60's Dad Canon Psychedelia
- Thread starter sadmanbarty
- Start date
I kind of agree with them, though - I've listened to a fair chunk of this stuff, from twee British psych (like Kaleidoscope, Open Mind, Bulldog Breed, etc) to the (preferable, IMO) US stuff on compilation series like Nuggets, Acid Visions, Pebbles, etc. Some of it's great, but most of these 'psych classics' just sound like straightforward garage pop tunes now - I really don't get the 'mind-bending' qualities? The 13th Floor Elevators sounded particularly dull, I've never understood the hype around them.
The only 'psych' I've heard that really came close would be Time Machine by Satori, Bend Me, Shape Me by The Models and Now by Paysleys (can't be arsed to paste the YT links) - which ALL do sound fucked up to various degrees. I guess even those are about as 'psychedelic' as ramping up the reverb? But to be honest, the most 'psychedelic' music I've heard was the industrial/noise/experimental stuff that came way later.
To be fair though, you only have to listen to a couple of minutes of Miles Davis to realise it's rubbish that sociology lecturers buy to stick next to the pot plant in their offices, and never play.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
:crylarf:
I think there's a thread somewhere, or a post in one, where either I or someone else brought up the atrocious taste that seems to emerge from psychedelic experimentation. The tie dye, the magic eye patterns, the eastern bric a brac, neon, the garish trashbag hippie aesthetic. Perhaps there's something fundamentally tasteless about psychedelics. (Or so it seems to our coffee, fags, cocaine classicist eyes.)
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Another question - where is the psychedelic in music now? I did that thread about Acid rap but maybe that was just wishful thinking? Still, perhaps there's even something comparable in rap music that retains the formulaic concerns of more tradrap while making rappers sound like castratos from venus.
I've not heard many rappers talk about acid/lsd, it's more molly, xannies, sizzurp - but presumably these things, especially taken together (+ binbagfulls of industrial grade skunk) have psychedelic effects.
I've not heard many rappers talk about acid/lsd, it's more molly, xannies, sizzurp - but presumably these things, especially taken together (+ binbagfulls of industrial grade skunk) have psychedelic effects.
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Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Say what you like about this 60s stuff but it has a naivety and dreaminess about it that you won't find in modern pop, much less modern rock. (I say confidently, not having listened to any modern rock since about 2005.) Even silly stuff now feels pristinely manufactured, airbrushed and coiffured.
That could be another connection with acid rap, insofar as to those people who aren't fans of it is probably just sounds utterly ridiculous. The babyish voices. There's something infantile about it. Something emotionally unresolved too, between celebration/partying and underlying or blatant sadness.
That could be another connection with acid rap, insofar as to those people who aren't fans of it is probably just sounds utterly ridiculous. The babyish voices. There's something infantile about it. Something emotionally unresolved too, between celebration/partying and underlying or blatant sadness.
pattycakes_
Can turn naughty
Careful what you wish for
luka
Well-known member
Answer the question patty
luka
Well-known member
I've always known about this (HHC had it on their top 100 hip hop albums of all time) but never listened before. It's very much in the cypress hill, funkdoobiest vein. wheezing organs. frat boy drums. Not some mad cosmic escape from the templates of the time. Standard stuff with rapping about acid on top. I thought it would be dreadful but not so generic.
I collect turkish psych and i can safely say the english american stuff is uniformly terrible and un-psychedelic, even compared to free jazz and its bluesy tones that signal something beyond, germany and japan have good stuff though. it's like taking a shoom playlist of balearic and calling it acid house, we do this a lot in the UK because of our imperial arrogance and our class disdain.
luka
Well-known member
Everyone's waiting patty. Can you answer the question please.
naivete is huckstering in 2019 though, even this forum proves it to be so with the constant default to oh what have we lost, why are we so self-aware? one has to move the times and create the fashion, not *follow it*
pattycakes_
Can turn naughty
Can - Tago Mago, Spacemen 3, The Soft Machine - Third, Hindustani stuff, Gnaoua, Maurice Fulton, Balearic, New Age, Les Rallizes Denudes, Wally Badarou's synthetic africa, Khan and Walker, Sabbath, Lee Perry. Countless disco/post disco tracks. Loads of 70s jazz/fusion. Although most of the miles for me is more pcp, cocaine. Asymmetric rhythms gnawing away at your sense of grip. Lots of fx to refract the sounds into the otherworld. Shifting layers, interlocking, dispersing, oscillating. Constant evolution. Tiny details you barely notice. Songs/suites as journeys. Coming back to a theme. Impending doom. Discombobulation. Repetition with subtle variations. Flipping everything inside out. Reality slipping through your fingers. The sound of the ancient. Glacial structures shattering into infinite fragments into infinite particles into liquid and then reforming into your favourite childhood pet. Hendrix. Bedouin Ascent. Most of what was posted in The Depths thread. It's hard because of all the variables. Did you have mostly good or bad times tripping? Did you have both but only remember one? Was it the most traumatic thing ever? But in a good way? Did Gaia caress you? Or was it some withered old toothless toad? Buckets of effluent? Crystal goblets of molten love? Was it throbbing gristle, plastikman or something from bunker records (wassup third) ? Sometimes I think parliament funkadelic nailed it and with some pretty healthy dollops of whimsy. But yeah, it's pretty fkn hard to pin it down. And the harder you try the further away it gets from you. Like a trip innit.
IdleRich
IdleRich
It seems to me that the time lsd became available to the average person (or the average turned on person) was the 60s and whatever music was being made at the time was gonna end up being called psychedelic. It's not really a question of whether you (we) find it psychedelic now. Of course the drugs affected the music and made the sound (which was dominantly guitar) a bit weirder than it was before, and then that became a style, a short hand for psychedelia which wash disappointing if inevitable. But I think you've got the question the wrong way round asking "why don't I find this psychedelic?".
sadmanbarty
Well-known member
mumble rap is a return to a lot of the 60's notions of psychedelia. the folk revival and fourth world instrumentals. references to folklore and myth. whimsy. dreamy weightlessness. infantilism. the psychedelic shirts. references to nature and animals.
crucial difference is that geometry as i was talking about earlier. it's hyper fragmented. it's stimulation intensive (the quality that seems to separate 60's psychedelia from all psychedelia since).
I'm not sure if I buy this! indeed the 60s stuff codifies the building blocks of lsd music per se but the idea of turning on tuning in and dropping out just seems to be a cult of indolence and poverty tourism. one is not actually sure what they are dropping out of given that it was so wide spread and if not approved of, implicitly tolerated by mainstream society. the black panthers were dropping out of society, yet that is a far cry from tim leary's dilettantish dogshite.
And also there has always been that avant-prole wing of lsd right through the gay scene of disco that was more congruent with the mod scene staying up all night to blow out the fuse.
Even if we go to acid house times, a tab of E was what, £20? unaffordable for most, speed+acid was the drug of choice unless you were in with the shoom crowd.
speaking of which, why do i struggle to get acid at disco nights in the 2010s, esp after 2013? supply must have dried up. all them extended walter gibbons and shep pettibone mixes with the afrocuban drum bits are perfect to trip out on, not the italo stuff though...
khan and walker definitely. rest of that list is also co-signed by me, apart from new age though, worst crime in music alongside brian eno.
have you managed to source any of the stuff khan did as el turko loco?
another one is freddy fresh. before he did that fatboy slim stuff he was making some amazing resonant psychedelic midwest techno at 1000mph, all of his tunes from like 93-96 are basically killer. real freakbeats warehouse gear.
thomas brinkmann and vainio good also, though more for the austere trips where you just want to witness something minimal rotating subtly.
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