This book is a pioneering effort that presents psychedelia as a culture and lifestyle with its own history, philosophy, art, visions, and traditions -- Back cover.
The definitive monograph on the work of celebrated mind-altering artist and album cover designer, Leif Podhajsky. Over the past decade, Leif Podhajsky’s kaleidoscopic artwork has helped popularize the resurgence of psychedelia by reinventing the style for contemporary culture. By exploring the relationship between the organic and digital realms, Podhajsky’s work speaks to a new generation of curious minds. Best known for his striking, Grammy-nominated album covers for musicians, like Foals, Bonobo, Lykke Li, and Young Magic, Podhajsky deftly crosses the boundary between sound and visual art. The reverberating, ethereal vocals of Tame Impala’s debut album Innerspeaker, for instance, are embodied in the visual space of Podhajsky’s iconic, ever-retracting dreamscape cover. Fascinatingly, synaesthesia, which manifests itself for Podhajsky as the appearance of colors with sounds, plays a significant role in his creative process. Music becomes a pebble dropped into a pool of color inside his mind, causing ripples to spread and shades to surface. The results are his hypnotic one-of-a-kind graphics, presented in this volume for the first time.
The ultimate guide to underground sounds 1965-1982. The book features release details and in-depth reviews for more than 5,000 obscure LPs from the USA and Canada, 1965-1982, including reissue data and value ratings. The main genres are psychedelia, garage, folk & folkrock, hippie rock, progressive rock, and hard-rock. There is also a wide selection of interesting and rare singer-songwriter, harmony pop, soft rock, lounge-rock, avant-garde, vanity-pressings and "outsider" albums. This is the first ever comprehensive guide to the vintage musical underground of North America, and opens up a gigantic field of outstanding music that has earlier been exclusive and hard to grasp. There's also a buyer's guide, a glossary, a historical background, fun Top 10 lists, and much more. The massive book is loaded with color images of obscure and trippy album sleeves, posters and band photos, many of which have never been published before, and a foreword by Mike Stax of Ugly Things magazine. Highlights:- The largest selection ever presented of underground albums from North America 1965-1982.- Original release data and in-depth commentary from world-leading rare record experts.- Ratings of LP market value, detailed reissue data, and full color images of rare and trippy albums sleeves.- Special feature essays about rare Exotica, Lounge, '70s Funk & Soul, Southern Rock and New Age albums, written by leading field collectors.- A brand new round of informative and hilarious Top 10 Lists that were a popular part in the first book.
Syd Barrett was an English composer and purveyor of some of the most intriguing music ever written. Famous before his twentieth birthday, Barrett led the charge of psychedelia onstage at London's famed UFO club. With a Fender Telecaster and a primitive Binson echo unit, Barrett liberated the guitar from being, in critic Simon Reynolds' words, 'a riff machine, and turned it into a texture and timbre generator.' His inspired celestial flights of improvisation, and his more structured and whimsical short songs indicated a mind of unusual inventiveness. Chief in Barrett's mind was a Zen-like insistence on spontaneity; each performance had to be unique, and Barrett strived to push his music farther and farther out into the zone of complete abstraction. This in-depth analysis of Pink Floyd founding member Syd Barrett's life and work is the product of years of extensive research. Lost in the Woods traces Syd's swift evolution from precocious young art student to acid-fuelled psychedelic rock star, and examines the myriad musical and literary influences that he utilised in composing his hypnotic, groundbreaking songs. A never-forgotten casualty of the excesses, innovations, and idealism of the 1960s, Syd Barrett is one of the most heavily mythologized men in rock, and Lost in the Woods offers a rare portrayal of a unique spirit in freefall.
It wasn't just clothes and hair that changed as the 1960s progressed - social awareness crept into youth culture and music ceased to be simply about dancing. A counter-culture gradually emerged, and rock 'n' roll was its defining feature. Pop music broadened beyond the traditional guitar-bass-drum format and started to experiment with new sounds. Musicianship reached unsurpassable levels, and for a brief, glorious time, genuinely experimental music coincided with the popular taste. The explosion of imagination and ambition that characterised the psychedelic movement of the late 1960s stretched the possibilities of the pop song to their limits. Never before or since were so many classic albums made in such a short time. Psychedelia is the most colourful, detailed and authoritative guide to these albums ever published. One hundred of them are evaluated here, using contemporary reviews, rare photographs and interviews, accompanied by a plethora of iconic images and reproductions of cover artwork.
