the inflation and the bandwagon of all things Psychedelic

[Adoom]

+1.

Minus the sundrunk buzz.

[dase]

eh, I really, really dislike tool. And if dudes are like 'hey come check out my band / hey can you give us a show' and I'm expecting something I'd dig but instead get 50 minutes of prog wankery (these bands always play the LONGEST SETS), well it's kinda a bummer.

[D.o.S.]

I went to a "soul" show last night that was psychedelic as fuck.

Because psychedelic is an adjective, not a genre.

[Bassus Sanguinis]

I went to a "soul" show last night that was psychedelic as fuck.

Because psychedelic is an adjective, not a genre.

yeah, I guess so. SO should I have perhaps just made a remark that it's being used sloppily? Not that genres make much more sense either, they are nothing more than, well, attributive labels based on group unit adjectives that are found a more or less common nominator in the group.

But that's semantics. I get that by dozens at my day job.

[D.o.S.]

I submit to you that the best things in life are those which we use sloppily, sir.
































(...and your mother agrees!)

[Chankgeez]

I went to a "soul" show last night that was psychedelic as fuck.

Because psychedelic is an adjective, not a genre.

Except, there IS a genre called "psychedelic soul".

[Gone Fission]

Bump.

[Chankgeez]

I went to a "soul" show last night that was psychedelic as fuck.

Because psychedelic is an adjective, not a genre.

Except, there IS a genre called "psychedelic soul".

[D.o.S.]

what folks call "psychedelic" music nowadays often has very little to do with "psychedelic" music as it was originally defined or the very concept "psychedelic" in its original literal etymologic meaning of "mind-manifesting." this isn't necessarily to say that everything which was originally lumped into the rubric of "psychedelic music" in the 60s and early 70s was about manifesting the mind's untapped potential rather than trying to follow trends of the day, especially in the 1966-69 period when people put on Carnaby Street hipster gear and then Woodstock street gear like they put on punk gear in 1978 and flannel in 1991. but in the early era there was a strain of music that truly did mean to use sound as part of an attempt to alter brain function in the same sense as some of the pioneers of psychedelic drugs wanted to use substances. sometimes this was done in direct combination with drugs, as in the Ken Kesey "Acid Tests" and Bill Graham-promoted Trips Festival with the Grateful Dead immortalized in Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels; other times the music and other multimedia were the only stimuli supplied.

often the bands which were most engaged in this activity were quite open and explicit about it. if you read interviews with the Dead, Hawkwind, or Can, for example, they're quite explicit about their intent to alter consciousness with sound. Dave Brock and Lemmy talk gleefully about the effect of the strobes and projections in combination with the band's relentless attack, and when the GD electronic-music side project Seastones was released in 1974 it was blurbed as having been created specifically to get you high just by listening to it. it worked, too. Can did an interview in the 00s for MOJO where they talked about how Jaki's drumming was so powerfully metronomic that he could focus on audience members and make them dance or make them so ill they would vomit.

the will to psychedelia didn't die out with punk. to the contrary, the influence of a lot of the weirdest psychedelia--from the brittle Byrds tracks to Hawkwind to Hendrix to Krautrock to Quicksilver (and their left-hand-path doppelganger Television) and the later Airplane to "Maggot Brain"--was firmly embedded in Mission of Burma, PiL, Hüsker Dü, and R.E.M. From there it was passed along: from Burma to Fugazi, from PiL and Levene's clattering echoes to U2, from Mould to everyone worth a shit in American alt-rock, and from R.E.M. to My Bloody Valentine (clock the Strawberry Wine and Ecstacy EPs if you don't believe me). and it showed up in places where you wouldn't expect it...Lee Ranaldo's favorite live band was the Dead, 40 of whose shows he saw. again, some of the later players have been quite vocal about their interest in sonic derangement...Kevin Shields has talked about the importance of preposterous amounts of volume at length, and Mould's Sugar show i saw on their first tour was the loudest thing i'd seen since the 70s until the MBV reunion tour. SY, and Glenn Branca before them, were also very into the concept of sonic overload as a means of altering consciousness.

you also had the beginnings of an underground folk- and pop-influenced psychedelic movement happening in the later 80s and early 90s, with Flying Saucer Attack's pioneering and fearless home recordings joined by Amp and other British groups and folks like Yo La Tengo and Galaxie 500 in the States in combining melodic songs and roaring, vaguely Velvets-influenced drone jams.

but the biggest manifestation of the psychedelic impulse in music--and in many ways the biggest disappointment--of the post-80s was the electronic dance music (hereafter "EDM") or "rave music" scene. having started from an already ecstatic impulse to alter consciousness via dance, early house music, descended from disco, rapidly mutated into a minimal electronic form with a rigorous buildup/breakdown/reprise track structure designed to create repeated emotional and physical peaks in dancefloor crowds. many of the characteristics of EDM tracks for club use are almost dictated by principles of psychoacoustics, and effectively constructed dance tracks can raise the hair on the backs of your arms like almost nothing else because of the basic, elemental nature of their construction...everything is assembled in fairly simple subdivisions of 4/4, so it has to be really well done to be compelling.

