Opening Portals
Your quest if you choose to accept it 🤲
What do you really like?
This is a question that all artists should be able to answer, says Brian Eno. And so does Rick Rubin who talks about his total lack of musical and engineering ability but his absolute trust in his own taste. He writes:
“We are all antennae for creative thought. Some transmissions come on strong, others are more faint. If your antenna isn’t sensitively tuned, you’re likely to lose the data in the noise. Particularly since the signals coming through are often more subtle than the content we collect through sensory awareness. They are energetic more than tactile, intuitively perceived more than consciously recorded.”
This is the quest I will be leading you on, asking you to become an active and sensitive adventurer on your own discovery of what lights you up, what passions are igniting just for you, what sounds and music gets you curious and turned on. Tapping into the subtle energetic field of what delights you.
The quest will require that you be able to listen deeply, not only to the input, but also to what’s happening internally within - you will have to get good at discerning your voice apart from all the influential voices in your life; voices of people you love, people who have harmed you, voices of institutions and systems that have been programming you, and you will need to be able to hear the sweet sound of your own timbre cut through all that static and noise.
The hero’s journey will not be complete without arriving at stops along the way to discard the we were “suppose” to find. When we pull on one thread, it might start tugging at other elements in your life — magic might begin to manifest in surprising ways when you begin answering the call from within. Synchronistic miracles might begin to align as you listen deeper and pay attention to who you really are, expressing that person and bringing it into the light.
All this through music?
Yes.
Music is much more than entertainment. It’s far more than commerce.
Music is one of the biggest gifts to humanity for achieving transcendence, healing, focus, progress. It is change agent. Reality conductor. It is the magic vibratory dust we can sprinkle on our current reality to imagine and contact other realms, the quantum current to get through portals into new ways of being.
Many people have become lean back listeners in the streaming age, outsourcing their entire musical life — catalogue, motivation, and experience — to a corporate algorithm that doesn’t care if you’re completely disengaged with your heart, mind, and capacity to be creative and just use music as background. When we get ourselves ensnared in systems that are designed to shut down our capacity to engage with the very brightest parts of ourselves, we should be concerned.
My offering in this space will be musings from my own Aquarian portal — things I am gathering in my practices in music making, creative work, and esoteric exploration to make sure that you are staying bright. It’s the sandbox to play around with ideas, experiments, joyful and imperfect explorations into the unknown, and my hope is that it inspires a lively community of folks who are moved to listen deeply and who are ready for liberation. The world needs us.
Ready the Ritual 👽
Each week I’ll vary some of the writings and musings coming your way, but you can always count on these curated lists ear-worming their way into your life.
Sundays
Portal Playlist
Cozy up as I add tracks that are lighting me up in real time each week to a seasonal playlist using the method I outline in my Deep Listening Workshop. Expect it to be on the pulse of whatever is alive for me right now — transcending genre, trends, releases - demonstrating how and where I discover music to be obsessed over.
Wednesdays
On the Liminal
Pause to listen to a track or album from an artist with less that 15k monthly listeners, featuring artists who are currently outliers in the streaming ecosystem. They might be new, emerging, or just not dedicating energy to getting streams, but definitely worth a deep listen.
Winter 2025
The discoveries lighting up my heart week-by week, rolling out in real time.
To get us started, I am launching the playlist with a hearty grouping of discoveries as the year turned over, all using my Deep Listening Workshop techniques I layout (free for subscribers). Each Sunday, you can expect new additions to this playlist and at the spring equinox we’ll reset so that we end up with a playlist per season, one per quarter of the year.
Album highlights ⟿ there are a few tracks on this list that come from albums that are worthy of a start-to-finish listen.
1. GNX - Kendrick Lamar (I’m awaiting for my vinyl to arrive on this one)
2. Two Star & The Dream Police - Mk.Gee
3. Alligator Bites Never Heal - Doechii
4. Our Garden Needs It’s Flowers - Jess Sah Bi, Peter One
Single highlights ⟿
It’s a good day (to fight the system)
ShungudzoWriting this within the first weeks of the new fascist regime, this song centers joy, being resourced by the earth, and the relational way we must count on each other to resist, humanly. “I woke up feelin’ great, The birds are in the trees, They’re singin’ me a melody, La-la-la-la fuck the police.” 🤌 “We’re never gonna stop, we’re gonna make it count, when one of us is tired out, the other one will hold it down.” It’s a playbook for the resistance, full of love, hope and strategy in equal measure. We need updated protest songs that speak to this generation and the love we want to keep alive. I recently came across this quote from
that speaks to this seeming paradox of joyful resistance:"Anyone who tells you that making time for joy — however you experience or define it — is a distraction or a betrayal has no idea what they’re talking about. During the darkest days of the AIDS Crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all fucking night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for."
