Salvia Divinorum by Pennyslop

The misunderstood plant Salvia Divinorum induces breakthrough hallucinations marked by intense time dilation; there are reports of users experiencing entire alternate lifetimes within the 15 minutes it takes for Salvinorin-A to be fully metabolized. And on the album Salvia Divinorum by pennyslop, long droning walls of harsh noise create a similar sense of immersive stillness—time stops, allowing listeners to discover internal worlds that lie just beneath the surface. Soon fuzzy guitar riffs overtake the impenetrable static to evoke a melancholic feeling of familiarity and nostalgia for those imagined lives that never really existed.

Furthermore, most popular recreational chemicals increase your dopamine levels. In contrast, Salvia Divinorum is anti-dopaminergic, an anxiogenic substance that causes acute anxiety, physical discomfort, and mental distress in its users. Pennyslop explores these hypnagogic realms and paranoid panic attacks through self-referential spoken word segments that capture the unique state of hysterical dissociation that this plant can produce. Many of the tracks build towards vulnerable thought-looping monologues, such as the introduction to the album, “my naked body under thousands of pounds of visceral gore and rusty metal” in which Penny presents an outsider artist manifesto tinged by the challenges of creating anything meaningful in our post-post-ironic culture. Yet by speaking to these frustrations, by explaining her process of pulling samples from dreams, and even by cutting up and scrambling stories that are too intimate to be decoded, Pennyslop succeeds in making something serious, personal, and profound.