unfortunately, the ubiquitous usage of club drugs allows music producers to get away with lazy record-making; i remember a very famous UK DJ saying in the early 00s that her style of music didn't work unless the audience was all E'd up. this, and the over-promotion that always attends a scene when it hits the public eye, pretty much killed the rave scene dead by the mid-00s...once a scene gets known primarily for drugs, it's doomed. it's too bad, because when the music was good it was really great, and it really worked as a portable repeatable consciousness-alteration system. notably, some old-school psychedelic people got involved and in some cases are still involved in EDM, most notably Steve Hillage of Gong who's been doing the System 7 project with his partner Miquette since the 1990s. there was also a brief fad of shoegaze bands getting EDM remixes...i have a couple e.g. the Slowdive remixes on the 5 EP and the Chapterhouse remixes by Irresistable Force i think?

i would certainly class at least some of post-rock as psychedelic in intent. what else are you going to call "Djed" by Tortoise with its 1970 underground-radio edits, or the first Labradford album with those huge roaring drones, or the Rome LP? you could make an argument for gybe! as psychedelic in some sense, as they certainly mean to mess with your head with their cinematics. somewhere nearby live the drone artists like Windy and Carl, and their ambient neighbors. if Eno isn't psychedelic in intent, who the fuck is? the New Agers are over on the other side of the tracks, but we can't throw 'em out of town...it wouldn't be right. and then there's the more recent, obviously psych/prog-inspired stuff that sits somewhere between post-rock and indie, like Yume Bitsu, the Landing albums, and Surface of Ece(y)on. which brings us around to the psych/prog-inspired "jam bands," which ironically are often the least psychedelic descendent of "psychedelic music" despite hewing most closely to the form of the San Francisco bands in general and the Dead specifically. some folks adore one "jam band" or another; the only one i really enjoy is Phish, whose discursive extended jams make for enjoyable woolgathering background music and are just plain fun when taken on their own terms.

nowadays most of the rock bands that package themselves as "psychedelic" are bullshitting IMO, or at least that's true of the newer American bands. the Japanese bands seem to mean it...i've met Kawabata briefly, and he's a lovely fellow but dead serious, totally present. and some of the US experimental bands seem serious, but they don't call themselves "psychedelic." when i hear the word "psychedelic" any more i reach for my revolver, or at least check to see that my wallet is still there. it's like someone saying "i'm honest" or "i'm spiritual"...if you're telling me, i don't believe you.

that's what i think about what i know about. of course, i've left out all kinds of shit, like the influence of Indian music, the Beatles, Sandy Bull and John Fahey, A Love Supreme, "Eight Miles High," but give me a break...it's 2 in the morning.

Thread is worth bumping just for this slice of realness.

[Gone Fission]

{epic snip}

that's what i think about what i know about. of course, i've left out all kinds of shit, like the influence of Indian music, the Beatles, Sandy Bull and John Fahey, A Love Supreme, "Eight Miles High," but give me a break...it's 2 in the morning.

Thread is worth bumping just for this slice of realness.

And in hopes of some hinted-at sequels.

[retinal orbita]

Great thread. Good re-read. I was like "yo I got some opinions on this shit" and then realized I'd already said them.

[retinal orbita]

It's like.... the very idea of "songs" in a sense is hard to rationalize when talking about psychedelic music in a consciousness sort of way because itself is a structured thing which detracts from that kind of "zone out" element I'm always looking for. I always make the distinction between "psychedelic rock" and "psychedelic" because I find the concept of an "Interstellar Overdrive" to work in that zone out kind of way that I like "psychedelic" music to affect me (fuck I am sick of typing the word psychedelic), the same way a lot of ambient is more akin to what I'm looking for when I think about psychedelic music. That's just me - I also don't really dig on vocals in that sort of music because it again detracts out of that space the band is trying to achieve...... Like I'd say Oren Ambarchi's In The Pendulums Embrace is exactly on par with what I'd consider "psych" even though it probably rarely gets described as such.

I'd also say the same about Boris's Feedbacker record so there you have where I'm at....

[Chankgeez]

This a great thread, but I think I forgot to post this:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Wy6oXP_5jU[/youtube]

[DarkAxel]

If i've ever talked about my band's music being psychedelic at times, i meant it absolutely as an adjective

it's hard to describe what the term means to me... in our music, I use it to refer to certain type of jams and weird soundscapes (kind of a Hawkwind influence on my side) we sometimes do. but I know it can mean so much more... And I absolutely know what it needs to sound like if i want it to feel psychedelic just hard to describe... but there absolutely needs to be some kind of repetition and simplicity of form alongside with the feeling of vast plains opening in front of us and stepping out of the physical boundaries. Dense sonic experience, you know... the true effect of psychedelic music that got mentioned a few times in this thread,

Earthless are hella psychedelic to me... Om, The Mars Volta, too. And for example Ufomammut (especially the last two records) are what I'd call heavy psychedelic rock, alongside with some Boris stuff for example. Basically - Opus Primum/Alter sound psychedelic as fuck to me

where is AdrianLee when you need him? Brujas del Sol sound absolutely psychedelic to me. That's the stuff i'm talking about!

(can't wait for the package he sent me... Black Sabbath and Dead Medow on vinyl plus a fuzz pedal? YES PLEASE)

[ryan summit]

Austin IS psyche... And we all do lots of acid and caps and mescaline and dmt and...

i have a vision of austin
it involves lots of fire , rust, and tar......................^*plus this*^
confirm this for me soni
ill start packing