The only music worth its salt is psychedelic..

luka

Well-known member
http://www.paratheatrical.com/pages/talkingraven/INTOXICATION.html
FIFTH CIRCUIT: SOMATIC-HEDONIC TRANCE

Disconnected from the previous goals and survival concerns of Circuits 1-4, this center is the opening of the five senses as the chief source of all life and relevant information. Being Here Now. The natural sensory rhythms and impulses of the body uncensored by mental, emotional or moral intervention. The hedonic needs for rapture, bliss and ecstatic experience. The post-survival quest for nirvana. When frustrated, the despair and spiritual discontent of "entrapment in the corporeal world of survival issues." When over-emphasized, excessive hedonism becomes debauch, dispersion and disintegration of personal integrity and concentration, ie., "spaced out bliss ninnies." Ecstacy Junkies. When hedonic needs are met, a state of charismatic magnetism infuse the personality, as seen with some rock stars, film celebrities and performing artists. HEDONIC CATALYSTS: Empathogens (MDMA, etc.). cannabis, opium, hashish, lower doses of psilocybin, Tantric and Hatha yoga, listening to music (subjective assessment), sex magick, performing live dance and live theatre, Sufi whirling dervishes, ecstatic pagan rituals, falling in love, endorphin rushes from "second wind" states (long distance running and working out), verbal fasting (mandatory silence), zen meditation. OVERDOSE SYMPTOMS: "Spaciness." Loss of meaningful connection with "consensus reality" sometimes showing poor time management and an oblivion to the emotions, thoughts and ethics of others. Time/spatial disorientation and distortions. Difficulty articulating, ie., "Like, wow, man..."
 

luka

Well-known member
SIXTH CIRCUIT: NEURO-PSYCHIC TRANCE.

"Brain pleasure"; the subjective absorption of intense light. Opening of the "third eye", clairvoyance, telepathy and other supersensual, or psychic, abilities. Incoming signals are registered at light speed and translated by an active intuition, unencumbered by empirical demands of linear ideation. The Self-Aware Brain. Future-oriented vision; premonitions, precognitions and prophecy. The psychic need for seeing and knowing things as they are, beyond the illusions, dreams and fantasies projected by previous states. When frustrated, the "sixth sense" atrophies and psychic, or soul, death ensues. When over-emphasized nervous disorders, hallucinations and mental illnesses develop in the struggle to act and respond to the influx of overwhelming impressions. Vision, or Truth, Addiction. When psychic needs are met, lucidity stabilizes perception to accept things as they are while seeing through the scams, the lies, and the illusions often shrouding them. This lucidity can also illuminate the truth of things to the world and in others. PSYCHIC CATALYSTS: Kundalini and Raja yogas, Rajneesh's chaotic meditations, surviving the loss of a loved one, higher doses of psilocybin, mescaline, peyote, LSD, "Heavenly Blue" morning glory seeds, near-death experiences, sense-deprivation, isolation tanks, solitary confinement, intensive Buddhist retreats, Antero Alli's paratheatrical ritual technology, video/filmmaking and editing processes. OVERDOSE SYMPTOMS: Paranoia. Schitzophrenic fragmentation. Loss of emotion and meaningful connection with the feelings of others. Psychotic breaks. Violence.
 

bruno

est malade
Is there a properly modern psychedelic music? Is the dreaming going on in other arenas of culture?

unequivocally, yes.

there is a local scene here that has all the hallmarks of psychedelia: music as communal experience (shared band members, little rivalry, local following), awful lp art/branding, mantric principles in music (drone, ecstatic sound) and a tendency to stretch things out in a way that is very psychedelic. it has been around for some time (eg. tobias alcayota in late 90s) but started to pick up in the late 00s. at its best it feels like gliding over the music in slow motion leading to losing oneself in sound..

there is a small audience for this, for example last week a full cosmic sound and camera (surprisingly good berlin band) to a packed house, then chicos de nazca on thursday in top form. i believe there is a similar psych/kraut thing going on elsewhere, eg. minami deutsch in japan, but here it's more loop than can if that makes sense. so a repetition of the early 90s in communal feeling and trance sound. this scene is now petering out, and it's debatable how novel the sound is, but psychedelia is alive and well in the most unlikely of places, at least for the time being.

examples in every time/style:

tobias alcayota, 1999

chicos de nazca, 2011

glorias navales, 2016

la hell gang, 2014
 
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luka

Well-known member
it's probably easier to think of psychedelic like Balearic. in that a record becomes Balearic, or rather the Balearic elements of a record are foregrounded by putting it in a Balearic context.

