(All photos by Christopher Bruno)

On the 5th of April, Psychedelic Sangha staged a glorious return to Manhattan’s Judson Church, cycling through two heavy sets dedicated to the Chöd meditation practice that became the focus of their last major Bardo Bath, which we covered in the previous year.

“Chöd, often pronounced “chö,” is a meditative practice found in both the Buddhist and Bön traditions of Tibet. Chöd, translated literally as “cutting through,” incorporates chanting, music, and visualization aimed as cutting through hindrances and obscurations that cloud ultimate wisdom and understanding of emptiness—the ultimate nature of reality.”

-Shambhala Publications

What unfolded was a fully realized conceptual performance that beautifully combined visuals, music and atmosphere into a profound spiritual journey. With periods of soft, spacey pools of peaceful soundscapes punctuated by rising peaks of primal and sometimes even aggressively dark rock jams, this was the perfect soundtrack to the severing of one’s attachment to their ego to clear a path towards an enlightened sense of primordial awareness. This overwhelming ceremony of sound and light not only provided the best backdrop for such a ritual, but it also sonically portrayed what you’re supposed to imagine during the ritual. Each of the evening’s two sets played out as a psychedelic grand suite, told through various movements and progressions.

“Imagine your death. It is a good death”
– Doc Kelley, opening guided meditation. 

Doc Kelley set the tone of the evening with a reading from Allen Ginsberg’s translation of the Heart Sutra, as a form of invoking the Prajñāpāramitā, to pay tribute to the departed poet in commemoration of his death, of which occurred exactly 28 years ago to the day. These were the flight instructions that we’d rely on for the next six hours.

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Soon, swirling mystical vocalisations and the patter of water droplets echoed and ricocheted across the building, making us feel as though we were descending into a dank cave inhabited by phantoms. Jesse Jarnow and Jonah Sollins Devlin were responsible for the night’s drones and ambient textures, which danced all around our heads, making the sound in Judson Church feel positively alive. A recording of Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience Folkways album clicked on and the former Harvard psychologist informed us from across time that we were about to begin a great adventure out of our minds beyond familiar reality and into the level of transcendent awareness, leaving behind all ego.

“You are where you want to be, with the people you want to be with.” Doc’s opening meditation continued, providing us the comfort and light we needed before we plunged ourselves into the emptiness of our own deaths.

“Everything feels heavy. The world is so very, very heavy. Heavy blankets are pressing down. Heavy clothes. Heavy muscles. Heavy bones. Heavy skin. Let your body sink into the floor, backwards towards Earth. Eyesight fails. The outer world fades into black. The mind is confused. Don’t be afraid. Go inward. Observe a silver blue mirage-like apparition. Be fearless. This is your Earth element collapsing…”

Meanwhile, Kendraplex and Chris Dingman gently built up a great cloud bank of church organ drones and dreamy bell-like vibraphones that blanketed the space, lifting us off the floor and making the necessary act of letting go of our Earth element all the easier to do in our minds. Above and around us, Macrodose’s prismatic explosions of colors danced and bubbled across the walls, blending perfectly with the projected spiritual films and other visuals by Yosuh Jones, Aubrey Nehring and Arik Moonhawk Roper.

Doc continued to guide us further into letting go of our other elements and encouraging us not to fear what lay ahead, nor what dwells within. We slowly drifted away into a great sea of rippling, cosmic vibrations.

From there, Garcia Peoples and Isaiah Mitchell slowly crept into the fold, leading us into the mysterious darkness of death. Howling guitars pierced the night, sounding like the wails of the mournful ghosts calling out from the oncoming spirit world. Through gradually intensifying space rock, they perfectly captured the terror, the peace and the transience feeling of this imagined demise. As the band revved up with a pounding motorik synth beat, you could easily picture the personifications of your inner demons emerging, all fierce and ready to feast upon your fear.

With Meddle-era Floyd styled guitar pyrotechnics and cataclysmic drumming that set the church rushing with an adrenaline-pumping beat, GP and Mitchell led us through the heavy and intense task of visualizing our egos being ripped apart by hungry deities and demons. The glowing terrifying visage of such a creature, drawn by Roper, glared down at us from the lightshow, with intimidatingly red glowing eyes.

