The Otherworldly Sounds of Medicine Music
Way back in 2020, I had a captivating conversation with my friend and PR maven, Kim Booth, where we delved into the emergence of “medicine music.” Kim had transitioned out of the electronic music world, where she represented a roster of influential artists, and felt a calling to return to PR. This time, however, she began working with musicians who are inspired by or inhabit the realm of spirituality and indigenous medicine culture.
We both saw the immense potential of this music to catalyze positive change in the world, and we shared a magical moment where our minds arrived at the same conclusion in unison – this music has emerged from the rainforest, like the medicinal plants, to spark a shift of consciousness on our ailing planet. I made a pact with myself to write about this captivating genre, which I’ve come to know as a “catch-all term for the folk-esque music made by a wide range of artists rooted in revelry for the human experience, nature, and the divine, with a deep appreciation and understanding of life beyond the physical realm.”
Bridging the Gap Between Woo-Woo and Mainstream
I have to admit that I felt anxious about pitching medicine music to any of the more mainstream publications, as the origins and beliefs attached to it are beyond the comprehension of most everyday people. Terms like “woo-woo” and “New Age” are often used to stigmatize an array of ancient practices and philosophies that actually predate our technology-saturated lives today. It took a long time for me to finally work up the courage to pitch the idea – almost two years, in fact.
When I finally did, I got a steady flow of “Not for us” replies. Until one major outlet actually said yes! I went in with an ecological angle, merging it with the “messengers from the rainforest” line, and it worked. I secured interviews with some of the leading voices in medicine music and talked at length with them. I also managed to get time with a couple of leaders from a Brazilian indigenous community called the Huni Kuin while they were in London, and attended a singing circle they hosted.
It all came together organically, and I acquired an abundance of rich material from everyone I spoke to. I also attended several events and ceremonies myself, including Medicine Festival, experiencing the transcendent power of the music, dance, and medicines first-hand. I witnessed some truly incredible musicianship and saw how it could have widespread positive impact on people.
A Personal Setback and the Perseverance to Tell the Story
Sadly, a very difficult personal situation arose in the lead-up to my deadline. My partner at the time lost her father, which was extremely challenging. I endeavored to get the piece done, as the intention was to publish it before Medicine Festival. However, after writing two drafts, it got spiked by the editors, who said it wasn’t quite hitting the mark in terms of environmental news or music news, and the quotes were too “New Age” for the outlet’s audience.
I haven’t actually spoken about this publicly until now, but in the midst of all that was happening personally, and to be frank, falling out of love with journalism at that time, the article being spiked had a big impact on my professional self-esteem. It took me nearly a year to get back in the saddle and start pitching again, such was the pain of the rejection. Especially after all the work I put in and the fact that I felt anxious about even pitching it in the first place. It confirmed my initial fears and put me off journalism and pitching ideas for months afterwards.
So with Medicine Festival just around the corner and a renewed enthusiasm for pitching and writing features, I decided that the piece should have its day. Since I now have the space to write freely, this is an updated version with more quotes and insight. Enjoy the journey, and feel free to provide feedback!
The Huni Kuin: Guardians of the Forest
Earlier this year, in June, at a singing circle held at Portico Gallery in West Norwood, South London, several members of the Huni Kuin, an indigenous Brazilian peoples, spent an evening delivering their devotional songs. Txana Tuwe, Txana Yube, and Biruani Siriani shared their sacred prayers, each adorned in feathered headdresses and vibrant shamanic robes.
Known as the “Guardians of the Forest,” the Huni Kuin invoked the spirits of their homeland, singing and strumming their guitars loudly and wholeheartedly with pure expression for two hours. Members of the audience danced and sang together, reciprocating the bold, expressive delivery of the Huni Kuin and generating a palpable communal energy.
The Huni Kuin are widely regarded as one of the key global mediators between nature and humanity. They have been travelling the globe since the 80s to host healing ceremonies as part of the humanitarian effort to save the planet, though the practice has significantly longer roots. “All the chants have been passed on orally through the generations going back thousands of years,” says Txana Tuwe, one of the community’s spiritual leaders in one of their villages, Novo Futuro, speaking through a translator.
In sacred practices practiced for millennia, known as “dietas,” shamans or “pajés” take on a strict regimen intended to bring them into communion with specific plants in the forest, to receive communications from the plant spirits, typically delivered in the form of songs, chants, and prayers. Over the past few decades, music communities formed around plant medicines from the Amazon have spread across Europe, the Americas, Japan, and Africa, hoping to spark a shift in human consciousness and reconnect us with nature.
