Music for opening the door to creativity

I was at an opening recently chatting with the mystical DJ Ciana* about music. I asked her favorite music for making art, the kind of music that helps you get in the flow and not ask the question, ‘Is what I’m making good or bad?’. Something shifts and the mind becomes a sort of open conduit for creativity and it’s the best feeling of all time. 

She immediately answered, ‘Of course, you want the frequency 528’. I had no idea what she was talking about. She explained that this is the frequency lots of the best songs of all time have. Plenty of Bob Marley tracks, Beatles and Jimmy Hendrix, to name a few. It’s the frequency of the heart. Listen to this music when you’re doing anything creative: writing, painting, whatever practice you get lost in. Check out a playlist of famous 528s here. 

One of my favorite painters, Danielle Mckinney, speaks about the importance of music while painting in an interview here.

In this interview, Mckinney explains, “I listen to music all the time when I'm working…it's a sound that creates these visual installations in the mind for me that I'm inspired by. I play a lot of music to produce feelings that come out of me onto the canvas.” 

She mentions Frank Ocean, James Blake, Thom York and Sade. 

I wonder if she’s tapping into this frequency too, the place where doubt has no place at the table. Our consciousness expands and creation seems almost effortless. You could also say this changes our brain waves to beta so we perform more optimally or however you want to define it. We can feel our feels. 

Lastly, there’s a specific style of hypnotic, upbeat dance music that I like to listen to when I want to dial up the energy. (picture me running up that hill) I’m thinking of two songs that both give me a sort of doomy, anxious feeling in my guts while also making me move, dance, and open a portal to creative thought. How can I describe this? I felt it when I was driving down a desert mountain with an ice storm blowing in fast from behind. Like death is tapping me on the shoulder, reminding me that I'm alive. It’s the feeling I get at the beginning of something momentous, or at the burning destruction at the very end of a chapter. I don’t know what frequency these songs are, probably an amped up version of 528, so I'll just call them the frequency of doom or the frequency of ten million.

The first is Venus Fly by Grimes, about 2:30 into the song there's a haunting, echoing violin sample that speaks to the second, The English Dancing Master, a dancing scene written by Claire van Kampen from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. The droney background sounds like a drum full of buzzing cicadas (prob an instrument called a hurdy gurdy, says Mac Barnett, who also happens to resonate with this song and listens to it sometimes when writing as well. 

*CIANA (also known as Alex Giardino) is a bilingual creative force: a writer, translator, event creatrix, and DJ who’s lived in Latin America, Italy, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Having reveled on dance floors all over the world, Ciana knows deep in her body that when we dance, we leave the mundane world behind and elevate to higher realms, where we connect, feel alive, and get free.

Here’s a link to follow DJ Ciana’s DJ collective here

and her SoundCloud account here.