(Yet, counteracting this was the caring watchful gazes of figures like Octavia Butler and Bell Hooks, of whom looked on from the gorgeous stained glass windows that lined the church’s walls. So you couldn’t get too disturbed if you were getting real deep into the ritual)

After feeling like we had been sufficiently eviscerated by the jams alone, the band shifted tones and glided into a smooth river of mellow melty interstellar guitars. The sound of trickling streams bounced around the room while cymbals crashed like slow-motion ocean waves.

The relieving tone of this section, complete with reverberating noodly guitar lines, gave the impression that we had weathered the storm. The sun has returned and inner peace has been found. A sense of unified contentment radiated throughout the room. It was like everything suddenly became whole. 

After sitting with this feeling of pure centeredness for a while, GP and Mitchell revved up like a beast once again, this time in an elated and blissful tone, making one want to leap to their feet and dance in celebration of the success of this difficult journey. The feeling of rebirth sparked in the very air around us.

Cooling down from this grand high took some major strength, but the musicians eased the church into a graceful and relaxed landing. The environmental soundscapes (of which contained a 1943 Library of Congress recording of a Creek Nation lullaby that I happen to love) piloted by Jarnow and Devlin, returned to center stage, as did Dingman and Kendraplex’s ephemeral waves of celestial vibes and organ. We coasted on this hypnotic haze of rumbling tones tones til we all started to come alive again on our little blanket-adorned stations on the church floor. This period of minimal, trance-inducing ambient music allowed us to meditate on what we just experienced, notice our surroundings again and breathe out any residual dark energies from the toughest parts of our spiritual voyage.

Doc returned to the mic, and guided us back into our bodies, reunited us with our elements, and welcomed a new dawn.

The second set allowed for those of us who were present for the first to explore Chöd again with perhaps a deeper understanding of where our heads were going to go, and perhaps achieve an even greater outcome with the recent practice still fresh in our minds. It also gave us a chance to enjoy more of the lightshow or the music itself, if we were too deep into our meditations or experienced lost time during the first go around.

Musically, the sets may have traveled with a similar road map in mind, but each one was performed uniquely, with plenty of unexpected directions born out of pure improvisation, much like the old adage about the shows of the good ol’ Grateful Dead. So if you come to one of these sound baths, be sure to be in it for the long haul.

In fact, as I’ve probably mentioned before in past write ups, these Bardo Baths are clearly the closest links to the spirit of the original acid tests. Despite the loose structure installed for this particular evening, there was an atmosphere that felt like just about anything might happen, and it enriched and encouraged your creative side. If you wanted to dance, you could dance. If you wanted to make art, you could make art (there was actually a painter off to the sidelines who painted the musicians as they performed in real time). If you wanted to chant, do yoga, play your own instruments, emit your own light or whatever else, you felt comfortable enough to do it. With perhaps one of the leading experts on these subjects, the Heads author himself, Jesse Jarnow, involved as one of the main “disorganizers,” you just knew that the energies of Garcia, Kesey and Cassady smiled down upon us with approval.

With this in mind, it felt quite natural for the evening to conclude with a chanting invocation of departed freaks, allies and power sources that Jarnow penned himself to honor our weirdo heritage that one way or another led us all here to this very moment in time. From the likes of City Lights Bookstore to Don Cherry to even The Three Stooges and Fritz The Cat, Doc, Kendraplex and Dingman read out the great list of names over a bed of throbbing drones before repeating the mantra of “out demons out” to dispel the evils in our society in the name of these psychedelic heroes. All the while, the music rose to a grand crescendo of growls and clanging chaos, ceremoniously chasing off the “horrorisms” of 2025. It’s safe to say that I, and I’m sure many others, left Judson Church that evening feeling deeply cleansed.

For some of you who want to experience this Chöd performance yourself, Mitchell, Doc and Roper are taking it onto a small tour, starting with a performance in LA on 4/19, followed by some dates across Europe in May. Check them out, if you can:

Were you there? Drop your memories, or what you think might be your memories down in the comments.

Big thanks to Psychedelic Sangha for inviting us out to the Bardo Bath. Please be sure to follow them on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

I’d like to also give a big thank you to Christopher Bruno for taking such incredible shots and letting us share them in this post. Please check out his other work!

Please also follow Chris Dingman, Garcia Peoples,  Kendra Amalie, and Isaiah Mitchell and be sure to support them by buying their music on Bandcamp. Please also check out more about Macrodose, Jesse Jarnow, Yosuh Jones, Arik Moonhawk Roper, Aubrey Nehring and of course, the Judson Memorial Church. Chant and be happy, folks.

-KH