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Upon graduating from Orwell's class of 1984, I, like so many collegians, decided to travel. Unlike most collegians, however, I chose to visit, in conjunction with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, three alternative, spiritually based communities. They were High Wind, in Wisconsin, Sirius in Massachusetts and the legendary Findhorn in Scotland. Sirius was an interesting place where the community seemed to be split into two separate camps. There were the insiders, who spent a lot of time with the upkeep of the community, programs, gardening, cooking, contemplation, etc. The other group was more on the peripheral tip and had outside interests, yet still lived on or near communal land. It was here, amongst the not-as-serious Sirius set, where I first heard about a substance they called "Adam." Adam, I would later find out, was an early moniker of MDMA, more commonly known as Ecstacy.

It was a period of time before "e" had made its way to Ibiza, where the likes of Paul Oakenfold and others sampled its warm and fuzzy fizz beneath the star-filled sky of Balearic summer nights. This was long before Hasidic couriers would move mass quantities through Amsterdam as part of the diamond trade. It was still being used in psychotherapeutic studies by therapists, inside and outside the protective embrace of academia.

Fast-forward to 1998, and the hills of Tiburon in Northern California's affluent Marin County. It's a full moon and people are gathered together in a multi-storied house, overspilling into various rooms; the garden and kitchen where there's a tasty potluck of foods from tofu loafs to BBQ ribs. In walks a tall and hearty soul who resembles a leaner, cleaner Santa Claus, wearing the same psychedelic Hawaiian shirt as mine. It's Alexander Shulgin, father of Ecstasy, Prometheus of love for millions of ravers and more. These people meet on every full moon, surrounding Shulgin and his friends and peers, psychonauts and scholars of entheogenic plants and their states.

Music and psychoactive substances have gone together ever since mushroom spores landed on the planet and we could raise our voices, singing in tongues of ancient times. Shulgin's baby led the way to the second largest opening of consciousness since the '60s, when, in the summer of 1990, mega-raves sprang up around the English countryside like wild fungi amidst the crumbling megaliths of olden days. The chill-out experience, where the 4am re-entry into skin and cells would take place, gave birth to a meditative hybrid of electronic and new age music. Mixmaster Morris was at the epicenter of the chill-out scene, mixing tracks by the likes of Eno, Steve Hillage, Steve Reich and others while crafting his own ambient excursions with Pete Namlook, like Dreamfish, One and Two. The chill-out scene exploded the canvas for ambient and brought the electronic and new age worlds closer together. Other significant chill-out artists of the time included Tetsu Inoue, the aforementioned Namlook, Global Communication, the Orb and others. New age distributors, like the Marin-based Backroads, began to stock as much of this new space music, fueled by the serotonin rush of "E."

But the convergence of substance and music did not stop there. While the feel-good moment of the late 20th century was taking place, Terrence McKenna and a group of dedicated journeyers like Gracie and Zarkov were exploring the hidden and mysterious dimensions of DMT. Before his untimely death, McKenna had risen to the status of philospher-sage, replacing the rapidly declining Tim Leary as the Magellan of mind states. But McKenna was no stuffed-shirt academician — he was on the cultural frontlines, working with electronic artists like Space Time Continuum, the Shamen and Surfers of Zuvuya, narrating his experiences into the world of "self-replicating machine elves" and other Matrix-like phantasmagoria, driven by the powerful psychedelic DMT. In fact, you can briefly hear McKenna on "Grand Luminosity" from Spontaneous Illumination by Entheogenic, which also features "Invisible Landscapes," named after one of McKenna's seminal works.

McKenna went on to become a featured speaker and presenter at new age fairs like the Whole Life Expo, further blurring the already fuzzy line between new age culture and the warp speed experimentalism of psychedelics and technology. The '90s were a heady time, a brave new world of discovery in sounds and visions. We haven't yet seen their like again. But we will.