The only music worth its salt is psychedelic..

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
...and by that I mean music which speaks to the existence of transcendent realities.

On this the 75th anniversary of Albert Hoffman discovering LSD.

Because I'm an old fart I'm of the opinion that the reason 99.99% of today's music, young people's music, does not speak to me is that it ISN'T psychedelic.

And I reckon young people too (under 30s) are aware of this gaping hollowness in their music as well. That's why so many of them (and us older people) still fixate on older music that was informed by the psychedelic experience.

I'm talking about the far out music of the 60s/70s/80s/90s.

There are the odd breakouts of insanity after 1996 but not enough to sustain everyone's interest.

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

I disagree. I think most modern music is psychedelic. 21 Savage is a good example - the space - but pretty much any hiphop now, plus all modern dance pop. It's just that the drugs have changed. Modern acid is super lite compared to Leary's dosage, modern psychedelics are different, more functional, leading to a perpetual state of psychedelic being. All music changes are just based on ingestion and the modern pill stuff (oxycontin, laced weed etc) are no less psychedelic, it's just that the states of awareness (see definition of psychedelic) have changed. See also Trump's speech patterns, etc. Everything is psychedelic nowadays. Just not in the way it used to mean.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Simon Posford is an old mate of Woebot's i believe

i'm in sympathy with the general proposition but then i keep thinking of music i love that isn't really psychedelic even if you define psychedelia really loosely and uncouple it from "druggy-sounding" or "drug-taking-conducive".

definitely feels like something is missing - and trying to pin down and characterise the Lack is an interesting challenge

i tried to get at it recently by writing about how there is not a sense of people releasing something in themselves through the music - a feeling of liberation and energy exploding outwards into the world

which is something you got in Sixties rock and pop (almost of all of it, as a base level condition of its existence, i think - so that Lulu records have it as much as the Stones). Then it carried in some way with groovy 70s rock, and then it became something else compeltely with punk (are X-Ray Spex's "Let's Submerge" and "Identity" and "Warrior in Woolworths" et al psychedelic? not really, but the sound is a huge burst of liberation and raging glee even when the lyrics are absolutely cynical / despairing / nihilistic). And it's definitely a quality in the best songs by the Smiths - Morrissey finding the release through music / dance that he can't in actual life.

And so on and so forth .. with rave in all its forms expressive of a renewed Dionysian turbulence

But i don't feel this aspect to be around much in the contemporary listening landscape, which maybe connects or reflects w/ modern uses of technology that numbing / distracting / self-repressing

but in terms of actively druggy music, there is trap - which is druggy but w/o spirituality maybe (different chemicals)

oblivion without transcendence

This is it - sometimes i think Hyper on Experience were the beginning of the end of music.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
this is psychedelic


but modern psychedelia - it's mise en scene is not a meadow in the English countryside or a park in London with ducks grooving in the pond or the Cosmos

it's a strip club
 

martin

----
Crass I wouldn't call psychedelic but v hippieish, as indeed their roots were - look up Wally Hope for the backstory. sonically not v hippie either, lots of dissonance.

Well, as they put it

They formed little groups like rich man's ghettos
Tending their goats and organic tomatoes
While the world was being fucked by fascist regimes
They talked about windmills and psychedelic dreams


I suppose 10 Notes On A Summer's Day might be their most psychedelic moment - though I'm probably one of the three people in the world who doesn't consider that 12" a pile of self-indulgent crap, despite the awful dated 80s synth. Not quite as whacked out as the Eve Libertine / A-Soma album that came out after, though. Not to mention Merry Crassmas.
 

martin

----
A lot of 60s psych is bland and boring. One of the dullest, most over-hyped groups I've ever heard was the 13th Floor Elevators. Supposed to be a psych classic - just sounded like a typical beat group playing basic rock. Some of the stuff that psych obsessives gush over sounds indistinguishable from Mungo Jerry to me.
 
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padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
once mind blowing sounds which subsequently became codified as psychedelic
lotta truth to this - I always think of Hendrix blowing people's minds in a way I absolutely cannot imagine having my mind blown by any kind of music.

tho otoh, some things are timeless. the oldest human music is probably the drum + the drone, literal trance music, often with religious/mystical overtones. I don't think that combination will ever not have huge psychedelic potential, with or without the spiritual element.

it's not just sounds tho. the original psychedelic era (+ to an extent Summer of Love 2.0 etc) had an almost shocking naivete + sense of possibility that can never be recaptured, with the failure of its transcendent realities to materialize in any meaningful way is right there to see. transcendent realities now are related to technology, not drugs. further, we've long since passed through the one-way gate of cynicism, irony, hyper self-awareness.

that doesn't mean people won't continue to make (often excellent) psychedelic musics, just that they won't speak to transcendent realities, which is perhaps the hollowness WB describes

my take, anyway.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Well, as they put it
self-critical hippies but still absolutely hippies. besides Steve Ignorant, he was a punk proper.

