SINGING TO PLANTS IS A PSYCHEDELIC PRACTICE

Plant whisperer Paige Emery on her new album 'Intercommunications,' out now on Leaving Records

Paige Emery in her studio (Photo by Paloma Dooley)

On the evening of the Spring Equinox, the artist and plant whisperer Paige Emery stood over a crowd of yogis, ambient music heads, and and other assorted characters of LA’s spiritually-adjacent music and wellness communities. The night air still held traces of winter’s chilly bite, which made for a cozy atmosphere in the wood-paneled yoga center where a vernal celebration was taking place. Guests held steaming cups of tea infused with passionflower, and took their seats on yoga blankets.

Draped in a robe in her signature shade of Yves Klein blue, Paige led a ritual opening for the space, inviting everyone to imagine a sacred garden. In this garden, she continued, we could plant seeds—ideas of intentions and future actions—that could help our communities and the Earth. It is important to be open and receptive, she encouraged, “to the subtle forms of communication from plants.”

Then, Paige began singing in low, meditative tones, looping her vocals over a minimalist palette of notes played on her keyboard. The sounds pooled over each other like waves over the audience, most of whom were lying on their backs with their eyes closed. The feeling was of being washed over by glistening ripples of resonances, and drifting into a hypnotic state of tranquility.

The songs that Paige performed were taken off her debut album Intercommunications, which is out today on Leaving Records. The release explores the concept of inter-species communication, specifically through the practice of dialoguing with plants. Intercommunications sprang out of Paige’s daily ritual of singing to the flowers in her garden as she watered and meditated with them in the morning, with the songs springing out of the vocal utterances she’d make during this daily ritual.

Opening up to plant dialogue, Paige explains, is a practice that requires tapping into emotional frequencies that bypass the mind’s rational mental models. Many people experience this form of communication while sitting in mushroom and ayahuasca ceremonies, where the “spirit” of these powerful psychoactive plants often communicate messages to those under the medicine’s hold. The album charts various states of being that can occur through this process, with each song’s formal structure representing a different modality of plant interaction. “Enduring,” for example, is an ode to the physical discipline required to sit in a plant ceremony, when the body is often wracked with discomfort and pain.

Intercommunications explores the intersection between experimental electronic music and plant medicine songs, offering a more avant-garde approach to New Age meditation music. It also dives into the fascinating realm of inter-species communication, a concept that could be increasingly salient in the near-future. After all, as Paige explains, opening ourselves to deeper communication with plants is not so different from the conversations growing around artificial intelligence. Thus, deepening our ability to communicate with non-human consciousness is a likely step in the evolution—and preservation—of human life.

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Speaking of magical plants, many of you have been asking what the heck was that powder I was spotted snorting on Instagram recently. It’s called kanna, a South African cactus that some have been calling “nature’s MDMA.” While it’s relatively under-the-radar right now, kanna is definitely on the come-up, with more and more people turning to it to replace alcohol and other addictive substances. Due to popular demand, Rave New World is teaming up with Kanna Extract Co. to bring you this *legal* psychoactive plant, so you can experience kanna’s mood-lifting, heart-opening effects via a trusted and ethically-sourced company. While kanna is typically eaten or smoked, Kanna Extract Co’s high-potency kanna powder can also be snorted for the strongest effects, which truly feel (to me) like you’re rolling…

We’ll be doing a full-length interview with Kanna Extract Co.’s founder soon, with more information about the plant’s chemistry, growing popularity, and therapeutic applications. But for now, here’s the link for you to check it out yourself!

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Intercommunications came out of your practice of singing to your plants. Could you tell me more about plant communication and how it maybe also relates to sitting with plants in ceremony? 

Singing is a form of meditation. I would sing to plants while watering them and just working in the garden, and I’ve learned that the strongest communication is through song, and often a sort of song that dissociates you from rational language. 

I had been exploring plant communication for a long time, which had to do with the deconstruction of language, and where rational enlightenment under colonialism has gotten us. A primary condition of undoing these narratives and ways of thinking is to be open to plant communication. Then, through sitting with entheogenic plants a lot, I learned that a way to open up a pathway of communication, and ask for help and healing, is through song. That’s the meeting place that forms a bridge across these different communications across species.