psychedelia
Kieron Tyler
Signs of irrevocable change materialised in December 1965. On Wednesday the 8th, a new band named The 13th Floor Elevators debuted live at The Jade Room in Austin, Texas. Band members prepared for the experience by taking LSD in the run-up to the booking. Within a couple of weeks, they had a business card describing them as playing “psychedelic rock.”Three days later, on the 11th, another new band was seen by a paying audience for the first time. The Velvet Underground played in a support slot at Summit High School in New Jersey. Two numbers in their set were titled “Heroin” and “Venus in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any compilation with a track credited to “Unknown Artist” is always going to entice, especially when it’s one which goes the full way by digging into original master tapes to find the best audio sources and previously unearthed nuggets. In this case, it’s not known who recorded “To Make a Lie”, a dark, menacing cut where a disembodied voice intones about the threat of a giant willow tree (“it’s coming!”), evil, pain and walking into eternity over a doomy organ, spiralling guitar and draggy drums. As it ends – a female scream. Bad trip vibes.“To Make a Lie” was found in the archives associated Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bergen’s Electric Eye’s pithy description of themselves is “psych-space-drone-rock from Norway.” They also say they “play droned out psych-rock inspired by the blues, India and the ever-more expanding universe.” Horizons is their fourth studio album.They’ve been honing what they do for just short of a decade. Their drummer Øyvind Hegg-Lunde has also regularly played with folk and jazz individualists Building Instrument and Erlend Apneseth Trio. Guitarist and keyboard player Njål Clementsen has been in post-rock/psych-rock bands The Low Frequency In Stereo and The Megaphonic Thrift. Amongst Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Between August 1966 and November 1967, The Syn played 36 shows at London’s high-profile Marquee Club. In June and September 1967 they issued two singles on the happening Decca subsidiary Deram, an imprint scoring hits with releases by Cat Stevens, The Move and Procol Harum. The Syn’s singles were voguish: tracks included the flower-power referencing “Flowerman” and “14 Hour Technicolour Dream,” its title borrowed from the recent underground event at Alexandra Palace. Amongst The Syn’s members were Peter Banks and Chris Squire, who went on to Yes. Regardless of all this, The Syn did not click Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Reaffirmation” is the sound of a San Francisco ballroom in 1968. The 12-minute long track opens mysteriously with what might be a Mellotron on the flute setting. A bubbling bass guitar arrives, along with jazzy piano. At 02.50, the tempo picks up and the guitar, which until then has delicately picked its way through the arrangement, begins to soar. There’s a vaguely funky section and, just over half-way in, a dive into an almost free-form spiralling section. This is top-notch psychedelia. Dungen have passed through similar territory.Other parallels include the first-album Steve Miller Band Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Following in the slipstream of wide critical acclaim for posthumous album Mutator, released earlier this year, comes Alan Vega After Dark by the former Suicide frontman. It’s a starkly different album to its predecessor, swapping concrete collisions and considered collages for the tremolo tones of vintage rock and roll, the driving krautrock energy of 70s Dusseldorf and the space cadet cadence of… well, of Alan Vega.Vega’s last live band recording, made in 2015 in collaboration with members of Pink Slip Daddy, a band similarly steeped in the spirit of rock and roll and the pure power of Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The endless circles and spirals that dance music moves in can take you to some strange places.It is, after all, a little peculiar that a producer from California, who was first turned on to DJing by the edgy, claustrophobic, ultra-modernist sound of Chicago’s footworking DJs, should on her debut album sound like a blissed-out, hazy sunrise at a hippie rave somewhere in the English countryside 30 years ago. But Tomu DJ has captured a very specific mood and moment that feels slightly outside of time so well that this doesn’t even feel like a nostalgia piece. Back between 1991 and 1994 Read more ...
Joe Muggs
For 25 years now, LA label Stones Throw records has become one of the most reliable brands in music. It began with, and has always been associated with, the leftfield hip hop of founder George “Peanut Butter Wolf” Manak, and regular contributors Madlib and J Dilla. But from very early on, it was heavily invested also in the music that hip hop sampled, signing live bands, mining archives for reissue and providing platforms for underappreciated musical elders, always with emphasis on the strange and stoned – so in fact its aesthetic overall is probably better summed up as psychedelic soul Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Craig Fortnam’s music – solo or in the bands North Sea Radio Orchestra and Arch Garrison – sounds like a lot of things. It sounds like the 70s prog-folk-jazz interface of Kevin Ayres and Robert Wyatt as its influence feeds on into Kate Bush. When he starts looping things up or letting synthesisers dominate, it hints at early 90s electronica. His plaintive singing and natural surrealism frequently recall the early '00s folktronica songwriting of Mike Lindsay and Sam Genders in Tunng. A lot of the time you can even feel like you’re only a sackbut away from things going entirely medieval. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Instability coursed through the Yardbirds in 1966. When their first studio album Yardbirds was issued in July, the band seen on stage was not the one which had made the album. Bassist and in-house producer Paul Samwell-Smith had left between its recording and release. His replacement was session player Jimmy Page. In time, Page switched to guitar to play alongside Jeff Beck, and guitarist Chris Dreja moved to bass. Next, Beck was off and the new four-piece Yardbirds had one guitarist: Jimmy Page. All this happened between mid-June and the end of November 1966.There had already been upsets. Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Emma-Jean Thackray is not lacking in audaciousness. This is, after all, a white woman from Leeds barely into her thirties, raised on bassline house and indie rock, making music whose most obvious comparisons are with some of the most revered (in the most literal sense) black musicians in modern history: Fela Kuti, Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, Stevie Wonder, J Dilla and more. And what’s more, she suggests this album will “simulate a life-changing psychedelic experience, an hour where we see behind the curtain to a hidden dimension”, packs it full of full-bore, third-eye-open omnitheistic Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Empty Sky, Elton John’s first album was released in June 1969. Now, an album titled Regimental Sgt. Zippo has turned up. It’s marketed as “The debut album that never was.” The 12 tracks are annotated loosely as having been recorded from November 1967 to May 1968.Regimental Sgt. Zippo is great. The album opens with “When I Was Tealby Abbey”: string-drenched psychedelic pop easily as good as the early Blossom Toes or a Mark Wirtz confection. As the album goes on, what was being absorbed is evident. The Zombies are in there. “And the Clock Goes Round” has the rolling piano chassis of The Left Read more ...