Little Light
Supalung, Sam Brooks, Pete Josef
This song is a great example of how my listening method pays off; having the ability to withstand a little discomfort can lead to major wins. On first listen, I dug the intro but was turned off by the first verse vocals that sounded a little too soft for my taste… but I stuck with it instead of hitting skip because I was in a low stakes listening mode, not highly invested. As the track unfolded, to my surprise, it got cooler and weirder, ending with garage-y guitars that had me shaking my head yes, then brass joined in to land the soaring melodies, what?? Now I’m on full dopamine mode, hitting repeat on this track obsessively. Would have missed it altogether if I had been impatient.
Riding’ Out The Storm
Samantha Crain
I first heard Choctaw songwriter and musician, Samantha Crain, when her song Joey, was featured on the FX show Reservation Dogs, the first TV show to feature an (almost) entirely Indigenous crew, writers, and directors and a 100% native American cast. She has a library of vocal stylings across her lexicon of work, when this new track dropped, I met a new shade of her timbre that set my heart on fire. It’s a clean, up and down ride or die rock song with a pulsing groove that does not let go as she wends you through a dense lyrical tapestry. It’s a song to blast while driving down dirt roads with the windows down.
Clipo Clipo
Jess Sah Bi, Peter One
The melodies on this song are surprising and never go where I expect them to go — a reason among many to listen to artists from other cultures, it teaches your ear to expand. Off the album Our Garden Needs Its Flowers originally released in 1985, this track came to me on one of my Discovery playlists because I listen to a lot of African music (two of my favorite playlists include Afro Psychodelica and Sahara). Jess Sah Bi was born in Côte d'Ivoire, and raised in a rich tradition of folk and African melodies, which he infused with his own interest with western musicians like Simon and Garfunkel and Crosby, Stills & Nash. The harmonies are lilting and blissful, and giving a sense of place. I loved this song and album so much I bought the vinyl on Bandcamp which was reissued in 2018.
Married to the Ground
Glitterfox
One of the biggest barriers to learning to sing for me was dealing with the energy of “be beautiful - be pretty”. This energy is incredibly intense for people raised female in our culture, our entire value and worth as people is predicated on it, including how our voice is perceived if you dare to sing. I had a singing teacher who would stop me over and over and say, “Stop trying to be pretty.”
On my journey to learning to heal and let go of this energy and conditioning, I had to gather many examples of singers who broke this mold, who had voices that were distinctive, weird, interesting, “unfeminine”, strange, “ugly”, surprising, jarring, and ultimately - emotive and moving. Which circles back to being beautiful once again because it’s authentic and real. Lead singer Solange Igoa (they/them) has a low, gritty, confident voice that goes belty with such vigor that it’s both shocking, sweet and endearing - it’s a bit Stevie Nicks but not. The guitar riffs are also delicious. Glitterfox is performing for FREE at Little Saints in Healdsburg on February 20th | 6pm.
Hit the button to see links to your preferred platform for listening, ranked from best to worst based on how they treat artists and the quality of their audio.
The occasional Love Ethic section will highlight love, taking it of the strictly romantic and into a verb, an action, something we choose to do. I will drop into this section things that light up my heart chakra, that inspire, that have me rethinking my own prejudice — it is a place for expansion.
It is borrowed entirely from the work, the labor, the writings, the definition of love from bell hooks —
"the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth."
For our first installation, I recently took a songwriting class with Brian Eno through the School of Song (amazing, A+++ I’ll write a whole article) and he mentioned this video. It’s an amazing example of how technology and humans influence each other.
I grew up pre-auto tune and I tend to find it a bit grating and abrasive to listen to when it’s heavily applied, I don’t like the feeling of listening to a computer-y sounding voice. It feels like it’s hiding the human. That’s just me, over here stuck in my judgements.
I didn’t grow up listening to that sound, but Emma Robinson did, and she probably found it not only commonplace to hear autotune, but also beautiful.
What gets me is that while sound engineers are using tools to apply a distorted sound, this young girl naively just learned how to sing it note for note, side yodeling to sound exactly like a perfectly auto-tuned track.
What was once a computer sound is now a human sound.
I saw this video I cried in my kitchen: the sweetness, the weirdness, the wild way we are capable of so much more than we ever think possible.
It’s so innocent. My feelings about autotune expanded. Enjoy, and thanks Brian 🛸
I’ll be seeing you through the portal 🌀
Little Door
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If you have a recommendation, a song, a band you’re excited about right now, drop it in the comments and I’ll check it out, and consider it a gift to the community 👇
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