A drone journey at a Brooklyn funeral parlor

Apollo Frequencies is a series exploring sounds that seem to come from another world. In this week’s edition, the writer experiences Psychedelic Sangha’s Bardo Bath at a funeral home.

Have you ever brought a first date to an ambient show at a funeral home? I crossed this item off of my bucket list on May 15, when my new partner-in-drone and I attended Psychedelic Sangha’s Bardo Bath, an “eyes-wide-open guided meditation into numinous improvised music soundscapes with surreal visuals,” per the organization’s website. The event was held at the Sparrow Contemporary Funeral Home in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Per the hosts’ instructions, we came with a picnic blanket and pillow, parking ourselves in a corner at the far side of the room from the performance. The proceedings began with a speech from Psychedelic Sangha co-founder Doc Kelley, introducing the key players and discussing what we were about to experience: In the Bardo Thodol (known in English as The Tibetan Book of the Dead), he explained, we move through the loss of our five elements: Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Space. In the fifth and final phase, we enter the bardo, the liminal state of pure consciousness in which we find ourselves between death and rebirth. “In this case, we’re imagining what [the bardo] would be like, so this is all kind of a rehearsal,” Kelley said.

The Bardo Thodol has been a part of Western discourse since its translation into European languages in the late 1920s. It skyrocketed in popularity in the U.S. in 1964, when famed psychologist and psilocybin advocate Timothy Leary published The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead with his peers Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert. The Psychedelic Experience broke ground on a new school of popular psychology, and the Bardo Thodol became a guiding light for generations of newly initiated Buddhists to come. As society continued on its doomed postmodernist arc, “bardo” became a catch-all term for any liminal space, just as “liminal space” became a catch-all phrase to describe anything that gives an impression — physical, psychological, or otherwise — of in-betweenness.

At the funeral parlor, Psychedelic Sangha aimed to recreate the bardo in its traditional sense, using sound, video, and guided meditation as its vehicles. “I think drone music and sonic resonance combined with meditation can help us tune into our basic awareness,” Kelley wrote to me the next day.

I agree to an extent. I’m an innate skeptic of all things religious and spiritual, a trait I’ll likely need to face up to soon as the god-sized void in my soul deepens with every passing day. As I’ve acquired a taste for ambient and drone music, though, I’ve had transcendent experiences through deep, extended listening. Lying on the floor of Basilica Hudson during 24-HOUR DRONE, or on my bed at home with Phill Niblock’s long tones blasting through my speakers, I’ve come dangerously close to a connection with the collective unconscious.

The best moments of Bardo Bath came in the purely musical portions of the event. After Kelley’s intro speech, revered vibraphonist and composer Chris Dingman set up behind his instrument in a flowing golden robe andf began to play while Kelley led us through the first four stages of death, accompanied by electric organist Kendraplex and guitarist/soundscape artist Jonah Sollins Devlin. While I was largely unmoved by Kelley's and, later, Dingman's cosmic meditations, which ranged from standard prompts to more pointed passages, including one in which he asked us to “feel [our] fluids” — sweat, saliva, urine — I was impressed with the rich environments Dingman created with four mallets and an assortment of metal bars.

The music hit its stride when we reached the bardo proper. Here, as we entered the pure-consciousness segment of our tour through death, Dingman's words became less frequent, allowing the trio to stretch out and lock in. After taking center stage for the bath’s first half, Dingman’s mesmeric vibraphone receded slightly, acting as a canvas for Kendraplex and Devlin’s improvisations. Deep tones from Kendraplex’s organ mingled with Devlin’s distorted guitar and modular synthesizers to create a legitimately unearthly sound. In these confluences, I felt the faint tug of the beyond.

During a peak in the action, Dingman slipped into an unintelligible chant. A practiced medium, he later explained that he was channeling voices from the bardo. Lying supine, I alternated between closing my eyes, staring up through a window in the funeral parlor’s ceiling, and crooking my neck to watch the performers and the projected visuals on the wall behind them, mostly nature videos overlaid in pleasant synchronicity. In the show’s final phase, though, these clips were replaced by animations that verged on the ridiculous. The worst offender was an image of an ascetic figure in lotus pose floating in space, emitting and surrounded by beams of colorful light. It was here that Bardo Bath lost me.

The experience was, in the end, a mixed bag. The music ranged from run-of-the-mill ambient meditation music to scintillating soft noise. The guided meditation itself stretched from the standard to the supernatural but never provoked any spiritual epiphanies in my skeptically predisposed mind. The visuals devolved from serenity into self-caricature. At moments, I cringed at what felt like the woo-woo-ification of Eastern traditions by Western practitioners. At others, the power of the music overwhelmed these intrusive thoughts.

My date was less impressed. “The issue I have with events like those that are posing themselves as transcendental experiences or meditations is that I personally believe they need to come from a really grounded and humble place and they are always the opposite,” she wrote to me later. Still, she conceded, it was a “ridiculously effective icebreaker.”