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most psychedelic record you've heard?
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Astralcat
Astralcat
742 posts

Re: most psychedelic record you've heard?
Feb 20, 2015, 09:28
espsummer wrote:
I think its hard to convey to others what "psychedelic" really is. I think most people generally think its what you "trip out" too......but my favorite psychedelic albums often are the ones that ground you and give you that interconnectedness that blows you away while undergoing a trip.

Good Vibe Psych favorites are:

Donovan: A Gift From a Flower to a Garden (you can live inside this album)
Pearls Before Swine: These Things Too
Kaleidoscope: Faintly Blowin'
Pink Floyd: Piper at the Gates.....

Trip Out music

United States of America (Broadcast built a career off the first track of their first lp)
Mark Wirtz (as producer from 1967 to 1969) "mr. weatherman"
Beach Boys: Smile (official or unofficial bootlegs, always fascinating)


I don't necessarily think you have to get particularly obscure to be the "most psychedelic". Some of the best are actually the most popular like Love's "forever changes" ect. I also love cheesy psych like the Strawberry Alarm Clock. Hell they had some great songs actually.


Great choices - the only ones I'm unfamiliar with are United States Of America and mark Wirtz. On the must check out list!
Hunter T Wolfe
Hunter T Wolfe
1701 posts

Re: most psychedelic record you've heard?
Feb 20, 2015, 10:57
Really good question. I'm going to have to think about it.

It did make me recall however how when I was at school out in the sticks in the 80s a bunch of us had just started smoking weed and went to the local record shop asking for the most psychedelic record he had. At the time we knew virtually nothing about the genre, beyond Relics and a few other things. Anyway he was pretty clued up and played us bits of all the usual suspects- I don't know, Dead, Airplane, Seeds etc- and it all just sounded like heavy blues to us. I think what we really wanted would have been some far out free jazz or something. Anyway we eventually left with Spirit's 12 Dreams of Dr Sardonicus on the strength of the title and the cover, even though it still wasn't what we were looking for. It took me years to appreciate how great that record is!

Also even though it may not be the "most" psychedelic record I've heard and is really obvious, 'Strawberry Fields Forever' still stands for me as an archetype of the form. It would almost certainly have been the first psychedelic record I ever heard, probably on Radio 2 when I was 5 years old or younger. It was just so obviously in a different universe to all the pop music and soft rock that surrounded it- it intrigued me and creeped me out at the same time. It seemed to descend into some forbidden dark underworld. The sneered vocals and the sense of ennui and rejection of society linked it to punk in my mind eventually. Psychedelia seemed to me to be like punk in that it was saying NO to a lot of what we take for granted. It wasn't until I actually took psychedelics that I realised it was also saying a big YES.
spencer
spencer
3065 posts

Re: most psychedelic record you've heard?
Feb 20, 2015, 11:11
I have been musing about this this morning, and on logging in again it seems we are of like mind, agree with your choices.
Astralcat
Astralcat
742 posts

Re: most psychedelic record you've heard?
Feb 20, 2015, 11:19
Strawberry Fields. A towering achievement. If I could have that along with See Emily Play, then I'd have in my opinion, the two greatest singles ever released, as well as being the two pinnacles of psych pop. If I can make it an ep, I'd put Tomorrow Never Knows on it as well.

Here's Peter Hamill:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJJ7gQBdrZw
tyroneshoelaces
38 posts

Re: most psychedelic record you've heard?
Feb 20, 2015, 11:46
I think the first Country Joe and the Fish lp fits the bill for the era. Maybe The Madcap Laughs by Syd Barrett for sheer musical and lyrical strangeness. I often think of the first Suicide lp as rather drugged up, but probably not on psychedelics. I have to give a mention to Fried, by our host. I hated it when it first came out and gave him a swerve from then on. Coming back to it recently, I can hail it as a work of perverse genius and better than the over-praised Peggy Suicide. (Other opinions are available)
tyroneshoelaces
38 posts

Re: most psychedelic record you've heard?
Feb 20, 2015, 11:47
The USA record is certainly offbeat and unusual for its time. Psychedelic? not sure about that.
spencer
spencer
3065 posts

