KETAMINE THERAPY IS GETTING GROOVIER
My quest to find genuinely good music in the inexorably commercial stream of psychedelic healing
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Tonight’s ketamine session is at a new age sanctuary in Venice, one of the most psychotically gentrified neighborhoods in LA. Dharma bums and Dogtown skaters once gave this canal-laced beach town its grungy charm, but like many former utopian enclaves, the promise has been broken—the boardwalk freak show has left town. Venice today is a land of tech bros and neo-bohemians, who share a kink for anti-establishment-coded self-improvement regimens. Squinting through the car window at Eat Pray Love-style murals, high-end health food stores, and modern homes of glass and steel, I understand why this neighborhood has also been so friendly to the rise of luxury ketamine. When a friend drops me off at the designated address—a bright blue building with the Ram Dass mantra BE HERE NOW painted on its archway—I cringe a little, bracing for the LA strain of woo that I know a little too well by now.
Thoughts, judgements. Cringe is an allergic response, an automatic distancing of myself from the bullshit I am afraid others will lump me in with.
But tonight’s ketamine session isn’t some exercise in cultural anthropology that I am attending in basic bitch drag for the sake of knowing what’s up in the grand historical continuum of psychedelia. It is, at least in my imagination, something with immense potential. I’d received the invitation over email, which teased an “immersive experience” where participants would embark on a “supervised ketamine journey” featuring the legendary composer Don Slepian performing his 1980 album Sea of Bliss on a hi-fi audio sound-system. Doctors would be present to do medical intakes, medicine administration, trip supervision, and integration sessions. Tickets were “extremely limited,” and cost between $650 to $875.
It’d be easy to dismiss this as the latest iteration of luxury wellness for rich people to toss their money into. But this possibly marks the first time that anyone has attempted to bring a live electronic music performance to a legal psychedelic therapy setting. (At least that I’ve heard of… if you’ve seen similar things, please write me!) Due to the lack of precedents, I had a hard time imagining what it was going to be like: a concert, except everyone in the audience is getting injected with ketamine? Or would it be more like a ketamine clinic, with patients lying in reclining chairs as a guy plays synths in a corner? Hard to tell.
Whatever’s about to happen, I feel extremely lucky to be here. It’s not an easy feat to find some genuine culture in the inexorably commercial stream of psychedelic therapy, an industry currently groaning into being and inflated with the usual assortment of cons, salesmen, and pseudo-gurus that flock to every well-capitalized frontier.
Ketamine is currently the only “psychedelic” that is not a Schedule I controlled substance, and can thus be prescribed off-label by doctors for mental health reasons. This has made the dissociative anesthetic an unlikely canary test for the wider psychedelic therapy industry, with the legal ketamine market valued at $3.4 billion in 2023. The 2010s will be remembered for the slew of glitzy clinics and shady mail-order services fueled by venture capitalists and COVID-related lax regulations.
The flashiest keta-clinics I’ve visited resembled spas outfitted in millennial design aesthetics: private rooms with salmon pink walls and Monstera plants where I could get an IV drip of ketamine in a moon pod chair while gazing at NFT video art. Correspondingly, the music I heard in these places felt sort of predictable: a grab bag of ambient tracks by musicians like Jon Hopkins or Laraaji mixed with “world beats,” classical music, psychedelic dad rock, and generic nature sounds. The online apps I downloaded to try various ketamine home delivery services offered AI-generated soundtracks based on the intentions I had for the trip: did I want to feel “Triumph,” or “Transcendence”? None of it was what I actually wanted to hear: trippy music from the far-out fringes of the electronic avant-garde.
Tonight’s headliner Don Slepian is a New Age pioneer whose music is a lot warmer and weirder than any Spotify chill-out playlist. A computer music enthusiast since childhood, Slepian was way ahead of the game, building synths and composing songs on teletype machines as a teenager in the early 70s. At age 19, he moved to Honolulu and ran a testing outpost for an early version of the internet backed by the Department of Defense called the ARPANET. (In his spare time, he played as a synthesizer soloist with the Honolulu Symphony.)
In 1979, Slepian became the artist-in-residence at Bell Labs—a legendary laboratory in New Jersey that was the birthplace of many technological innovations including information theory, the UNIX operating system, and the programming language C. During his stint at the fabled lab, Slepian hung out with the scientists in the Acoustics and Behavioral Research department, who convinced him to make music with the lab’sprototype digital synthesizer, the Hal Alles (also known as Alice). Digging it out from a corner, Slepian began experimenting with the machine by writing a permutation algorithm using its programmable sliders. The result was Sea of Bliss—a blissful two-sider of gleaming tones and ethereal arpeggios now considered a New Age masterpiece. It was, as Slepian put it in The Radio Phonics Laboratory, “handmade computer music.”
