When I began training as a Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapist one of the elements of the work that was most exciting to me was the emphasis within the KAP community on leveraging the power of music for healing. Intuitively (and based on my own experiences), I knew that a focus on being in one’s moment to moment awareness, carried along on a stream of sound, can be profoundly transformative. Add to this the increased intensity of acoustic perceptions and what it conjures in the midst of a psychedelic journey and you obviously have a recipe for some very deep work.
“Thank goodness”, I thought, “these clinicians really get it!” I immersed myself in exploring all the playlists I could find on Spotify, changing the crossfade to the full 12 seconds as everyone suggested, and began my work with clients. And while I’m deeply grateful for the compilations that everyone in the KAP community has so generously shared, and still often use them, I couldn’t help but feel that our burgeoning field still had not tapped into the full potential of what orchestrated sound might offer our clients during their journeys. But not being a musician myself, I didn’t quite know where to start.
At this point I contacted my friend, multi-instrumentalist and composer Richard Penzone to help me assess what might be driving this feeling that we had yet to unlock the full potential of how to use sound in this space. He immediately recognized that the incongruencies in mood and tone from track to track, not to mention the obvious breaks in sound (even with a crossfade) result in a discontinuity that will inevitably impact the journey. Consider how quickly one can transition from ecstatic revelations to anxious despair. By the time the clinician reflects or questions the experience the journey has already moved on…
This began our collaboration. As I shared some of the knowledge and clinical experience I was accumulating with Richard, he whole-heartedly dove into his creative process, creating single tracks with familiar themes that elaborate throughout. These tracks last roughly 45-60 minutes (or the bulk of the main phase of the journey) and follow the traditional arc of experience the medicine provides. My personal and professional experience thus far is that these tracks offer unique possibilities in journey space that immediately set themselves apart from the experience of a playlist. To remind us of this, Richard coined the term “Unified Sonic Environment” or U.S.E. to differentiate this new paradigm of harnessing music as medicine, which I feel succinctly captures both his mission and his final offerings.
Thus far he has created 8 U.S.E. compositions from which a clinician can choose to match what they feel might be most fitting to accompany each particular journey. I highly suggest listening to the various clips provided as well as the full sample track so you can get a feel for how this sonic experience differs from the playlist paradigm we’ve currently embraced and signing up for his newsletter so you can learn more about how to subscribe to his full-library of U.S.E. tracks.