“These guys are the extension of nature,” says Patrick Belem, director of the documentary “Eskawata Kayawai – The Spiritual Transformation,” which explores the regeneration of the Huni Kuin tribes’ culture, which was beginning to be eroded as younger generations began to adopt Western customs. “I went to my first Huni Kuin ceremony nine years ago, and it was just chants, no guitar or anything. I got consumed by it. It became something really powerful.”
The Rainforest’s Mission to Heal Humanity
Many practitioners believe that shamans are mere conduits for the voice of nature itself, which is communicating with humanity through our own language to awaken a primal intelligence. For some, this emergence of medicine music represents the rainforest’s mission to reach out across the globe and encourage people to heal themselves, with the hope that by healing themselves, they will ultimately heal the planet.
Adrian Freedman, a British musician who has received more than 160 medicine songs since he first encountered plant medicine in 1995, explains the profound experience of receiving these songs in ceremonies: “In plant medicine ceremonies, participants experience higher states of consciousness through which they may receive songs, becoming a channel for the music – and with it, they say, the resonance of the forest and its plants.”
He continues, “The music of the ceremonies was very simple and repetitive. But because I heard it in the context of the medicine, it took me to a very profound place which was the source of the music. And I had this seminal experience which was, although these songs were simple, it was like I travelled through the music to its source. When I got to that point, I saw that from this source, the music trickles down to all people in all cultures and takes on the form of the culture. So from the same source, the music could go to Bach or Beethoven or Miles Davis or any inspired musician in any culture. In the form of medicine music, it just trickles down to these people who are receiving simple songs with the abundance of the source present in all these forms of music. That was an amazing revelation for me which opened the door for me to be able to really connect with this simple music.”
Reconnecting to the Self and Nature Through Music
At that time, Adrian’s life ran along two parallel paths – he started making frequent visits to Brazil, attending ceremonies and becoming deeply immersed in the world of plant spirit medicine, while also maintaining his professional profile as a musician with no crossover between the two. Now, 25 years later, he’s at a crossroads in his life where these two paths have merged into one.
“The one key issue that seems to cut through is people feeling disconnected,” he says. “It’s because of a disconnection with nature that people can destroy nature. He believes that a split from ancestral traditions of healing, communal, and sacred practices has left us feeling confused, disconnected, and fragmented. “The path to salvation lies with whatever can enable us to reconnect. In our work with plant medicine, this sense of reconnection is embodied in the reconnection with nature.”
Adrian has received 160 medicine songs over the last 25 years, and he sees these songs as a “kind of bridge” that allow him to experience himself as a channel for inner wisdom or inner guidance. “The songs arrive to him as teachings for himself, but then they ask to be sung in such a way that they become available for the community.”
This idea of reconnecting with ourselves and nature through music is rooted in the notion of healing – healing oneself and, in the process, healing the planet. Key to Adrian’s development as an artist who creates medicine music has been his detachment from traditional Western musician archetypes. “If you’re a professional musician and you want to live as a musician, you have to make money from it. That means people have to like you, you need good reviews, you need to sell tickets for concerts, you need to sell CDs, you need to promote yourself. You have to be this entity that is available for people to respond to in a way that supports you financially and professionally. And you become a kind of commodity in a way.”
Through attending ceremonies and creating his own medicine music, Adrian learned that there are other ways to express oneself musically that don’t follow the standardized Western model of commodification. “It took me so many years to get to a point where I realised that there are other contexts in which music is made where you can still be a totally committed, devoted, capable musician. But it doesn’t have to be on a stage or in front of a camera or in a recording studio. That is devotional music or healing music or music for meditation or music for ceremonies.”
Finding Purpose Beyond the Performative
Ayla Schafer, who has collaborated with Adrian as well as being a highly-regarded medicine musician in her own right, had a similar experience of finding the performance element of music was not aligned with her true nature. “I would be playing music venues and open mic nights where people were drinking, and these kinds of atmospheres. I remember I’d come home and sit there thinking, ‘Something’s wrong,’ and I would cry. I didn’t know what it was because I didn’t know what else existed.”
Part of what happened in that process was I stepped away from music in quite a painful way because it was hurting me, and I needed to really shed my skin. That was when I went first Mexico, and this was really the moment that I unknowingly crossed the bridge and entered into the realm of many things. I discovered indigenous cultures, I discovered yoga and meditation for the first time and plant medicines. I was learning about prayer and being with people using sound and song as the amazing tool that it is for many, many things – invoking healing, releasing, calling.”
Witnessing the power of song in such a profound context, away from the performative element she had become so accustomed to, demonstrated to Ayla that there are other avenues for her creativity. “If you look at what’s happened to tribal cultures around the world, and is still happening, one of the main things they do is make it some way illegal or dangerous for people to sing their songs and dance. One of the things they take away is the language, because then they cannot sing songs. And if they cannot sing the songs, they cannot do the dances, and they can’t practice their prayers. This is one of the most disempowering things that can occur.”