I first heard Sea of Bliss during a visit in September to the Los Angeles Community Ketamine Clinic, which pops up about once a month in an Echo Park acupuncture center. The two doctors who run the clinic, Matt Baldwin and Mark Shortt, were introduced to me by a mutual friend, who told me they were doing interesting things with music. In addition to his work as a psychedelic therapist, Baldwin has released an album of woozy guitar tape loops on Leaving Records, and makes punk-inspired zines on music as an aid to exploring “inner twilight spaces.” (Not your average ketamine doctor, obviously.) During our session, they laid me down on a bed, gave me a pair of expensive headphones, and shot me into hyperspace while playing Slepian’s album followed by Structures from Silence by Steve Roach.
That trip was the deepest I’d ventured into what early ketamine psychonaut Marcia Moore called “the bright world.” First, I morphed into a sheet of film that the two doctors, envisioned in the trip as twin puppet masters, were plunging repeatedly into a chemical bath in order to “develop” my “reality.” This meta-media fantasy was quickly replaced by a state of meditative repose, where I felt connected to a more elemental self—a stripped-down version of consciousness that was mercifully free of self-criticism and simply radiated love. Emerging from the journey, I realized this was the first time ketamine therapy had given me a more tangible—a more useful—download than all the beautiful experiences I’ve had snorting it at raves and afterparties. I clung on to the feeling of total unity consciousness for several weeks while navigating a particularly stressful personal period.
I was certain that my personal affinity to the electronic soundtrack the doctors had played for me had set the conditions for this transcendent trip. This observation is backed by a prevailing hypothesis held by many researchers that an individual’s “resonance” towards music played in psychedelic sessions is associated with larger reductions in depressive symptoms after psychedelic sessions. In other words, how much you’re able to connect with the music of a psychedelic journey greatly impacts the likelihood of therapeutic outcomes.
In October, Matt and Mark announced they were starting a new venture called MCPI (Music Centered Psychedelic Integration), under which they would be organizing ketamine-assisted therapy sessions where groups could listen to live ambient music. Despite our established relationship, coming to their debut event tonight as a journalist took some discussion and negotiation, given the sensitivities and potential risks. It’s important to note that nothing illegal was going to be happening: both doctors are licensed professionals who are allowed to prescribe ketamine, and all they were doing was taking the practice out of their regular clinic and adding a live performance. Yet, the doctors were zigging quite far away from the industry norm, and the proposition is experimental enough that they feared losing their licenses if anything goes wrong…
📝 TRIP REPORT
I just got back this week from Minneapolis, where I was hanging out with my sister’s new baby. In between some deep fam time, I managed to pop out to Ecophonic—a new weed party at a stylish plant store in downtown Minneapolis called Mother. The founder of the party, Orion—who I met in an elevator at a psychedelic conference last year—gleefully told me that their party is Cali sober: no booze, just weed drinks from Utopia Borealis, an insanely delicious soda infused with maple syrup from a farm in Northern Minneapolis. (Who knew weed, sparkling water, and maple syrup tasted so good together?!) My new friend also gave me the tea: most of the weed products in Minneapolis are derived from hemp, a loophole that allows them to be federally legal.
The party had started off with a vibration-heavy sound bath, followed by a discussion on microdosing and nervous system regulation. As bundled-up attendees unraveled their heavy winter coats, the music—played by local DJs (and sometimes Great Beyond alums) D Untethered, Blue Funk, Mike Pifer, and QJ—felt like the types of tunes you’d hear in an audiophile’s living room, ranging from downtempo to funk and disco, and piped out of a top-of-the-line Klipsch soundsystem. Strange and beautiful plants draped around the cozy room gave the air a crisp feel, and to my delight, the bodies on the dancefloor were really dancing—twirling around, dipping to the ground, rubbing up against each other. The wholesome fun reminded me of the weed raves I used to throw—there’s something about eliminating alcohol that just raises the collective vibration. The vibes, I declared, were immaculate. I can’t wait to go back for the next one.
💊 THE SCOOP
I wrote about how the “big bad wolf” of Big Shrooms, Compass Pathways, just announced that it is delaying its clinical trials and laying off staff—signaling that the FDA’s denial of MDMA therapy is having wider ramifications across the industry, particularly as it comes to the tricky issue of “functional unblinding.”
Also for DoubleBlind magazine, I covered the debate around Colorado’s legal psychedelic program, which is now accepting license applications. The state has been getting the heat from both sides: aspiring business owners are worried about overregulation and sky-high fees, while watchdog groups want even more regulation, calling the program a “farce” that disguises recreational drug use as therapy for mental health issues.