Listening to music is my favourite part of a psychedelic experience, and I’m sure this is the case for many other people. It often feels like my love for music has been intertwined with my consumption of psychedelic substances, and there’s clearly something interesting happening when it comes to our perception of music while under the influence of these substances.
I have personally been very enthusiastic about the impact of LSD on my relationship with music, both from the perspective of a musician and a listener. There’s a sense of more of a “3D” perceptual experience compared to how I’d listen to music prior to my LSD experiences, where it feels as if the sounds are moving through my brain, rather than just hitting my ears. I can notice the tiny fluctuations in pitch, and I feel more connected to harmonies, with emotional responses to the music enhanced. Even after the experience itself, there seems to have been some kind of permanent alteration in how I engage with music, where I sense a permanence as a result of having so many LSD experiences intertwined with music.
My experiences with LSD and other psychedelics have opened me up to the idea that everything is related to perception, and our way of hearing music can fluctuate, with our musical perception being learned rather than something which is fixed. This dynamic sense of openness that was gifted to me from my encounters with LSD has drawn me towards styles of music which create a landscape to travel through, rather than just being a sequence of notes which might evoke emotional or nostalgic feelings. This way of perceiving music can allow for a greater sense of fluctuation between different notes, and open us up to new styles of music which might abandon our familiar Western system of understanding the relationship between different notes (or tones).
What is Microtonal Music?
The fluctuations we hear between tones in Western music divide the octave into 12 equal parts and are the most widespread system in contemporary music. Known as equal temperament, it became a predominant tuning system in the world, starting with classical music in the 18th century. The roots of the system date back further to 16th-century China, with the mathematician and musicologist Zhu Zaiyu being credited for discovering the mathematical principles of equal temperament in 1596. This concept was widely adopted in Western music, with the way of understanding the relationship between sounds being pioneered in piano music by the 18th-century German composer and musician Johann Sebastian Bach. The adoption of the 12-tone tuning system creates a sense of proportionality, where the semitone intervals (the distance between any two adjacent pitches) sound equal.
The idea of creating a sense of audible proportionality might be related to the idea of practicality, however, rather than necessarily sounding better. While this system allowed composers to explore complex harmonies and challenging modulations in sound, these explorations were ultimately short-lived, and could be seen as limiting to exploring more expressive tuning within music. This limitation can be seen as a way of conditioning, where Western ears have become used to hearing certain tuning, with other systems such as microtonal music having the potential to sound ‘out of tune’ to ears accustomed to the 12-tone tuning system.
Although different systems might sound odd to us in the West, there’s no reason why music has to necessarily subscribe to the 12-tone system. Much of the music in the world doesn’t follow this system, and instead relies on the notes in between the notes, which we refer to as ‘microtones’, which use intervals smaller than a semitone. Microtonal is a collective term that refers to all music created outside the limitations of the Western system, often taking smaller steps to go from one tone to the other. In French, the term “micro-intervalle” is more self-explanatory, with the interval being smaller than half a step (the distance), or not divisible by half a step.
We can look culturally towards music from the Middle East and Persia, which often use pitches halfway between the notes of a chromatic scale, known as quarter tones – this creates a 24-tone tuning system, allowing for greater musical possibilities and richer harmonies. This system of tuning was proposed by 19th-century music theorist Heinrich Richter in 1823 and later by Mikhail Mishaqa in 1840. It’s also known as the Arab tone system, with each tone having its own distinct name and the lowest (known as yakah) being determined by the lowest pitch in the range of the singer.
The Arabic melody style, known as maqam, relies on this quarter-tone system with subtle variations in pitches to provide the foundation for the rich emotional quality of the music. Maqam itself is a term relating to different musical structures from different cultures, including Arabic, Persian, Turkish, North African, and Central Asian, where the melodies involve mood, emotional depth, and something of a personality, rather than just a scale. Some of these melodies are intended to evoke warmth, joy, or spiritual intensity, with others providing space for longing and introspection, which would certainly pair well with a psychedelic experience that’s intended to be introspective or spiritual.
Another example of this kind of system can be found in Indian classical music, where the term shrutirefers to the smallest interval in pitch that the human ear can detect, or a voice/instrument is able to produce. In some ancient Sanskrit texts such as the Natya Shastra (treatise on the performing arts) and Sangita Ratnakara(one of the most important Indian musicological texts meaning “Ocean of Music”), the octave is divided into 22 tones. The shruti is different to the swara, with the shruti being the smallest modulation in pitch available, and the swara being the select notes which make up the scales, melodies, and ragas (melodic frameworks of improvisation) and divided into seven per octave. There is some controversy, however, relating to the different types of classical Indian music (Carnatic from the South, and Hindustani/North Indian classical music), where some listeners might experience a sharpened or flattened version of an existing note, with intermediate tones being explored as a contemporary area of research.
