Cover art for Hypnotist Makes Music for Films. Original photo by Andrew Segreti. Design by Michael Domitrovich.
Before I opened my practice, I was focused on music full-time. I hesitate to call myself a “musician" because I lack technical training. I’m self-taught in guitar and fetishizing vintage analog gear - mostly Japanese synthesizers and drum machines produced in the 70s and 80s. I’ve been singing all my life; harmonizing and writing songs with a close friend in high school. In college, I was in my first band. And a few years after college, I met the men and women who would become my lifelong musical partners. (Weird fact: In 2005 I met three guys also named “Daniel” who were in a band. I joined them. We still get together now and then.)
The experience of playing and recording music has never ceased to serve me in offering hypnotherapy, meditation, and other guided experiences. Pacing and leading, rhythm and tone, volume, pitch, bass, loudness, softness, and all the other non-verbal aspects of “tuning” one’s voice for trance are constantly informed by the ability to write a song, to lead a listener, to sing lyrics, and to play with others while keeping time. In the last eight years, I’ve been asked to score and write original music for a handful of film and commercial projects. In other cases, songs have been placed and licensed. Within the wild, wacky world of hypnotists and meditators, I find musical training or experience of some sort is actually quite common. Insofar as guiding trance is helping people to change and shift their states, consider how many feeling states you might experience during a great four-minute pop song.
From left to right: Daniel Fickle, Daniel Ryan, Daniel Bellury, and Daniel Whitt in Athens, Alabama, 2015.
In the short film below, a track I recorded in 2013 called The Day-to-Day in Space plays during the first 10 or so minutes. Directed by the excellent Ben Thorp Brown, Gropius Memory Palace explores psychology, memory, meditation, trance, and shoe last manufacturing through the physical space of the Fagus Factory which was designed by Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus School. Ben and I worked on the script together. I perform the vocal.
Gropius Memory Palace, 2017. Directed by Ben Thorp Brown. Performed by Daniel Ryan.
These kinds of projects have remained on the margins of my focus for the better part of the last decade. While it can seem like diversion, music and the playing of it are so central to my practices of meditation, hypnosis, and regression therapy, that I consider it essential and necessary. The relationship between music and the brain - and the application of this knowledge in therapy - is so intuitively and fundamentally important, to mention it feels obvious.
This year I had the opportunity to produce original music for a film called Feeling Through. I felt this was the right time to punctuate a certain period of time and a certain collection of songs by compiling them into one record. The result is Hypnotist Makes Music for Films. It is music written and recorded for films (most were actual films, but some may just have been in my head) between 2011 and 2019. The selected tracks, as well as their sequence and arrangement, have been considered with trance in mind on behalf of the listener. This music is recommended for use during meditation, hypnosis, trance, past life regression, cooking, driving, working, running, reading, writing, sleeping, sex, psychedelic experiences, thousand yard stares, and entering flow states.
You’ll find the record on Spotify below. It’s also on Apple Music and other streaming services. Please listen and enjoy at your leisure.
In lieu of a physical release - if there were to be special thanks and liner notes, my gratitude would go to Doug Neumann, Daniel Bellury, Daniel Whitt, Daniel Fickle, Todd Buchler, James Gannon, Matt Ferrin, Joseph Gannon, Chris Cipriano, Taylor McFadden, Ben Thorp Brown, Doug Roland, and Dr. Sarah Joan Biffen.
For further reading, I recommend Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks.