version

Well-known member
A bunch of people running around with their faces painted could be pretty mindblowing on enough acid.
 

version

Well-known member
I'd be interested in hearing whether everyone's in agreement on exactly what 'psychedelic' means.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I'd be interested in hearing whether everyone's in agreement on exactly what 'psychedelic' means.

Good question.

To understand what makes music stylistically "psychedelic," one should consider three fundamental effects of LSD: dechronicization, depersonalization, and dynamization. Dechronicization permits the drug user to move outside of conventional perceptions of time. Depersonalization allows the user to lose the self and gain an "awareness of undifferentiated unity." Dynamization, as [Timothy] Leary wrote, makes everything from floors to lamps seem to bends, as "familiar forms dissolve into moving, dancing structures"... Music that is truly "psychedelic" mimics these three effects.

Wiki
 
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sadmanbarty

Well-known member
not psychadelic this one, but very sad. you can simultaneously hear the genuine optimism of it and the flimsiness of the ideal.

they truly believed it and you can hear it in this song. a new eden awaiting.

i always bang on about this, but there's an interview with robin williamson saying in 1967 he really, truly did believe that there'd be no such thing as money within 18 months. society transformed.

what a let down. one that we've spent the last 50 years mourning and coming to terms with.

 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Has anyone else ever felt the swoon of horror when a utopian psychedelic bubble is burst by some interloping threat?

I'm thinking here of being at a festival where you're having a great time on drugs and then suddenly you see someone having a fit or doing a shit or something. Sundays at festivals, when you begin to see why people SHOULDN'T do drugs all the time.

That's how I imagine the Manson murders effected the hippies.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I'll chuck this in here



Actually, Fincher's 'Zodiac' was sort of about this shift from utopian psychedelic naivety to the outright horror of the 70s.

It's obviously too neat to be true but it's a very powerful story - the innocence of the 60s, the experience of the 70s, the fuckknowswhat of the 80s and 90s and 00s.
 
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sadmanbarty

Well-known member
the drug music of the 70's was pretty grim. the nasty side of drugs.

there also seems a bit of trend that after a mass cultural intake of positive drugs, everyone goes for the amphetamines


 

version

Well-known member
Has anyone else ever felt the swoon of horror when a utopian psychedelic bubble is burst by some interloping threat?

I'm thinking here of being at a festival where you're having a great time on drugs and then suddenly you see someone having a fit or doing a shit or something. Sundays at festivals, when you begin to see why people SHOULDN'T do drugs all the time.

That's how I imagine the Manson murders effected the hippies.

The last night at a festival is almost always completely insane. I remember being at one where there seemed to be huge fires everywhere you looked, a bunch of people brought down this massive flagpole thing and everyone was burning their tents, throwing cans of deodorant into the fires and all sorts -- felt like the end of the world.
 

Leo

Well-known member
I always took it to mean sounds that are otherworldly in some way. floating, drifting, untethered. complicated as opposed to a drifting drone, though. usually in a positive sense but, like every other genre, there's eventually also a dark side. heavy dark psyche: bad acid, bad trips, bad vibes, "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida".
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
I thought was just what LA does to you

It's funny the ideas that people have about LA

(I had them too before I moved here)

(Mark Fisher had a whole thing about LA based entirely on Michael Mann's Heat and the Baudrillard book America)

Most of it is like I dunno High Barnet with sunshine all year around and palm trees instead of plane trees.

Placid and relaxing and pleasantly boring. Lots of lawns. The odd coyote.

Maybe it was more apocalyptic in the Sixties with the bad air and the virulent sunsets on account of the pollution, but i think Jim Morrison would have been like that wherever he lived.

He certainly constructed, or contributed, to an LA mythos - "bloody red sun of fantastic LA"

The Doors's psychedelia isn't the obvious kind of studio trickery type - phasing on the drums, backwards voices, etc etc -- it's that sense of everything being slightly skew, a tinge of paranoia

Estrangement - "Strange Days", "People Are Strange" which is one of their least overtly psychedelic songs sonically but one of the most psychedelic in mood and lyric
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Based on experience of acid is it fair to say that there should be an element of paranoia or fear in any genuinely psychedelic music? As you say, that "the world is weird" thing which can be delightful but also horrendous.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Based on experience of acid is it fair to say that there should be an element of paranoia or fear in any genuinely psychedelic music? As you say, that "the world is weird" thing which can be delightful but also horrendous.

I was going to say all the most potently psychedelic music is bad trip music. I didn’t know if that was just because my formative drug experience were with gross people.
 

version

Well-known member
It's funny the ideas that people have about LA

(I had them too before I moved here)

(Mark Fisher had a whole thing about LA based entirely on Michael Mann's Heat and the Baudrillard book America)

I think I've learned more about American cities from skate vids than anything else. I couldn't tell you much about them, but if I see a particular stair set or whatever I'll be like "Oh, that's on Wilshire Boulevard" or "That's Hollywood High."
 
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