Moving across Asia, we can look towards another complex style of music known as Gamelan, which is the traditional ensemble music of the Javanese, Sundanese, and Balinese people of Indonesia. This is predominantly made up of percussive instruments, with hand-drums, metallophones, and the bonang(a collection of small gongs tuned to a specific pitch) being the main ones used. Javanese Gamelan music uses two tuning systems known as slendro, which uses a pentatonic scale, and pelog, which has a heptatonic scale. The unfamiliarity of this tuning system can make it challenging to Western ears, with the sounds being largely inharmonic and having no exact octaves within the scales.
While these different kinds of tuning systems might sound weird to our ears, the Western 12-tone system seems to be historically unusual, rather than something universal. It could be that engaging with microtonal music is more of an ‘undoing’ of the confines that Western music has placed upon our audible landscape, rather than diverging from how things ‘should’ sound. Perhaps this freedom within the music lends itself to psychedelic experiences, both from a structural perspective and a cultural one, where we can travel through previously unexplored sonic dimensions.
Musical Traditions and Altered States
Cultures that utilise the power of altered states of consciousness have implemented music as a crucial technology for facilitating these experiences. Different musical traditions have often existed alongside other technologies such as meditation, trance, shamanic practices, ecstatic dance, and healing rituals, where the sonic practices play a central role in inducing altered states.
The degree to which music can provide a rich landscape to explore consciousness is seemingly unparalleled, with the ability for it to directly bring us into states of awareness and experiences of unification with something greater than ourselves. The capacity of music to alter our mental and physical states, where it lights up nearly all areas of our brain, can offer unique insights into consciousness. We should recognise the importance of music in exploring this field of research.
Consuming psychedelics within a ritualistic setting often involves the use of instruments or chanting as rhythmic anchors to bring the body and mind into alignment during what can be intense experiences. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the musical systems previously mentioned have psychedelics at their core. It could be more so that there is something that might feel intrinsically psychedelic about particular sounds that play around with our expectations, or have more of an intention to induce a certain state of consciousness.
Some of the tonal systems previously mentioned have provided a foundation for ritualistic use of sound, such as the Arabic maqam, which is used to recite passages from the Quran and other devotional practices in Islam. Each maqam is related to a different kind of spiritual state, where the specific intervals between the tones relate to the invocation of distinct moods and atmospheres.
Similarly, Indian classical music has been shown to invoke an emotional response: ragas can induce positive emotional states and improve brain function, which can be useful from a ritualistic or healing perspective. Regardless of the split between the North and South, the raga serves as the foundation of Indian classical music, with its roots in Nada yoga, which relates to the quality of sounds and how they affect us from a spiritual perspective. The way in which these kinds of tones and sounds impacted the human psyche was not just limited to India, and from around the 1960s onwards, there was a noticeable influence of Indian classical music in the West.
Psychedelic Music and Eastern Influences
The trend towards incorporating Indian-inspired elements in rock music in the West was influenced by the music of Bengali sitar player Ravi Shankar, with the term raga rock being used to describe any kind of rock music that had elements of Indian classical music. This would often involve instruments such as the sitar, tanpura (used for drones), melodies based on Indian scales, vocal stylings, lead instruments mirroring the vocal line, and often vocals invoking mysticism or religious symbolism. The song “Heart Full of Soul” by the Yardbirds, released in June 1965, is often cited as being the first key song in starting this trend towards incorporating elements of classical Indian music into rock music. The song was originally recorded with a sitarist and tabla player; however, the sitar part was deemed unusable by the band, and instead, guitarist Jeff Beck decided to emulate the sound of the sitar using electric guitar.
The 1966 number 1 single “Paint It Black” by the Rolling Stones, released in May that year, also featured a sitar part played by guitarist Brian Jones, where it was touted as being a catalyst for a new genre of minor-key psychedelic music, with Indian, Middle Eastern, and Eastern European influences and lyrics about grief and loss. In August, the Beatles released their seventh studio album Revolver, with songs such as “Love You To” written by George Harrison especially for sitar and tabla, as well as “Tomorrow Never Knows”, which features Eastern-sounding tones and heavy tanpura drone, as well as lyrics inspired by the 1964 book The Psychedelic Experience by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Ram Dass.
One of the bands I was most fond of during my early encounters with psychedelics was Mahavishnu Orchestra, a jazz fusion group formed in New York in 1971 by English guitarist John McLaughlin. The mix of psychedelic rock, jazz, and classical Indian music performed with such precision and intensity totally sucked me in, and I have found that intensity to have inspired some of the heavier music I enjoy, with many contemporary bands citing them as an influence. (For anyone who hasn’t encountered this band, I HIGHLY recommend checking out this live performance from 1972.)
The incorporation of Eastern influences into psychedelic rock in the 1960s was particularly noticeable in Turkey, with Istanbul being on the “hippie trail”. A genre of music known as Anatolian rock (or Turkish psychedelic rock) emerged at this time, fusing together traditional folk music and rock. Notable musicians such as Erkin Koray, Cem Karaca, and the band Moğollar pioneered this genre of music, which was influenced by previous decades' Anatolian folk music being promoted from the 1930s onwards as a form of national pride after the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923.
