Interview with Le Champsonore

http://lechampsonore.fr/2016/12/interview-the-love-dimension-english-version/

 

Interview The Love Dimension: English version [ Une leçon de psychédélisme L ]

If California is synonymous with sunshine and love, The Love Dimension is for you. Assuming proudly the legacy of the sixties, their music remains a hymn to joy. From shamanism to the relay between the generations, they did not hesitate to tell us about their colorful world. 

1-How formed The Love Dimension? What do you look for in The Love Dimension? Why collectives are so numerous in psyche music? 

The Love Dimension formed back in 2008.  Its a long story but I’ll try to get to the point and cover the main events that sparked the band.  I have a feeling this is going to be a long answer though.  Hahaha. 

I had given up on music after moving in 2006 from the east coast (Boston, MA) to the Bay Area (San Francisco, CA).  I had sold all my guitars, drums, musical gear.   I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with life. 

At the time I was studying the healing arts (Hypnotherapy, Shamanic Healing, Energy Healing).  During one of the classes while exploring some deep traumatic and personal issues,  I felt like a boomerang had come back and hit me in the back of the head.  That boomerang was music.  I couldn’t throw it away because it was part of me, my soul’s purpose and the reason I came to have a human experience at this time in history. 

When this realization happened, I started with buying an acoustic guitar and writing songs.  Many of those songs later became songs that appeared on the Love Dimension’s first two albums « In Between Lives » and « Forget the Remember ».  I decided I wanted to start a band again and kept thinking I had to find a lead singer. 

While on a trip to Tulum, Mexico, I attended a sweat lodge facilitated by a Mayan Shaman.  While going through that experience, I had many visions and more realizations.  One of them was that I was the singer I had been searching for.  Before the Love Dimension, I had never been able to sing and play guitar at the same time.  Growing up on the east coast of the United States, I had always been in the background playing drums or bass in various punk and indie rock bands.  But since my early years as a teenager, I had always been recording my own 4 track demos.  I never felt confident enough to put them out there and share them with others. 

So when I got back to California after my trip to Mexico, I began taking voice lessons and writing more songs.  In the fall of 2008, I went on a spiritual retreat to Ojai, CA to visit my voice teacher’s teacher, Danny Castro (Author of the book « In That Stillness »).  That trip awoke something in me and started a spiritual journey that I am still on and will probably be on for many lifetimes. 

When I got back home and as I was about  to fall sleep, I kept hearing in my head the name « The Love Dimension ».  I thought it sounded cool but I was feeling like I didn’t want to get out of bed.  The inner voice got louder and said « Write it down.  You won’t remember it in the morning. »  So I did.  And now its 8 years later and the band is constantly evolving and unfolding. 

What I look for in the Love Dimension is simply to express truth in the way I perceive it, my own personal journey of self realization and what it is like being a spiritual being having a human experience. 

I believe that collectives are so numerous in psych music, because anyone who has ever had a psychedelic experience realizes it is all connected and it is all one.  When you help others with their musical expression, you are really helping yourself and the collective consciousness.  It is more about community then an individual ego or everyone for themselves. 

2- You released your last album in June. What inspired you when you made this album? 

My inspiration for « Freakquency Space Mind Continuum » was 60s surf music and thinking about the higher levels of awareness that artists, musicians, writers, creative people, etc are able to tap into and how they then are able to bring those thought forms into the 3D. 

Its truly an amazing gift.  If all of these beautiful souls could harness this power and come together in this higher collective mind space and create consciously, then we could change the 3D structure of this world so rapidly. 

So many people in the world are in fear right now and focusing on the lower vibrating human emotions like anger, jealousy, etc.  What you focus on expands.  What you resist persists.  You do have to face the fears and welcome them and then transmute them into higher frequency emotions such as gratitude, appreciation, unconditional love, courage, etc.  We are electro magnetic beings.  What do you want to magnetize in your energy field?  You have free will.  Its your choice. 

3- When you come from San Francisco, is not there a too heavy musical heritage coming from the sixties and the seventies to assume? 

Yes definitely.  The musical heritage can be felt here for sure.  It is a great inspiration for continuing on with that lineage.  Its like having musical ancestors and passing on the torch from generation to generation. 

4- What do you think of the election of Donald Trump? Does it feel like there is a real divide in the United States? 

In general, I am not much of a political person.  I usually like to not take sides.  The way I see politics is like a tennis, ping pong, or sports match.  It is very much based in duality and seems like  a bunch of people yelling at each other and expressions opinions.  If you swing the pendulum to one side, it just gains momentum to swing to the other side.  There is no wrong or right. 

With that said, I was pretty shocked with the election of Donald Trump.  Its making me wonder if I somehow got myself stuck in some alternate quantum time line.  It feels very surreal.  And it does seem like it is causing a real divide in the U.S.  I’m not sure what will happen.  I do know that I am seeing a fire lit under a lot of people and motivating them to step up.  It seems like this is going to spark some amazing art and music.  The underground scene now has a lot of fuel for the fire. 

