Psychedelic music

sometimes psychedelia covers a range of popular music styles and genres, which are inspired by or influenced by psychedelic culture and which attempt to replicate and enhance the mind-altering experiences of psychedelic drugs. It emerged during the mid 1960s among folk rock and blues-rock bands in the United States and Britain. It often used new recording techniques and effects and drew on non-Western sources such as the ragas and drones of Indian music. It spread into psychedelic folk, psychedelic rock, psychedelic pop and psychedelic soul in the 1960s before declining in the early 1970s. It helped create many new musical genres including progressive rock, kosmische musik, synth rock, jazz rock, heavy metal, glam rock, funk, electro and bubblegum pop. It was revived in forms of neopsychedelia from the 1980s and re-emerged in electronic music in genres including acid house, trance music (see psychedelic trance) and new rave.

Background

                            Main articles: History of LSD and Psychedelic

 

Timothy Leary, a major advocate of the use of LSD in the 1960s, photographed in 1989

Beat Generation writers of the 1950s and 60s, like William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and especially the new proponents of consciousness expansion such as Timothy Leary, Alan Watts and Aldous Huxley, profoundly influenced the thinking of the new generation, helping to popularise the use of LSD, associating it with spiritual enlightenment and social consciousness.Soon musicians began to refer (at first indirectly, and later explicitly) to the drug and attempted to recreate or reflect the experience of taking LSD in their music, just as it was reflected in psychedelic art, psychedelic literature and film.

Characteristics

Psychedelic music often contains some of the following features:

• exotic instrumentation, with a particular fondness for the sitar and tabla;
• more complex song structures, key and time signature changes, modal melodies and drones;
• surreal, whimsical, esoterically or literary-inspired, lyrics;
• a strong emphasis on extended instrumental solos or jams;
• electric guitars, often used with feedback, wah wah and fuzzboxes;
• a strong keyboard presence, especially organs, harpsichords, or the Mellotron (an early tape-driven 'sampler');
• elaborate studio effects, such as backwards tapes, panning, phasing, long delay loops, and extreme reverb;
• primitive electronic instruments such as synthesizers and the theremin;
• later forms of electronic psychedelia also employed repetitive computer generated beats^.