Workshop
Mr. Mushroom
Moving From LA to NYC was almost as intense as moving from Lima to LA. NYC was a life changing experience for this lonely young musician that arrived with a dream and $500 in his pocket. And sometimes the most unlikely happens, and the 90's became my decade of exploration of psychotropics and hallucinogenic plant medicine. I became a very close friend of a Bolivian Ayahuasquero apprentice living in Brooklyn, Miguel Kavlin, and together we did a lot of experimenting for a few years. I also followed Terence McKenna's ideas on the use of psilocybin mushrooms. I don't know how much of all this has affected my music, but there was this one night that I took mushrooms in my Brooklyn apartment, somewhere around 1996, turned off the lights and plugged in the guitar and recorded.
If you listen carefully, which is not easy as what came out was a never ending slur of notes by a self-indulgent guitarist, you can tell the moments when there is a shift, when something magical is happening. I realized after listening to the tape again, that the sound itself doesn't communicate the experience. What I lived that night was the experience of a foreign energy entering my body and playing for me. I wasn't playing really, but witnessing something playing through me. Yes, that which we musicians wish to experience every time we play.
Curiously enough, the first take was a free improvisation of one of the songs included in Facing South, Luna in Lake Navajo. I said "curiously", because I also took mushrooms one night at Lake Navajo in New Mexico in 1995, and had the experience of a Native American spirit entering my body and giving some sort of extraordinary abilities (that unfortunately faded with the night).
I give you the three takes that survived that night.