Re: most psychedelic record you've heard?
Feb 20, 2015, 11:55
Apart from Spirit's Twelve Dreams, I would recommend what I regard as their magnum opus, which to me fits the bill even more, Future Games. I have not partook for many years, but this was a very good accompaniment. Another which I cannot praise highly enough would be Holger Czukay's Movies. As for the Floyd, the spirit of Syd lingered as far as Ummagumma, even part of AHM. Some Dead certainly would fall into this category, and I would love to hear the version of Dark Star on last year's Sunshine Daydream box. John Oswald/Dead's Greyfolded is a deeply weird thing too. Do not forget and give maximum respect to Gong's You....what memories I have from adventures back then are fond. Some Plastic Ono Band must surely have been 'fuelled'. AMT, natch. To me, the Prince of Psychedelia back in the '70's was: TERRY RILEY. Yes, A Rainbow In Curved Air deserves its popularity, but such a lot of his other output should be more widely known, eg Persian Surgery Dervishes, a personal favourite, and subsequent output. Henry Flynt and CC Hennix deserve a mention. What must be remembered, though, is that music has been made 'under the influence' for thousands of years. The only other mention of traditional music I've seen so far has been the Master Musicians of Joujouka. I bought an Ocora Records traditional music sampler by coincidence last week, which featured music from Gabon, and when I saw this topic I did a google for 'African hallucogens', which lead to peoples who partook, and, lo and behold, back to Gabon. Do a search for 'Youtube Bwiti'/Youtube Ibogo/both. Doubtless a search for South American hallucogens would prove just as fruitful musically, perhaps Smithsonian or Folkways? Russian shamanic music too? These people have had millennia to hone their music.
Astralcat
Astralcat
742 posts

Re: most psychedelic record you've heard?
Feb 20, 2015, 12:04
So much to check out.

Has anyone mentioned Taj Mahal Travellers or Parson Sound yet ? I have this place to thank for getting in to them.
Monganaut
Monganaut
2365 posts

Edited Feb 20, 2015, 12:22
Re: most psychedelic record you've heard?
Feb 20, 2015, 12:22
I only ever partly dug The USA album. Much preferred the Delia Derbyshire ensemble White Noise from a coupla years later.
Some parts of 'An ELectric Storm' are pretty psyched out (esp Black Mass track).
White Noise - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZG8CE2KnBQ

The Electric Flag's - Trip OST is pretty fukt up in parts too.

Spectrum - Forever Alien has some groovy oscillator action
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_hD_Q_8iyc&list=PLqqAcnBAzQaOI46aIAdhBnC2HfSzClKfi

Inna 60's trad psych stylee - The Lemon Pipers - Green Tambourines is pretty tuneful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LztdNWabY8
Not sure it fits the Stevo remit of Trepanned mind fuckery though.
Popel Vooje
5373 posts

Edited Feb 24, 2015, 11:22
Re: most psychedelic record you've heard?
Feb 20, 2015, 13:51
I'd nominate "Tago Mago", in the sense that I always suspected it was specifically sequenced to replicate the ebbs and flows of a trip (a trick also attempted by Todd Rundgren on "A Wizard, A True Star", but with less consistently far-out results). Obviously, it had to be condensed in order to fit within the time constraints of a double vinyl album, and it IS pure speculation on my part admittedly, but it makes sense.

"Paperhouse" is the anticipatory moment when your skin begins to tingle and your heart starts to beat just that little bit faster. "Mushroom" is the point after an hour or so when full-blown disorientation begins to kick in and you think "better batten down the hatches - it's going to be a bumpy ride". "Oh Yeah" is the point where you surrender to the flow and the chair you're sitting in starts to feel like a bottomless pit of jelly.

By the time "Halleluwah" starts up - curse those old-fashioned record-players, because you dropped the sodding thing and scratched it whilst trying to turn it over - your perception of time has gone all awry, to the extent where it ceases to matter whether the track you're listening to is four or eighteen minutes long. By "Augmn", your surroundings appear as distorted as if you were viewing them in a fairground mirror, and the synaesthesia becomes so overwhelming that everything - even the water you're drinking - feels like it's being processed through a vintage analogue delay pedal that's somehow lodged itself in the centre of your frontal lobes.

"Peking O", meanwhile, is when your ego shatters, you bark at the moon, and laugh hysterically at everything and everybody (including yourself) and bark at the moon, whilst "Bring Me coffee or Tea" is the serene and reflective comedown. Then some asshole gets up and puts on Back to the Planet. Thanks a bunch, former flatmate.

I could also regale you with colourful tales of the time when me and two colleagues at the studio I used to work in attempted to negotiate the Flaming Lips' "Zaireeka" whilst zonked on shrooms, but that would probably require one of those "331/3" books to do the experience justice.
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