She continues, “So I flip it around and go, ‘Well then, what’s the most empowering thing that we can do is to reclaim, recreate, rebirth? We cultivate our songs and our dances and the culture that comes with that, and the rituals that come with that, and the power and the magic and the spiritual force and that deep soul fulfilment that comes with that.'”
The Healing Power of Sacred Music
George Barker, curator of the British Medicine Festival, shares a similar perspective on the transformative potential of sacred music. “I felt that we could use music as an access point for a flavour of the sacred. If we approach music in the same way that these traditions do, with an attitude of devotion and gratitude, that opens a space for us to be able to hear the music in a different way. If it is a prayer that’s come from a lineage and you’ve been given that transmission – whether that’s an echo from nature or whether that’s a mantra from a Buddhist master that is holding a very high transcendent state of consciousness – when they deliver that piece of music to your heart, then you’re now carrying that medicine in your heart.”
George credits the singing circles he was part of for playing a key role in his success in battling throat cancer. “I came back from Colombia and having been in a ceremony with the Kogian people and been utterly ashamed of the fact that I’d made a living out of music for 15 years and had no ability to sing to anyone. I was so embarrassed that I couldn’t share any songs from my place of origin that I decided to learn a song. I learned a Colombian song and I tried to sing in ceremony, but it was appalling, terrible, embarrassing. A disaster. But I kept going with it, because in that ceremony, it became obvious that I needed to do it.”
Soon after, George had a diagnosis of laryngeal cancer, cancer of the voicebox. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, you couldn’t make this up! I’m having this desire to sing, and at the same time, I got a diagnosis of early stages of laryngeal cancer, throat cancer.’ So how extraordinary that I was being pushed to sing to change the vibration in my larynx.” He set up his own singing circle events, which grew to around 40 people, all held in a ceremonial, intentional manner. “This was during the time that I was also getting treatment for cancer. I was doing other things as well, like plant medicines. I did a six-month-long silent retreat which was equally important as music. Luckily, I’m now clear of any cancer and obviously attribute that to the work that I did both on the cushion as a meditator but also that singing circle.”
Many community-based projects arose out of George’s singing circles. “It was extraordinary how many projects then, how many of our group left behind more dysfunctional work and jobs that weren’t so much aligned to their true nature and began to nourish and set in motion projects that were about help, they were about service, they were about activism, they were about love in the community.”
The Birth of Medicine Festival
At George’s circles, the seeds were also planted for Medicine Festival, an event that I attended myself last summer. At Medicine, the curation is centered around artists who are connected to the broad umbrella term “medicine music.” Some of them have trained with indigenous communities and learned their songs and customs, while others travel the world collecting and sharing ancient songs from a variety of cultures, like Peia, who describes herself as an “archival songkeeper.”
The music is presented beautifully, with a rootsy setting in the woodland at Wasing Estate in Berkshire. Of particular note is the fireside, where musicians sing and play acoustically next to a sacred fire, surrounded by the audience. Indigenous communities also attend and host their own ceremonial gatherings where songs, prayers, and chants are shared.
Navigating the Complexities of Cultural Appropriation
Discussions around respect and exploitation arise frequently when discussing medicine music. In a world rife with cultural appropriation, it is a complex topic that has no definitive answers or guidance. Even within indigenous nations, there will be varying opinions on how the songs should be exported, if at all, by those who want to share them with the world.
“Sometimes we share our songs as a force for healing humanity,” says Txana Tuwe. “There have been a few occasions when we allowed someone to record the songs and publish them.” However, Txana Yube adds, “In most cases, people need to have a specific relationship with us. We don’t like it if someone who isn’t indigenous just takes a song and records it.” Only if they have a relationship with the Huni Kuin or if it’s connected to a fundraising project so they can reach a wider audience.
Ayla explains that it’s not as simple as singing the words or sounds – it’s the devotional energy that goes into them and how the singer receives and carries the music respectfully. She also highlights that differing opinions exist even within indigenous nations like the Yawanawa, where some people are very relaxed about the sharing of songs, while others are ultra-strict.
Should people from outside indigenous communities sing these songs, chants, and prayers at all? For some, their universal source means they are open to be channelled and shared by anyone so long as the intention is untainted. Recordings of the Huni Kuin and Yawanawa can be found on platforms like Spotify, Soundcloud, and YouTube, posted by organizers and attendees of their international singing circles. There are also renditions from devotees of the medicine community.
“Maybe people on the other side of the world who’ve learned those recordings will never have an opportunity to have direct contact with someone who can pass them that song,” Ayla adds. “And maybe the
