25 March 13
Dan Barrett's latest release -- Deconstructionist -- will take you on an experimental journey into ambient and drone music
"Good luck." After thirty pages of primer, Dan Barrett'sDeconstructionist ends with a simple encouragement. A spirit of experimentation and discovery, distilled down into a pair of words, before you slip on the headphones and attempt to lose yourself in the music. It's an EP, just three tracks long, but each of them spans nearly half an hour, making the whole record longer than most albums. An hour and a half of music aimed specifically at inducing a trance state, transporting you to an altered state of consciousness. It all sounds a little hokey, and even with thirty pages of explanation, it's hard not to be a sceptic.
"The EP plays pretty overtly with the placebo effect. The book that comes with it is deliberately priming you before you listen," Dan Barrett, who performs as Giles Corey, explains to me. It's about filling your head with tales of Buddha and voodoo, tribal rituals and suicide. It's a sombre read, and one that's deliberately creating a mood, something that the music can then craft into a vehicle to transport you to trance. It's immediately apparent that he's hardly sold on exactly how effective even his own work is, let alone anyone else's. There's something there, but he can't say exactly what.
"The whole idea of the EP came because I was getting really interested in traditional ritual trance." Barrett continues, and the influence is certainly felt in the music; there's an almost constant rise of chanting and the clang of improvised drums. It's a disconcerting racket, but instead of feeling claustrophobic it's almost lonely; every sound echoes, as if in a huge space, and the constant pressure of electronic beats adds a sense of desperate urgency to the music. It's unsettling and uncomfortable.
It turns out, the beats are a big part of what he's trying to do. They're binaural. "Through using headphones and playing slightly different beats in each ear, you might have 30 beats per minute in the right ear and 32 in the left, and even though you're playing them in separate headphones, you'll hear this sort of wobbling, which is your brain interpreting the sound." The idea is that your brain will then attempt to synch up to these complex rhythms, and somewhere along the line you'll stop being aware of what's going on.
There are a lot of qualifiers in the way that Dan speaks, multiple instances of "seems" and "supposedly", making sure that every claim that he makes, whenever science could potentially be used to refute him, he steers clear of stating something as fact. It's smart, but also unnecessary, for the most part. Not only is the science of trance something that's difficult to study, at best, and one that hasn't really been touched, especially in regards to music, but what he has done, he's managed to do in such a way that the science is behind him.
Sophie Scott is a professor at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience atUniversity College London, and, at least as far as complex rhythms go, they're something our brains are wired to handle in a specific way. "Rhythm seems to be very strongly associated with sensory motor processing in the brain. So going from a sound and reacting to that sound, it's still a motor system." Your body has an instinctual reaction to rhythm that all but bypasses your brain. It's older, more primal.
There's a certain poetry in distilling this all down to a primal sense of beat, and to frame complex rhythms as somehow tapping into a differnent mode of consciousness. "If there's a very noisy input, with a very wide spectrum of sounds to hear, your brain will start finding things in there, and hearing sounds that aren't. Partly to get over the repetition, and partly a sort of auditory version of seeing faces in the clouds," said Scott. We're wired for variation, and using the difference in sensory inputs to divine a pattern, and when music subverts those expectations, we're left baffled.
While Scott hasn't studied binaural beats specifically, a study carried out in Canada found "increased left temporal lobe power when the facilitative binaural beats were applied", although the most striking changes were in "experienced" meditators (those who had been doing it for 18 years). By no means conclusive, but certainly supporting the theory that they aid and complement a trance state.
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