as opposed to a genre per se. there is a generic psychedelia operating in the same way as happy hardcore or psytrance does now.
out of step with time. just supplying a kind of universal generic revelation or unchanging initiatory ritual.
but that is, uninteresting.
 

firefinga

Well-known member
I'd say this "cosmic" stuff Played in discos and at parties in northern Italy/southern Germany from the late 1970s - mid 1980s was quite psychedelic too. There are threads on this pehnomenon on here and also loads of digitized mixtapes on youtube. DJ Baldelli etc. :)
 

luka

Well-known member
I'd say this "cosmic" stuff Played in discos and at parties in northern Italy/southern Germany from the late 1970s - mid 1980s was quite psychedelic too. There are threads on this pehnomenon on here and also loads of digitized mixtapes on youtube. DJ Baldelli etc. :)

there's a Baldelli thread somehwere here \Woebot started
 

luka

Well-known member
out of step with time. just supplying a kind of universal generic revelation or unchanging initiatory ritual.
but that is, uninteresting.

i mean this is a dissensus commonplace i know. but still meaningful to me.
the difference between in a fluid medium (as this is) eddies, stagnant isolated pools
and
an active current in the mainstream, an identifiable strand within that wider surge forward into time

it is a fluid medium. the push displaces. causes currents and counter-currents, waves and eddies, different trajectories, clashing and converging, joining and breaking apart. curved lines coupling and uncoupling, tripling and rippling, expanding ovoids of liquid light. Eureka.
 

Woebot

Well-known member
it's probably easier to think of psychedelic like Balearic. in that a record becomes Balearic, or rather the Balearic elements of a record are foregrounded by putting it in a Balearic context.

BALEARIC!!!! That's exactly right!!! Finding the psychedelic aspects of pop.

I don't think truly psychedelic pop is false consciousness though. Very Marxist argument.

 

luka

Well-known member
it's not the argument im making exactly. just wondered if it was a corollary of your first proposition
(only psychedelic counts)
 

Woebot

Well-known member
it's not the argument im making exactly. just wondered if it was a corollary of your first proposition
(only psychedelic counts)

it is a pretty good point though. i'll have to think. certainly here in the office we tried to think of examples of this kind of thing and we ran out of examples towards the end of the nineties (predictably enough i guess)

 

luka

Well-known member
it would be difficult, to say the least, to argue that radical, liberating, revolutionary, paradigm-shifty, subversive, cosmic etc elements don't and can never, by definition, enter into pop music (pop music as music targeted at the charts rather than anything whatsoever that ends up selling well) but i do think that in terms of the incentive structures, the whole machinery of how records get made and marketed, it perverts the cultural process, captures it and deforms it.

(not that anything is ever pure and not that 'art' can never survive any encounter with capitalism or whatever)
 
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luka

Well-known member
another reminder that radical sobreity is often much more out there than the bracketed drug experience precisely becasue the ( ) aren't there

But let's dispense with one of the lazy, hazy assumptions we're all prone to fall into whenever we hear the word 'cybernetics'. Cybernetics does not only refer to technical machines. Wiener call it the study of control and communication in animals and machines (btw: why leave out plants?). Its principal discovery is 'feedback' - a system's capacity to reflect and act upon its own performance. So, as Luke and I were discussing the other day, the whole point of cybernetics is that nothing is 'more cybernetic' than anything else. There are only systems with more or less feedback, and diffferent types of feedback (k+, k-, k0.) So if the word 'cybernetics' calls up only gleaming steel you have the wrong association.

If cyborgianism is oriented towards a maintenance and reproduction of the organism and its homeostatic control circuitries, Cyberpunk or k-punk (one of the motivations for the 'k' btw is the origin of the word 'cyber' in the Greek 'kuber') flees towards a cybernetics of organic disassembly. Again, let's be clear here. You don't disassemble the human organism by replacing its parts with metal or silicon components. (That's why the term 'cyborg' - or 'cybernetic organism' is misleadingly redundant. All organisms are already cybernetic). What matters is the overall organization of the parts. Do the parts operate as hierarchically organized and functionally-specified 'organs' within a cybernegatively construed interiority or do they operate as deterritorialized potentials pulling from/ towards the Outside?
 

luka

Well-known member
feedback is vital cos its a snooker table not a pool table. or its like launching a probe for a distant planet. ant tiny initial miscalculation multiplied exponentially so you end up missing by miles. but with feedback you can adjust the trajectory in real time.
when you shut out the feedback you will becomes force, the point at which it ensures its own failure.
 
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