In the early 1950s, the leading centre of the world for LSD research was Weyburn, Saskatchewan, where two psychiatrists sought to revolutionize the treatment of mental illness and, in the process, gave rise to a new form of therapy: psychedelic psychiatry. Psychedelic Psychiatry is the tale of medical researchers working to understand LSD’s therapeutic properties just as escalating anxieties about drug abuse in modern society laid the groundwork for the end of experimentation at the edge of psychopharmacology. Historian Erika Dyck deftly recasts our understanding of LSD to show it as an experimental substance, a medical treatment, and a tool for exploring psychotic perspectives. She recounts the inside story of the early days of LSD research in small-town, prairie Canada, when Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer claimed incredible advances in treating alcoholism, understanding schizophrenia and other psychoses, and achieving empathy with their patients. In relating the drug’s short, strange trip, Dyck explains how societal concerns about countercultural trends led to the criminalization of LSD and other so-called psychedelic drugs. In this well-written and fascinating book, she confronts the ethical dilemmas of the time and challenges the prevailing wisdom behind drug regulation and addiction therapy.
Recognized for its distinctive musical features and its connection to periods of social innovation and ferment, the genre of psychedelia has exerted long-term influence in many areas of cultural production, including music, visual art, graphic design, film, and literature. William Echard explores the historical development of psychedelic music and its various stylistic incarnations as a genre unique for its fusion of rock, soul, funk, folk, and electronic music. Through the theory of musical topics—highly conventional musical figures that signify broad cultural concepts—and musical meaning, Echard traces the stylistic evolution of psychedelia from its inception in the early 1960s, with the Beatles' Rubber Soul and Revolver and the Kinks and Pink Floyd, to the German experimental bands and psychedelic funk of the 1970s, with a special emphasis on Parliament/Funkadelic. He concludes with a look at the 1980s and early 1990s, touching on the free festival scene, rave culture, and neo–jam bands. Set against the cultural backdrop of these decades, Echard's study of psychedelia lays the groundwork and offers lessons for analyzing the topic of popular music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
First published in 1979, Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered is regarded by many as the most comprehensive, accurate, and accessible analysis of psychedelic drugs for the general reader. It records the extensive history of scientific research on, and societal experience with, psychedelic drugs. The Lindesmith Center reprint edition features a new introduction by the authors on recent developments in psychedelic research, as well as a preface by Dr. Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Lindesmith center.
Psychedelic music is a fascinating yet under-researched field of study. This thought-provoking collection offers a broad introduction to the field of psychedelic music studies, bringing together scholarly work on psychedelic music in genres like rock, folk, electronic dance music and pop. Through an expanded purview on psychedelic music, an emerging trend in research, the collection affords students and academics alike an introduction to a rich, multi-faceted field. The contributing authors explore a range of different facets of musical psychedelia: its transgressive and transcendent aspects, its foregrounding of timbre and texture, the way it changes our perception of time, its influence on “non-psychedelic” music, key composition and production techniques that composers and musicians use in its creation, how it is mediated by different places and spaces, and the interplay between psychedelic visual and sonic aesthetics. This interdisciplinary work reveals both commonalities in musical psychedelic experiences and the contestation inherent in a field of study that juxtaposes music of different genres and eras with a variety of theoretical approaches and methodologies. In broadening the scope of psychedelic music research, the collection not only makes for varied and absorbing reading on the subject level but also stimulates reflexive thought about interdisciplinary research.
Psychedelics are part of a resurgence of interest in consciousness studies, especially as altered states of consciousness are being re-examined in the context of psychedelic-assisted therapies. To date, discussions about psychedelics in modern medicine have been dominated by studies in biomedicine. However, given that cultural factors play a significant role in the subjective effects of psychedelics, psychedelics can be considered a uniquely powerful point of convergence between the cultural and biomedical. Writers and artists, alongside psychiatrists and pharmacologists, have participated in shaping ‘the psychedelic experience’ by drawing on a rich set of approaches that blend narrative, arts, and humanities concepts to explain and interpret psychedelic experiences and explore consciousness for creative purposes. Psychedelic studies, past and present, emphasize the importance of ‘set and setting’ or the context of psychedelic consumption and its paramount importance in shaping psychedelic experiences. These non-pharmacological factors rely on a different set of methods and interpretations that necessarily rely on studies conducted outside of the biomedical sciences.