Soul Ayahuasca

Aleah Long is an experienced session singer, vocal arranger, songwriter, and activist whose music has many roots: worldbeat new-age afro-pop trance-dance soul might be a good description. She makes frequent appearances at women's and lesbian festivals with a number of groups she has helped form — her One World Inspirational Choir, and the theatrical performance and ritualist ensemble Evolution, which was inspired, she writes, "by the Great Mother, who beckons her daughters to call her names, embrace divine purpose and awaken to the creative healing powers, restoring balance and beauty to the Earth."

Long lives in Newburgh, in the Mid-Hudson Valley of New York State. Somewhere in her travels — there is little information on this — she encountered ayahuasca, and, in her album En Full Circle — A Shamanic Journey, she uses her music to capture what appears to have been a deeply transformative experience. "My work," she has written, "is with sound vibration and journaling my experiences with DMT / plant / root medicine through music."

En Full Circle is Long's only album to date. The title perhaps refers to the documentary film Full Circle, an exploration of contemporary women's spirituality, but the content is born out of her experience with Amazonian plant medicine. You have never heard ayahuasca music quite like this — for example, the following cut, entitled Icaro: