the human mind is an expansive mysterious elastic
property to this day our understanding of how it operates remains a mystery and while we don't
know much we do know the mind gives context to all things we hold dear falling in love
winning that football game and most importantly in my opinion experiencing art without the
mind soul experiencing these things they would simply be unknowable phenomena the
emotions and wonder one experiences when viewing the majestic grandeur of the david the
s
ly sensuality of the mona lisa are what give these artistic triumphs power and of course
this same principle can be ascribed to music but there are layers to this what if instead
of just experiencing base emotions such as love joy lust or triumph music could take us into
even deeper recesses of the mind to places where questions of existence consciousness ego and
transcendence combine this musical phenomenon does exist and it is known as psychedelic
music and in this video we will take a lo
ok at the entire kaleidoscopic history
of this particular musical phenomena now if we go to the current dictionary definition
of psychedelic music most musicological experts will point to its genesis being in the late
1960s however in many ways psychedelic music has its origins decades and decades before that
pivotal era now before we go over the history of this amazing music in detail it is important to
know where the word psychedelic even comes from the term psychedelic as far as we know
was first
introduced to the public vernacular by english psychologist humphrey osman in 1956 in fact
it is a portmanteau of two greek words psyche meaning mind soul and self and delaying meaning
to manifest which can roughly be understood to mean the manifestation of the soul the invention
of the word was spurred by conversations osman had with brave new world author alice huxley about
the peculiar experience of ingesting lysergic acid diathalamide or lsd as it is commonly known huxley
him
self was the first to use the term psychedelic in any written work and it subsequently became
a catch-all phrase for mind expansion induced by hallucinogens music made that stimulated many of
these same sensory experiences or enhanced a trip became to be known as psychedelic music while
the word psychedelic was first codified in 1956 these dreamlike mind-altering forms of music
certainly existed before then now the debate of when the first characteristics of psychedelic
music came into exis
tence at the current moment is still an open one a strong candidate to some
is hector berlioz 1830 composition symphony fantastique which uses the orchestra to illustrate
an opium induced nightmare of lost love and desire for others still going all the way back to
the middle ages the morality music plays of hildegard von bingen provide a starting point when
mind imagery and music melded together and while these are interesting discussions the point where
music definitively took on not just
a programmatic nature but a mind-expanding nature was the
1894 premiere of claude debussy's prelude to the afternoon of a fawn now in order to understand
debussy and why his music sounded like it did it is important to understand two artistic movements
that were happening in the late 19th century impressionism and symbolism the former is to
this day still a controversial term when applied to debussy while the latter more accurately
describes the music of pieces like prelude to the afternoon
for a fawn or la mer impressionism
was a reactionary movement against the then highly regimented and conservative-minded paris
visual arts community under emperor napoleon iii by utilizing abstract brushstrokes impressionist
painters tried to capture real life in a way only art could in a hazy vague yet beautiful sense that
only existed in the blurred memories and emotions of human society all that being said this was a
movement that according to debussy himself he had nothing to do with e
ver since he appeared on the
music scene critics from the 1890s to today have attempted to attach the impressionist label to
wc's music due to its dreamlike abstract and dare i say mind expanding qualities that being said due
to debusses and many subsequent critics rejection of his association with the impressionist
movement i think it pertinent to go over a movement with which he had much more apparent ties
that being the symbolist movement while debussy never referred to himself as a symb
olist it is
well known that a series of symbolist writings provided the inspiration for the aforementioned
prelude to the afternoon of aphan and his lone majestic opera peleus et melisandre so what
is symbolism well allow this quote from jean marisa a famous symbolist writer to explain in
his famous symbolist manifesto he stated thus in this art movement representation of nature human
activities and all real-life events don't stand on their own they are rather veiled reflections
of the sen
ses pointing to archetypical meanings through their esoteric connections thus in this
declaration we see an outline for a philosophical approach to art that is far more in line with
wc's evocation of dream-like states abstract emotions and unknowable knowledge and this is
above all else why the history of psychedelic music starts with debussy so all that being said
what specifically about prelude to the afternoon of a fawn was so psychedelic you asked well let's
take a look at the piece bri
efly when we dive into the music we actually see quite a few similarities
between debussy and a band like the doors first off the piece contains multiple odd meters
eastern musical influences and a loose if not non-existent structure to further the symbolist
psychedelic experience of a fawn luxuriating on a sunny afternoon as the piece continues to unfurl
it becomes more and more abstract until finally ending in a calm yet elated state while audiences
at the time might not have realized it
prelude to the afternoon of a fawn was a definitive move away
from simply programmatic music to inner emotional mind-expanding music while the psychedelic values
that wc pioneered faded into the background of orchestral music in favor of various different
strains of composing in the early 20th century these ideas and themes ended up finding a new home
in the burgeoning electronic music composition scene and nowhere was this more obvious than
in the movement of the italian futurists now the
futurists on first glance do not look like
they would have anything to do with the sublime aesthetics of the symbolists and composers like
debussy the music of the italian futurists was jarring nonsensical and often times unsettling it
was very much a music of the body of the exterior not the inner so what did it have to do with the
development of the concept of psychedelia well despite its exteriority and physicality it is
futurism's radical departure from traditional instrumentation and t
he innovation of electronic
composition within the movement that ultimately provided the building blocks of the sonic
textures of modern psychedelia in italian futurist luigi rusolo's 1913 treatise the art of noises
he describes the evolution of not just sound but the distinctive phenomena known as noise and
how it only came to be as a result of the unique circumstances of industrial revolution era europe
the sounds of machines clanging steam engines exhaling and the development of voltage-
controlled
sound all of it according to russolo was ripe for artistic exploitation specifically in the field of
sound or even music in fact according to russolo in order for the creation of music to keep
up with and be relatable to the then current state of humanity it was paramount that composers
begin to incorporate these concepts into modern composition by creating within these frameworks
the futurists were musical forerunners of modern psychedelias spaced out and tripped out sonic
land
scapes and while the futurists certainly laid the groundwork in the earliest decades of the
20th century for a new style of music it was the successor movement to the futurists that really
shook things up that style of music was known as music concrete now there are a number of known
music concrete composers of important renown pierre schaefer yana zanakis to name two but i am
going to focus on a specific composer who did more to advance the principles of pre-60 psychedelia
than any other a
nd brought the purely physical and carnal influence of the futurists back under
control and used it to explore the astral realm that man was edgard varese edgard varese was born
in france in 1883 but ended up later immigrating to the united states where he ended up composing
his most influential work coming from both a musical and scientific background varese started
in the traditional classical sphere before moving further towards electronic composition tape loops
and the general trappings
of what was to become music concrete his innovations in these fields
particularly in a piece like poem electronic were incalculably important to the development
of later psychedelic music it's hard to believe that the beatles use of tape manipulation in
tomorrow never knows or strawberry fields forever would have ever been possible without varese and
his dogged pursuit of incorporating tape into the orchestra additionally his innovative use of
voltage-controlled electricity to create melod
ies was an essential influence knowingly or not on
purely electronic late 60s psychedelic bands such as silver apples or the foundational synthesizer
work of wendy carlos and morton sabotnik and i would be remiss here if i did not mention
frank zappa it is well known that in frank zappa's young life no composer exerted a
greater creative hold on him than edgar varese the two even corresponded via telephone and
letters the reason to mention this was while i would never consider frank zappa a
part of the
60s psychedelic scene in fact he often spent time on his records lampooning what he thought were
vacuous hippies zappa often served as the conduit between the mainstream rock world of people like
the beatles cream and pink floyd and the cutting edge avant-garde classical world that included
people like stockhausen and edgard varese through zappa we can see a direct line of how the music
concrete movement pioneered by varese and others made its way into the rock scene and contri
buted
greatly to the birth of the 60s psychedelic scene now before we get into the creme de la creme
so to speak of this video and talk directly about the late 60s psychedelic era there's still one
more period in the 20th century we need to explore in the evolution of psychedelic music and that
is the music of the space age i have done a few videos already on this subject as this pre-rock
yet post-classical period continues to fascinate me not just with how unique it was but how to this
da
y its influence and trippy nature continues to be discounted in the course of music history
in order to explain the space age music scene i am going to insert clips here from some of my
earlier videos going over the scene in detail to give you more context the early 1960s were a very
peculiar interesting and transformative time in the history of western music the initial waves of
swing music and early rock and roll had begun to peter out as forms of mass popular entertainment
jazz had reduc
ed in size from big band ensembles to small modal quartets and the dominance of rock
music spurred by the beatles was still quite a few years away what was left in the intermediary
years was known as the space age era of music while the late 60s psychedelic era is often
equated with terms such as the wild west and trippy in reality it was actually a much more
cohesive scene than the disparate yet fascinating music of the space age europe within space age
music one had tiki or exotica music
avant-garde electronic guitar pop like that of joe meek and
the tornadoes and the wild stereophonic latin ensemble experiments of someone like esquibel
so i hope it is clear from these clips that the space age era of music was a very trippy time
in music that flew under the radar in many ways due to its target audience of mainstream suburban
america the initial influence of debussy was reintroduced and the electronic innovations of the
futurists and the music concretis were brought to dizzy
ing new heights throw in the addition of the
stereophonic recording innovations of esquivel and you have by far the trippiest most spaced out
form of music anyone had heard up until that point however due to the nature of post-world war
ii america and the west's general conservative nature the concepts espoused in these mostly
instrumental records were nothing that would cause anyone to question anything well perhaps other
than can i get another mai tai however there was one exception and s
eminal record during this
period that bucked that trend that record was imasumak's voice of ekstabe in a field of
fellow artists who maintained a conservative persona ima sumac served as a much more expansive
forerunner of what psychedelia would become it's hard to believe looking at the album cover of
the voice of xtabe that it was released in 1950 even more unbelievable was the music contained
inside on the record composer and arranger les baxter manipulates the studio orchestra to create
debussy-esque dream-like passages which ima sumac then primarily sings whoops and screams
over all with a magnificently clear 5 octave range comparable to that of a professional opera
singer all in all for a record that predated the psychedelic era by roughly 20 years it managed to
have a lot more in common with janus joplin than it did bing crosby or ella fitzgerald so here we
are everybody at the crux and core of this video the music of the 60s psychedelic explosion now
here's where i w
ant to take a slightly different route for exploring in depth the music of the late
60s usually in any documentary about this period and trust there have been literally hundreds
at this point most often the focus has been on psychedelic rock the classics we all know and love
and that will for sure make up a substantial part of this section of the video however what i think
tends to get overlooked and that could be because of the biases of the demographic of people who
usually make these typ
es of documentaries is the simultaneous explosion of the psychedelic soul and
psychedelic folk scene that happened at the same time so with that said let's begin now many people
know the 60s were perhaps the most singularly radical decade of the 20th century what started
with chubby checkers the twist ended with sly in the family stones i want to take you higher and
while there were shifts from the beginning to end in every decade including our most recent one to
this day i still maintain t
he cultural shift that took place from 1960 to 1969 was the most radical
and abrupt we saw during the latter half of the 20th century and it's incredibly pertinent that
we dive into the reasons why the musical culture of this decade changed so radically and quickly
first unrelated to the thriving space age pop scene there was a parallel scene growing around
the love of jazz music that included writers artists and fellow musicians this was known as the
beatnik scene the beatnik scene was imp
ortant for numerous reasons they codified the glorification
of america's native music styles over those from europe or rather jazz over classical additionally
they challenged the social mores of the day and the general white protestant framework of
morals and ethics that had dominated america from its founding up till the 1950s they emphasized
individual freedom over the oppressiveness of the conservative collective or as one might say
letting your freak flag fly on a more base level they a
dvocated for the taking of drugs and illicit
substances to unchain the self from the doldrums of post-world war ii suburbanized western life
and this is where the influence of the beatnik scene becomes tantamount to the development of
psychedelic music before the taking of illicit drugs became synonymous with the beatnik circle
they had already formed a philosophy diametrically opposed to the restrictive christian culture of
the day but it must be noted this was a rather secular or earthly
objection to christianity
not a celestial one but with the introduction of hallucinogens specifically lysergic acid
diathalamide or lsd the beatniks began to take on a much more spiritual objection to the banality
of 20th century christian capitalist society and it was this spirituality that began the evolution
of the beatnik movement into the hippie movement that would then spawn the psychedelic music scene
the combining of the spiritual and philosophical perspectives of the hippies with t
he musical
philosophy of experimentation that had culminated with the space age pop artists was the impetus
for the beginning of the psychedelic music scene now as i mentioned earlier in exploring the 60s
psychedelic scene i will attempt to take a more expansive view of mind expanding music including
musicians from all backgrounds and in doing so tried to give a more holistic view of the scene
than the typical psychedelic documentaries also because i will be including the entire
constellat
ion of artists and genres here the period we will be covering will range a
bit longer than the typical 1966-1970 period and will look more like 1967 to 1973 to capture
the full range of psychedelia from this time anyway let's get started the 1960s really was
where it all came together it was the culmination of the musical revolutions from the prior 70 years
exploding into new sonic dimensions the philosophy and the music were finally in sync and coupled
with new innovations this ensured it
would be the most innovative era of studio based music to date
and what were these new innovations you ask well electronic feedback coming into use is a musical
compositional element a spiritual successor to the noise of the italian futurists and the music
concretis exploration and full incorporation of eastern musical influences into the canon
of contemporary songwriting mostly featuring music of the indian subcontinent and in particular
the study and use of ragas the konokol and other tec
hniques from carnatic or south indian classical
music exploration outside the traditional blues rock framework into various modal and atonal
forms of composition and songwriting building on the space age pop studio innovations by featuring
detailed tape splicing backwards echo and reverb heavy overdubs and recording of reverse tape
lyrics that codified the philosophical concepts from the lineage of the symbolists all the way up
to the beatniks now this is a list broadly of the characteristi
cs that defined psychedelic music
in the 1960s and if you've listened to any of the more popular mainstream psychedelic records of
the time you've definitely heard these techniques in action from the feedback induced haze of
jimi hendrix and cream to the rootsy-esque jams of the grateful dead and jefferson airplane
to the weird noise experiments of pink floyd each artist chose to interpret the ideals of this
movement through his or her own unique lens all these aforementioned artists made t
he psychedelic
rock music scene what it was they pioneered the festival as a new form of live music entertainment
flaunted conservative sexual mores and protested the necessity of war specifically the vietnam war
it was an incredible time and trying to go over every amazing world-changing innovative album
would be a whole other video and in the one out of 1000 chance you haven't heard the music of any
of these artists go listen now please i implore you now that roughly is the psychedelic ro
ck scene
of the 1960s i'll admit it it may seem like i have spent comparatively less time than most on this
section of psychedelia mostly because it is so well known and talked about at this point i feel
pointing out how amazing electric ladyland is for the 18th time would be a bit of overkill instead
i want to shift and show how psychedelia impacted other genres that don't get as much play the first
being the genesis and creation of psychedelic soul now psychedelic souls evolution is a bit
hard to
pin down unlike rock music of the 60s which was highly individualized soul music had a much more
centralized top-down approach and this was due to the two big labels of the time atlantic and
motown controlling a lion's share of the soul music market in this way the soul music apparatus
was able to pump out new hits and act at a pace no other genre could match i guess if you're looking
for an analogy today think kpop but in the 60s and american while this made the soul music industr
y
much more adept at conquering the charts than other genres it often put label bosses at odds
with the artists on their roster as the artists were contemporaries of the hippie generation they
were aware of the changing musical aesthetic that was taking place at the end of the decade and
very much wanted to participate in it themselves however since label heads exerted unilateral
control over musical style and visual aesthetics and were of an older generation they were loathed
to change qu
ickly despite the changing times however it was the introduction and explosion of
one group who changed the direction of everything there can be no conversation about psychedelic
soul without mentioning sly in the family stone people to this day still underestimate the
singularity of influence sly had over numerous genres artists and movements in fact many artists
we loved today would not have existed had sly and the family stone not done what they did in the
1960s interestingly sly actuall
y bucked the trend of label-directed soul artists as the family
stone was formed in san francisco autonomously and then later signed to epic not atlantic or motown
sticking with soul music's gospel infused vocals and rhythms but adding layers of fuzz feedback in
the aforementioned studio production techniques sly and co birthed fundamental building blocks
that came to characterize psychedelic soul not to mention funk with songs like i want to
take you higher everyday people and hot fun in t
he summer time sly took the soul music template and
amped it up on all the psychedelic characteristics in vogue at the time following this the rest of
the soul music industry began to take notice with the temptations ditching their earlier wholesome
sound for songs like papa was a rolling stone with its heavy wawa based riff and rougher gang
vocals it was clear the counterculture had arrived at motown records and of course no psych soul
overview would be complete without mentioning parliame
nt and funkadelic p-funk's ability to
combine the best of hendrixian refuge and courting in the playing of eddie hazel with the gospel
yelps and hollers of george clinton laid the groundwork for the continuation and exploration
of psychedelic soul in the 1970s particularly on albums like cosmic slop the self-titled debut
album and the aptly titled free your ass in your mind will follow funkadelic created a unique
sonic landscape using psychedelic elements of the 60s and then expanding them
further by adding
grittier subject matter and production techniques that ended up creating an influential style of
psychedelic soul that influenced everyone from prince to the red hot chili peppers and lastly
psychedelic soul saw its biggest influence in the genre of philly soul again emphasizing how in many
ways everything really does go back to debussy philly's soul kept all the aforementioned
innovations while reintroducing the full orchestral template back into the composition
songwrit
ing and recording process just taking a quick look at a track like didn't i blow your mind
this time by the delphonics we can see all of this in full effect so soul music did indeed undergo
a drastic psychedelic transformation in the late 60s in addition to rock music but what a lot of
people don't know is that in fact another genre from the earlier 60s and 1950s underwent a massive
transformation as the 60s came to a close and that genre was folk music so i think it's worth it to
spend jus
t a bit of time exploring the phenomena that was psychedelic folk now the most prominent
name when this genre is invoked in conversation if it ever is these days is that of donovan with
a series of number one hits on the billboard hot 100 chart he was by far the most mainstream
of the psychedelic folk artists songs like sunshine superman season of the witch and hurty
gertie man laid out in the most palatable ways the psychedelic folk template in herdy gerdyman
in particular strummed acousti
c guitars open the song with a soft vocal only to be interrupted
by a jarring and prominent sitar which is then followed by a double tracked and heavier folkier
vocal extolling the ways of the hurdy gertie man whoever that is this combination of dylan-esque
lyrics and strumming mixed with the psychedelic template of sitar's and production technique
although psycfolk was less heavy on studio trickery than the other genres proliferated not
only throughout donovan's music but that of jake holm
es who wrote the original dazed and confused
later stolen i i mean covered by led zeppelin sid barrett early mark boland t-rex records
tim buckley and nick drake just to name a few while the sound of psychedelic folk would fade by
the mid-70s it would go on to become influential in the sound of bands like the cure or artists
like robin hitchcock and so these three genres of psychedelic music twisted their way into the
mainstream of popular culture in the late with psychedelic rock fading aw
ay first in favor of a
more back to roots hard rock sound from bands like led zeppelin psychedelic folk held on for a bit
longer before fading into a more mainstream folk sound from artists like james taylor carol king
or jim croche only psychedelic soul lasted into the mid-70s with artists like the aforementioned
funkadelic and the delphonics however that too morphed into something more palatable by the
end of the 70s in the form of disco music now the next question is of course what happe
ned to
the musical template and aesthetic of psychedelia in the 1970s and the answer to that is very
interesting indeed the 1970s were in many ways an inverse of the 1960s while the 60s had ended
in a colorful explosion of genre mashing and collaboration the 70s were highly segmented
bands that had pioneered psychedelic rock ended up spawning descendants that became much
more pared down and lean think the trippy acid rock of the jimi hendrix experience versus the
down-to-earth roots of a b
and like aerosmith and as such much of the previous three
aforementioned strains of psychedelia did indeed die out however the concepts and sounds
pioneered in 60s psychedelia did end up finding new homes in the space music artists of the 1970s
a mainstream band like pink floyd comes to mind as an example of this but even more than that
the obscure underground that contained artists like tangerine dream vangelis jean-michel jar
and brian eno among others were what defined spaced out music i
n the 1970s and while yes
progressive rock was also developing a form of out there music at this time in the form of
bands like yes gentle giant and king crimson its emphasis on tight playing and technical acrobatics
often put it in direct contrast with the expanding space music scene so focusing on space music what
were the characteristics of this genre well if we pull an example from vangelis's heaven and hell
we get a pretty good framework the album contained giant expansive rock tone pa
intings powered by
moore's law advancing synthesizers of the day with heavy classical influences in addition in
an artist like jean-michel jar there was less overt classical influence but more of an emphasis
on the ambiance of the environment see where i'm going with this and this my friends is where we
have to talk about brian eno brian eno's series of albums in the late 70s single-handedly invented
ambient music that is not in doubt in combining earlier influences of people like eric satt
ie a
psychedelic forefather with the modern ability of the studio to create space-like effects eno
developed a style that could be both background and foreground depending on the desires of the
listener now is ambient music psychedelic music there may be disagreement here but due to
its heady and mind-expanding aspects i will classify it as such acts like harold budd daniel
lenoir and later in the 90s oval and aphex twin all furthered psychedelia by using ambient music
to stimulate the inn
er dimensions of the mind but looking at ambient music in the late 70s we can
see that this was in contrast to the much harder edged approach of basically everybody else at
that time and as the 70s drew to a close and punk and new wave were more popular than ever where
would the path for trippy music be in the 1980s was there even a path left to tread the 1980s
at first glance looks like it would be one of the least hospitable decades to the values
pioneered in the psychedelic music from th
e 60s if anything reagan's supply-side economics and
social conservatism appeared to make it at best hospitable to some sort of space age pop revival
foregoing much of psychedelia's ideological stance however major innovations in psychedelic music
did indeed take place during this decade while the paisley underground featuring bands like dream
syndicate and the bengals attempted to revive some of the sounds of the late 60s and did have some
commercial success with this the real sound of psy
chedelia in the 1980s and early 90s was that
of acid house the transition to acid house is the primary progenitor of psychedelia heralded quite
a few important changes to how psychedelic music was produced and perceived in the waning days
of the 20th century primarily psychedelic music became an acoustic form of music due to the way in
which acid house was produced while the previously mentioned ambient and space music artists of the
70s had mostly abandoned guitars as the primary instrumen
t for creating expansive soundscapes
they had still kept real-time playing with the use of synthesizers intact however acid house
fully removed this real-time element by using the roland tb-303 and tr-808 as primary tools
of composition the sound of acid house was as hypnotic as any of the best brian eno ambient
records except on a totally different frequency the much higher bpm indebted the style to disco
which itself had descended from psychedelic soul while the heavy washes of reverb and