Rather than the music simply including some of these influences in the way that Western psychedelic rock did, Anatolian rock maintained more of the microtonality that you would hear within the structures of Middle Eastern music, allowing more of a hypnotic and disorienting effect. On the 1976 album 2 by Erkin Koray, the notable track “Şaşkın”features an electric bağlama (a long-necked lute used in traditional folk music): Eastern melodies emerge from the microtonal system and provide something of a trance-like experience. While the golden era of Anatolian rock was between the 1960s and 80s, and Turkish rock in general later diversified away from folk influences, contemporary bands such as Altın Gün have continued some of the stylistic qualities from the previous eras that incorporated more of the folk elements. The influence of this genre has also inspired other contemporary bands within the world of psychedelic rock to experiment with different tones that might play with our expectations.
Modern Experimentation and Microtonal Music
In February 2017, Australian psychedelic rock powerhouse King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard released their ninth studio album, titled Flying Microtonal Banana (subtitled Explorations into Microtonal Tuning, Volume 1), which explicitly leans into this system of tones in an enthusiastic fashion, where the guitar line treats listeners to an odd collection of notes only 10 seconds in. There’s a feeling of belief or trust, however, that these guys know what they’re doing, and any sense of there being something slightly ‘off’ with the tuning is thrown out the window when the first track, “Rattlesnake”, kicks in.
My favourite track on the album Sleep Drifter is reminiscent of some of the music from the Turkish psychedelic rock era, with a riff that very much leans into the microtonal tuning (almost sounding like a traditional folk song) and the vocal lines following along exactly to create a hypnotic soundscape. This song, along with others on the album, allows for a lot of the subtleties that we might hear in more traditional music, with the experimental guitar lines being surrounded by a solid rhythm section to take the listener on a powerful psychedelic journey.
From my perspective as a psychedelic musician who enjoys playing around with a lot of these Eastern sounds, there’s a sense of psych rock which experiments with these kinds of motifs and tunings becoming more popularised. Bands in the scene such as Helicon from Glasgow who blend sitar with more heavy ‘fuzzed-out’ riffs and noise have become a force to be reckoned with, as well American experimental group Secret Chiefs 3 who incorporate a wide range of musical styles and tunings including Persian, neo-Pythagorean, Indian, and electronic, as well as themes relating to mystical or occult systems such as Sufism, Kabbalah, Hermeticism, and alchemy.
Moving further into this world, I have recently discovered Canadian band Angine De Poitrine, who have rapidly risen to extreme heights with their captivating microtonal universe of math rock-inspired psychedelia.
The Canadian duo, who wear polka-dot costumes to hide their identities and go by the names KHN De Poitrine and Klek De Poitrine, gained popularity at the start of 2026 after their live performance on KEXP (which has now gained a staggering 17.4m views) went viral. The band's whole aesthetic and music are undoubtedly weird, but I have found it almost impossible to stop listening to. So why is this kind of weirdness becoming so popular right now?
The microtonal album released by King Gizzard was released nearly 10 years ago, and I’ve heard criticism of the popularity of Angine De Poitrine, where people have thought they’re just doing a similar thing to the Australian band, or the music and costumes are seen as gimmicks. You might be forgiven for just automatically switching off when you see a band with absurdist aesthetics, where the group describes itself as a "mantra-rock Dada Pythago-Cubist orchestra" composed of "space-time voyagers", but perhaps this is the exact kind of music we need right now for the psychedelic space.
Microtonal Music, Psychedelics, and Resistance
When the world seems to be overrun by AI slop, the music of Angine De Poitrine might just be the antidote we’re looking for! I’ve unfortunately noticed a growing trend of AI-generated art in the psychedelic world, and the rise of AI-generated music reminiscent of 1960s psych rock (which I refuse to listen to) with a strange amount of enthusiasm. If you thought absurdist microtonal psych rock was weird, wait until you hear the responses from people you call out for using slop to promote anything in this space – they’ll give the same tired talking points about cost and time, and all of that nonsense, but ultimately they’re just screaming into the void.
We have a duty to resist the nonsense which totally debases the thousands of years of human artistic creativity, and I’m sad to see so many people in the psychedelic world just blindly allowing our creative spirit to be exploited by the tech overlords. Some people might have handed them the keys, but those of us who still remain on the artistic fringes (particularly musicians) have the ability to shift the way in which we might be able to engage with our world.
The power of psychedelics to shift our expectations (which can provide a benefit for therapeutic outcomes) goes hand in hand with the kind of music we might find on the weirded edges of the psychedelic world. With bands like Angine De Poitrine being celebrated to the extent of being invited last month onto Later…with Jools Holland, it’s evident that this kind of music is providing something different, and perhaps offering a release from a sense of the world becoming more boring.
Psychedelics can certainly provide the potential for more meaning within our world, but it could be that we need music to provide something of a driving force to break us out of the sense of boredom. Our Western ears might be so conditioned that it could be difficult to even think of new ways of experiencing music, but perhaps engaging with tones that play around with our expectations while under the influence of psychedelics can offer up a whole new universe of possibilities. Psychedelic music certainly has degrees of complexity, but the world of microtonal music could be opening us up to perceiving the subtleties in greater detail and really noticing where they have an impact on our emotional, psychological, physical, and spiritual states.