When I step out of the story for a moment and do my best to see the bigger picture, I do see that Donald Trump is still in some weird way (I wish I could say this wasn’t true) a manifestation of source, great spirit, god, the universe, the oneness, whatever you want to call it.  He is not separate from us.  In fact at the higher levels of awareness as a collective consciousness we chose him for some crazy reason.  It won’t make sense right now because we are in the middle of the story.  I really do believe everything is always in divine order and happens in divine timing.  Think about any event in your life.  Even the bad ones.  When it happened it sucked.  But after some time has passed and you look back at it in retrospect, it all makes sense and you can see all the ways things lined up in miraculous ways to get you to where you are now. 

Think of it this way.  Imagine this whole thing as a theater.  The watcher part of us that is just observing are the people in the theater enjoying different perspectives and angles of the same thing.  The projector represents the thought forms we are projecting into 3D reality and so we witness it all unfold.  You could get mad at the villain on the screen and throw your shoe at the screen.  You can cry, laugh, scream, yell.  Its all coming from the same projector man.  If you want to see something different, you got to go the source.  You gotta change the film.  The film represents the inner world and inner consciousness of everyone of us.  You need to look inside first and change yourself.  Once you do that, you be that change like Gandhi said.  Be an example of that love.  Others will notice and maybe they will wake up too and change themselves.  You can’t change anyone though.  You can’t force it on another.  Remember we have free will.  Just be yourself and do the best you can. 

5- What current bands do you feel close and which ones you like listening ? 

I really appreciate all of the amazing bands coming out of the Bay Area right now.  The Spiral Electric, Down Dirty Shake, Down and Outlaws, Everyone is Dirty, The Green Door, The Golden Hexegrams, Cellar Doors, Coywolf, Lee Gallagher and the Hallelujah, Trans Van Santos, just to name a few. 

Some other current bands too that have really had an influence and I enjoy listening to are Temples, Tame Impala, Triptides, Sleepy Sun, The Black Angels, Primal Scream, BJM, and Elephant Stone. 

6 – How would you define psychedelic music? Which groups who embodies the most? 

I’m not sure there is one definition that could encompass or define psychedelic music.  Its more than just about the music to me.  I guess one simple aspect of it that is important is that it expands your consciousness.  It helps you to get out of your limited ego mind and feel the vastness of universe. 

There are so many groups that embody this.  There’s the obvious ones like The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Santana, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, etc.  Then there’s bands that maybe weren’t as well known like Ultimate Spinach, Blues Magoos, Country Joe and the Fish.  That’s just from 60s/70s.  I think it is more about how all of these psych bands as a collective pushed boundaries and created something that inspired many bands to follow.  There’s just too many bands for me to list them all.  I like to think of it as an ocean with many waves that are all influencing each other. 

7- How do you explain the psychedelic revival in recent years in the world ? Do you think bands like The Blacks Angels and The Brian Jonestown Massacre are important in this revival  ? 

My explanation for the revival would be that just like in the 60s, this is a pretty intense time and time is a spiral.  Things come around again and history repeats itself.  Not exactly like it did before but very similar.  We have evolved as a species in some ways.  In other ways things are kind of the same.  Its like how there was the gold rush in San Francisco in the 1800s and now it is happening again except the new gold is the tech industry. 

Yes I do think bands like the Black Angels and BJM are important.  They have done their thing and stuck with it.  They have inspired many other people to start bands and do what you love.  Create from a heart space and share that it with others.  What else can you really do? 

8- The sixities psychedelia appeared in a more optimistic period than ours Can you explain this difference ? What psychedelia shows of our time? 

I don’t know for sure that was a more optimistic time.  I wasn’t there.  Yes some people were able to stay in a good space and focus on creating and positive things I suppose.  However, there was a lot of turmoil during that time.  A lot of people probably felt like it was the end of the world so they said fuck it and decided to just live in the moment and do what they were gonna do. 

You always hear that phrase if you can remember the 60s then you weren’t really there.  I wonder if many people turned to substances during that time to help cope with that intensity and reality of what was happening in history.  Seems like it is happening again.  A more intense and sped up version of that similar corresponding point in the space time spiral.  All the good.  All the bad.  Its all one and this too shall pass. 

9- Psychedelia has always tried to provide other forms of vision or sensation, which visions or sensations that you would like to bring to your audience? 

In the Bay Area, we have some great visual artists who help create a multi sensory experience for the various shows and events that take place.  A couple of them are Mad Alchemy and White Light Prism. 

There are other friends and promoters here who have also put together events that include food vendors, other artists who paint at the same time a band is playing, maybe some incense for the sense of smell.  One event that took place in September of 2015 that really brought this all together was the « Gathering of the Tribes Festival » put on by Pow Magazine. 

What other senses are there?  I guess if there was a way to incorporate our sixth sense and higher senses, that would be pretty cool.  Maybe have some psychic stuff and psychokinesis at shows where everyone just plays their instruments with their minds.  Hahaha.

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