Lower Dens utilizes glossolalia on “Nootropics”

Mo Rahman
Mo Rahman
Jul 21, 2017 · 2 min read

Jana Hunter’s Blatimore project which would eventually get signed to Domino, gradually became a staple of the music press in the second decade of this millenium. Known for their synth hooks and fuzzy guitars, Lower Dens provided the textures, and movement to Hunter’s words. Even when they weren’t really words at all.

Early on before the Mod inspired looks the band is known for today

As a techinque and term, Glossolalia is first used in the New Testament in what would be described colloquially today as ‘speaking in tongues’. The method was often utilized throughout the ancient world in religious ceremonies and is still used in some Pentecostal communities, as well as other abrahamic, vedic, and even secular groups.

Under 4ad Elizabeth Fraser introduced these sounds on Cocteau Twins records

Throughout the 80s 4ad released works by Cocteau Twins, where listeners would be welcomed by the familiar drum machines, and dream pop guitars, intertwined by incomprehensible lyrics. Which, somehow fit so well that it could now be said that too much meaning or comprehension would have taken away rather than contributed to the beauty of that music.


This single took up much of the first section of the sophomore album by Lower Dens

It is undeniable that advances in computer science have caused drastic changes to our everyday lives, and that many of these advances are brought to the masses via San Francisco/Silicon Valley. Here the pursuit of cognitive enhancement combined with the history of psychedelics spurred an obsession among many engineers & scientists over a class of molecules not very well studied or understood, known as nootropics. Their effects, if any at all, are not known. Similarly, the complete context of our namesake album title is also unknown, though the two are connected in time (appearing around 2012) they are separated by geographical distance.

Nevertheless, the temptation to decipher Hunter’s vocalisations can again give us some intrigue:

Questions for the pastor for their clear minds were their thoughts without designation and division…. Because when I close my eyes I feel the teeth of the machine walking on us

While actual annotations for the track are available, thanks again to technology, it’s fun and maybe even more worthwhile to go through the trouble to find meaning, in what may be meaningless gibberish. The real pay off on the album may be the second half of the composition, ‘Stem’ which plays like a beatific answer to the prayer of ‘Brains’.

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Mo Rahman

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Mo Rahman

Genomics | Dark Beers

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