedelic music. This perspective on sound is associated with a set of musical characteristics and their psychoacoustic effects that are equally typical of altered states of consciousness and the use of psychoactive substances. These perceptual aspects include spatial distortion, temporal boundlessness, self-awareness and the potential for abstract associations. I use the term “ecstatic-materialist” to describe the particular understanding of sound found in this aesthetic as it highlights the two key facets: sound is experienced ecstatically (in an unstable, searching manner) as a material substance. During the 20th century, what was considered a musical (or non-musical) sound was questioned and the horizon of possible sounds suitable for use in a piece of music was greatly expanded, creating the context for this aesthetic to emerge. This understanding of sound can be found within various genres of music spanning post-spectralism, mixed-media works and offshoots from electronica including glitch and dubstep. Ecstatic-materialist sound is experienced as a dense material entity with unpredictable energy rather than as an organised structure. Listening to this music involves a particular perceptual stance in which auditory consciousness emerges within a suspended perceptual domain realised in memory; the listener does not follow a clear path set out by the music; rather, the sonic material provokes a particular engagement on the part of the listener in which time does not seem to unfold linearly and where subjective memory plays a constitutive role. This non-linear engagement with ecstatic-materialist sound parallels altered states of consciousness and the meditative, hypnotic and hallucinatory conditions brought about by (or stimulated in relation to) psychedelic music and psychoactive substances. Ecstatic-materialist sound is the key to an internal–external framework: the perception of this music does not involve clear identification of the external sources of the sounds and, at the same time, it is characterised by an embodied connection to the external experiential world.