phasing
indebted to the experimentalism of artists like vangelis and jean-michel jar in addition values
of free love anti-establishment sentiment and the introduction of ecstasy furthered the rise of
acid house as the new form of psychedelia so much so that in 1988 england declared the country was
in the middle of a quote second summer of love acid house while never exactly having mainstream
hits on the charts continued to dominate the underground and served as a stark alternative to
the
conformist attitudes of 1980s western culture and it laid the bedrock for the even more
twisting and strange turns electronic music would take throughout the 90s now the 90s as an era for
psychedelia was interesting in that many previous styles from the 60s through the space celestial
music of the 70s were revived with an indie or alternative take from bands like jellyfish the
screaming trees or the flaming lips but more prominently it was the shoegaze sound pioneered
by bands like my blood
y valentine and slow dive that brought a spaced out inward experience
back to music and interesting to note at this time psychedelic derived music shifted back away
from electronics to guitars as the primary sound generator of henny sonic architecture as evidenced
by shoegaze now i am not trying to gloss over the 90s as a decade as there was so much innovation
done in so many genres however in terms of strict psychedelia and the tenets we have established to
define it is a little hard to pi
n down movements there were not as many clearly defined ones
as in the aforementioned decades certainly as mentioned before ambient music continued to
evolve and reconstitute itself in strange ways and shugei's continued to innovate and expand what
a guitar could do however outside those two genres the 90s was very much similar to the 70 in that
it paired a lot of things back down and took a much more earthly raw approach to music making
however many of the recording innovations that began
in the 90s specifically the triumph of
digital recording over analog led to numerous new possibilities in psychedelic music so this
brings us to the 2000s through to today where has the ideas and concepts of psychedelia been
in the last 20 years and where is it going well in the 2000s we saw a fusion of multiple different
approaches to psychedelia come together a cosmetic non-acoustimatic guitar-based synthesizer based
and a new element of sample-based psychedelia or sample adelia were all
introduced in this decade
and this bright melange is no better encapsulated than in a band like animal collective with
beach boys s harmonies heavy thick synthesizers and digital manipulation of vocals animal
collective for many people including me who grew up in the 2000s were the definitive
psychedelic band on albums like strawberry jam and meriwether post pavilion animal collective
created a kaleidoscopic sound invoking the best of psychedelia's past present and future their
innovative
blend of sounds influenced everyone from beyonce to the xx on the electronic side of
things the acid house tendencies and brian enoist obsession with ambience come together perfectly
in an artist like john hopkins hopkins himself has explicitly stated that psychedelics and
psychedelic culture and lore play a big part in his music making process and this can be clearly
heard on not only his latest release titled music for psychedelic therapy but especially on an album
like singularity where
a peyote-inspired trip to the desert is soundtracked by some of the greatest
mind-expanding electronic music that has ever been made but artists like frank ocean and jay paul
could be considered part of the grand story of psychedelia on both these artists classic releases
modern timbaland style r b productions are paired with again an element of spaced out electronics
to create a soundscape that is both passionate and celestial in nature and of course we cannot
talk about psychedelia in the
21st century without mentioning the innovations of kevin parker and
tame impala on records such as the now classic currents tame impala truly presents the definitive
form of modern psychedelia digital manipulation heavy guitars vocals treated with new technologies
such as the izotope vocal synth all come together to create a sound tapestry that opens up new paths
forward for spaced out music both on the lighter and heavier side and with acts like king
gizzard and the lizard wizard continuo
usly releasing albums newer alt r b and electronic acts
constantly incorporating psychedelia the genre ideology and mindset seems to have a lot of
life left in it yet psychedelic impulses from the late 19th century to today continue to
be the impetus for musicians to explore the outer reaches of the sonic universe and if the
long storied past of the music is any indicator the future of the music promises to be mighty
mighty trippy my friends so go chill under a tree and listen to everyone f
rom wc to kevin parker
you won't regret it peace and love peace and love you
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