A New Trend In Urban Spirituality: Electro Meditation
What happens when two worlds that were never meant to meet, do? A lifelong raver and a dedicated meditator walks into a listening bar in Paris, and finds herself confronting a question she didn’t expect. Can the music that once moved her through nightclubs now move her toward stillness?
by Ceren Aral Desnos
Electro is an old friend of mine. A friend I spent my youth clubbing with. Even though years have drifted us apart, it is this kind of friendship where time doesn’t matter, you pick up exactly where you left off.
Meditation, on the other hand, is that new friend who came into my life as I grew older. The friend who appeared when I began to prefer daylight to nightlife.
So, when I heard about a meditation session with electro music hosted by my favourite listening bar in Paris, I had mixed feelings. I felt like introducing two good friends from different phases of life and I was anxious. What if they don’t like each other? What if they don’t enjoy hanging out together? What if, in simple terms, it just wasn’t a good idea? But good friends deserve a chance, and curiosity won, as it always does.
As I made myself comfortable on the cushions spread around the listening room’s famous speakers, I seemed to be the only one in the group lost in her thoughts. The rest of the small crowd seems carried by excitement. The excitement of trying something new. In our era defined by unlimited choices and access, that rare thing that still manages to move us most.
Alexandrine Comte, the creator of meditations électroniques greets us at the listening room of Listener Paris for a guided meditation on techno music. Apparently, in everyday life, we tend to be in a beta state – mentally active and constantly stimulated. Through breathing, concentration, and sound repetition, we can slow down, settle, and shift into a calmer, more stable, alpha state. And if we are lucky, sometimes, we can go even further into deeper states called theta, which resemble a form of light trance or conscious daydreaming. More importantly, it doesn’t always have to be cymbals, gongs and soothing voices of a zen garden that takes us there.
I woke up from my thoughts as a steady BPM began filling the room. I wasn’t expecting this. If my old raving days aren’t betraying me, this tempo… was indeed techno! I felt the bass in my chest. Then I felt it travelling up my spine. We closed our eyes and let Alexandrine guide us through movements and postures, helping us move the beats through our bodies, from head to toes.
But wait. This is just the beginning. We go faster. If my veteran days are not proving me wrong, we moved into hard techno. She asked us to ‘tout lacher’, which in French means to let it go completely. I cheated and opened my eyes for a little and it looked like I was in a miniature Berghain.
In Kundalini meditation – which I practice regularly – we sing mantras while meditating, allowing their vibrations to elevate us toward a higher state of consciousness. These vibrations are believed to create wavelengths that function like ancient codes, each serving a specific purpose: balancing positive and negative thoughts in the mind, like cleansing karma, or strengthening the root chakra. I suppose the logic here wasn’t so different. Just make it techno.
An hour passed like this and I left the room slightly breathless, but with a quiet sense of lightness. I realised nevertheless, that I enjoyed my friends’ company separately. I preferred dancing to techno without the need for a built-in meditation practice, and hearing cymbals and sitars while meditating. No matter what, it remained an enjoyable experience, and I was happy to have spent an hour on a Sunday afternoon trying something new. For me, it felt more like a discovery session than a truly spiritual one. Still, I was so eager to tell everyone, yet write an article about it!
But that, perhaps, is what made it so revealing. It made me question not only myself, but the way our era functions. We live in an age of endless discovery: restaurants, exhibitions, concepts, retreats. Everything invites us to try something new, and sometimes the thrill of being among the first to do so almost replaces the experience itself. Spiritual practices, too, have quietly entered that same economy of novelty.
As I biked home through the Marais, my body relaxed yet energised, a faint smile still on my face, I rode past a parade of pop-up stores, coffee shops that look like galleries and art galleries that look like after-clubs. It made me realise how we are living in an era of ‘curated everything’. And that, in this constant search for the new and the curated, the experience itself has quietly begun to fade into the background, as if being among the first to try become the experience in itself.
In the end, an electro meditation session in a listening bar felt like the perfect portrayal of our era.
