Party to Alan Watts? Justin Boreta's New Album Says Yes.

When it comes to music, wellness and dopeness aren’t mutually exclusive. The subdued drone tones and nature sounds that provide the soundtrack to an acupuncture studio may waft along at a much slower pace than the four-to-the-floor beats and pulsing synth riffs of a nightclub. But New Age ambient artists and EDM dance music producers actually have a lot in common—from their mutual love for electronic instruments to their shared appreciation for texture, tone, and mood-building. 

Justin Boreta knows this overlap well. As a former member of The Glitch Mob and a maker of therapeutic meditation music, he’s spent years exploring seemingly distant poles of musical expression. But he brings the two together on his new album, Hear the Listener. Sampling the voices of Alan Watts and Ann Shulgin—wife of MDMA scientist Alexander Shulgin and co-author of the famed 1990s psychedelic treatises PiHKAL and TiHKAL—the album dishes up a surge of chemically-enhanced New Age techno. 

Rocking the beats is, of course, familiar territory for this beatmaker, who performs under the name Boreta. Starting in the mid-2000s, Boreta rose alongside his Glitch Mob bandmates through the ranks of Los Angeles’s storied Low End Theory beat scene to become an international EDM sensation. On stages from Miami to Berlin, they powered through synth-heavy bangers with the help of turbine-shaped MIDI controllers and Roland “Octapad” drum triggers in a live setup dubbed The Blade. 

“When I started making music, it was always about the beats. When I was touring, I spent so much time onstage, moving energy through crowds. That’s the core of what I love about music, the way it creates connection and shared energy, whether it’s outdoors at a festival or under an eyemask,” Boreta explains in an email chat with DoubleBlind. 

Boreta left the Mob in 2023, but he started exploring more chilled-out sounds even before then. Since the late 2010s, he’s released multiple albums under his own name that delve into extended bass soundscapes and oceanic ripples of synthesizer bliss. Some of these efforts are reminiscent of ‘80s meditation and self-help cassettes, featuring calming voiceovers from late Western mystics Ram Dass and Alan Watts, who are sampled from beyond the grave to impart messages of inner transcendence. 

The title of Hear the Listener comes from a quote by Watts, a British-born Zen philosopher who, before his passing in 1973, influenced the Beat Generation with his many books and lectures on human consciousness and psychedelics. Speaking in his refined British accent, Watts urges everyone to open their ears to cosmic new dimensions: “Can you hear the past? Can you hear the future? Can you hear the listener? Where do the sounds come from? Let them tell you the truth.” 

That passage plays a central role in the 16-minute opening track of 2019’s Listen, Dream, an ambient effort that Boreta recorded with Matthew Davis under the name Superposition. The same soundbite reappears on Hear the Listener—but this time, Watts’ invocations don’t unfold as part of a lengthy monologue. Instead, his voice gets chopped into samples and modulated with effects, fueling the vibrational party jams. On the album’s title track, Boreta goes so far as to modulate the Zen philosopher’s voice with a Daft Punk-esque robotic sheen over a 120-BPM pulse of glimmering chimes. 

That may come across as an act of heresy to some ambient purists: In the foreword to a 1989 book called The New Age Music Guide, the iconic, therapy-minded composer Steven Halpern makes quite clear his disinterest in music that consists of “predetermined patterns,” which he likens to a “straightjacket” as a form of social conditioning. 

But Boreta makes clear that his sampling of Watts comes from a place of admiration. “I've been a fan of Alan Watts for a long time. His work really touched me. It was my introduction to Eastern philosophy, and since then I’ve explored many of the traditions he referenced. In a way, he DJs Eastern thought and remixes it for the Western mind. I wouldn’t be here without that influence,” he says, noting that he worked on the music with Watts’ son Mark. “For me, it’s about taking these bits of wisdom, which are gateways to deeper truths, and embedding them into music as a form of transmission. His voice carries something beautiful. It’s both deep and comforting.”

Astute listeners may also recognize the voice of Ann Shulgin on Hear the Listener. Album cut “Hands of God” features a sample taken from a talk she gave about her first MDMA experience: “It opened me up to who and what I was. I felt as if I were held in the hands of god.” The sentiment aligns nicely with the track’s brisk house beat and glistening, handpan-esque riffs, which ebb and flow in intensity through clouds of synth vapor. 

“I took the ingredients of psychedelic ambient music that I love and built something that works on big sound systems, something that can be shared in a room full of people,” Boreta says of Hear the Listener. There are certainly more groundbreaking examples of ambient techno out there, and at times the album’s colorful textures verge on a kind of ’90s granola-rave kitsch. But there’s something delightful about the way Hear the Listener treats music itself as a psychedelic experience, driving home the message that even the most enlightened beings have the right to party, too.

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