+ 10 Notes sucks. even Yes Sir I Will is p bad.

they got stuck in the trap of making music more abrasive to try to get the punks to focus on the politics. see also Flux of Pink Indians.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
A lot of 60s psych is bland and boring
this is absolutely true however. there are some gems but you have to dig thru waves of mediocrity/outright garbage to find them.

most 60s psych to is basically just garage rock. things mostly don't get actually tripped out until the 70s, + the exceptions mostly aren't "psych" how it's normally categorized.
 

martin

----
even Yes Sir I Will is p bad.

they got stuck in the trap of making music more abrasive to try to get the punks to focus on the politics. see also Flux of Pink Indians.

The best thing about Yes Sir was the fold-out poster photo. Just that pic and the Sun headline was enough of a scathing statement about 'the system', the disc was kind of irrelevant. Haven't heard it in years, remember the whole thing sounding like SWP paper sellers yelling reams of diatribe over a bunch of lathe machines, apart from one absurd excursion into Richard Clayderman territory. One of the worst wastes of £3 ever.

Fucking Cunts, on the other hand, is a righteous racket and much better example of how to do that kind of thing, IMO.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
lotta truth to this - I always think of Hendrix blowing people's minds in a way I absolutely cannot imagine having my mind blown by any kind of music.

No doubt it's a case of "you had to be there". You're never going to have the same experience listening at home (or even, with rock and stuff like that, played on a good system in a club or disco or whatever) compared to actually seeing the artist perform live.
 

Woebot

Well-known member
been thinking about this more.

i mean, from a hardcore spiritual perspective, it's just that psychedelic music by and large is the only stuff that communicates at the level of ENLIGHTENMENT. there's precious little music that reaches those levels WITHOUT plants (and chemicals derived from plants). some beethoven innit.

the psychedelic mavens of the 60s-90s were fulfilling the role of spirit guides. they were taking the drugs so you and i didn't have to. THAT was what was mooring the consciousness of the broader society. that was the function that music had which it no longer fulfills.

CERTAINLY in primitive societies that was the role of ritual music - and again it was frequently only the shaman/priest who took the medicine...
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
some beethoven innit.

^Real talk. Probably the most intense drug/music moment I've had was listening to the 9th Symphony just as I'd passed the peak of a mushroom trip that well and truly chewed me up and spat me out.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
the role of ritual music
young people looking - consciously or not - for sacral experience that once would've been solely the province of the religious, mystical

again, idk if you can recreate that the sense of possibility at this point via music. maybe other art forms, multimedia, engaging with technology.

there's also far less mystery in pop culture than there was even 10 years ago let alone 30. everything is branding, there's no real separate underground cultures.

that is actually an interesting to thing to look back on, the degree to which traditional gatekeepers of pop culture completely lost a handle on coolness in the late 60s - record labels hiring house hippies + throwing $ at all kinds of crazy projects, the rise of New Hollywood, etc - for 5-10 years. impossible to imagine something like that happening now, marketing is infinitely more sophisticated + integrated at all levels.

don't have any real answers but it's an interesting topic to speculate on.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
"you had to be there"
that's for anything

I mean specifically people had no frame of reference for what they were hearing

it's kind of a thing that can only happen once - the realization of the possibility of possibilities - afterword it just remains to map the limits of the possible

why I think similar mind-blowing experiences would have to come from new art forms - like the initial impact of film synthesizing various existing arts into a new art form

probably some kinda VR thing

@martin - ya Fucking Cunts is better but still not all that great IMO. both amateurs at doing abrasive agit-noise.

sometimes political rock musicians get this idea they can just do agit pop cos pop (or noise, whatever) is easy, but they're usually wrong, i.e. Le Tigre
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
that's for anything

I mean specifically people had no frame of reference for what they were hearing

I would say it's more important for live music than club music played by a DJ. Of course it's never going to be 1988 (or 1994 or whatever) ever again - that moment has passed - but a certain record is objectively going to sound the same whether it's played now or 30 years ago or 30 years in the future, leaving aside how it feels for the people hearing it. But after 1970 no-one ever got to see Jimi Hendrix perform in the flesh.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
more important for live music than club music played by a DJ
you are misunderstanding me

it's not about how something sounds, it's about completely not having a frame of reference for it - not even imagining the possibility of its possibility

I'm sure live it was much further out, but live or recorded doesn't matter, just lacking the prior frame of reference

like the well-known story of Holger Czukay hearing "I Am the Walrus" + having his mind blown + going on to form Can

gods love u tho + your dogged literalism, Oliver
 
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