LUM, Sebastian Gandine, is first and foremost a spiritual encounter, a ceremonial séance for acquiring one’s essence, a ceremony. In some ways, it’s also a treatment for easing personal grief and, by extension, relieving civilizational woes. To some extent, it’s a tribal culturology course.

Sebastian Gandine has spent a lot of time studying how music is incorporated into native cultures, identifying its social functions, familiarizing himself with its fundamentals, learning instruments, recording sounds, and taking part in various rites, from sacraments to funerals, all while reinterpreting his many findings within the context of digital technologies.

There’s a lot more to what makes LUM such a remarkable and magnificent performance. We find that his music was inspired by a near-death experience he had in his late youth. LUM surprised us by claiming that, despite its traumatology, this was his most amazing, insightful, and freeing journey to yet. He recalls leaving his body and dissolving into pure free-flowing awareness, devoid of prosaic practical worries and disconnected from the time-space-causality matrix. The ineffable durée may have lasted a millisecond or millions of years now that chronometry is no longer fundamentally valid. He recalls the agony of recombination and the discomfort of reconnection with his body, his disconnect from its fundamental requirements, conditioned reflexes, rudimentary appetites, and “robotic” activities.

Years after beginning his career as a producer and singer, LUM would have been a big name throughout the globe if not for his determination to stay true to himself. Sebastian’s soul’s desire for authenticity causes far more dramatic personal and professional actions than canceling his Ego in front of Ego-driven crowds and completely withdrawing into his music. Gandine goes so far as to abandon much of his audience in order to maintain and uncover more of his actual nature, the size of which is equally accountable for one’s fame.

Tulum, where LUM is presently living in self-imposed exile on the run from his own Argentina, is primarily two things: the jungle and the beach — the rest is history. LUM derives much of his vibrant élan from the former. The beach is just a bunch of scorching sand, a sterile material, but history — any history — is a linguistic construct with no connection to one’s Existenz (the state of a person being himself or herself or both). Plants are where LUM gets true nutrition and empowerment for his brilliance.

While performing his botanical study, which is quite similar to his investigation into indigenous music, he is extremely far into the bush. and mostly in the same places. Whether as such, liquefied, dried, as smoke, as smell, or already consumed and cognized through their wholesome effects on one’s mind and body, plants are always present as decoration for his stance on stage and the stage itself, as elements that comprise the shrine that is typically found next to the mixer.