Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds: A Journey Through Psychedelic Music
Over the past couple of years, I have become fascinated by psychedelic music. There is a certain comfort in escaping the mundanity of daily life and instead being transported to fantastical imagined worlds; ones with “tangerine trees and marmalade skies” as the Beatles described in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”. Whether or not the song is actually about LSD remains a bit of a mystery, but undoubtedly Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was a catalyst in bringing psychedelic to the mainstream. The genre of psychedelic music often evokes imagery of the mid to late 1960s, a time that holds a lot of parallels to today, especially politically. With this in mind, it makes perfect sense that references to and influences from psychedelic music are popular within the indie rock and indie pop music that is being made today.
The genre first emerged in the 1960s and was deeply connected to the hippie movement and use of hallucinogenic substances, especially magic mushrooms and LSD. The use of LSD was on the rise among young adults in the mid 1960s, causing the United States government to ban the drug in 1968. A countercultural movement was born out of the use of psychedelics, and musicians started to make music while tripping on acid. In fact, psychedelic music was most definitely a product of its time, mixing the already popular rock ‘n roll genre in the West with instrumentation and melodies popular in a lot of Eastern music. The Beatles first used the sitar on their 1965 track “Norwegian Wood” after being introduced to Indian transcendentalism, which subsequently began to grow in popularity in the West. Many bands promptly followed in their footsteps. Across the pond, artists like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Jimi Hendrix were all making popular music that reflected the experience of what it was like to take these substances. In the former’s “White Rabbit”, the story of Alice in Wonderland is used as a metaphor for psychedelic use. The trippy imagery of the lyrics along with the low rumble of the bass and jangly sixties guitar tone is pretty much the blueprint of the genre. Woodstock was probably the peak moment of this musical movement, but there are still a number of bands around the world still making psychedelic music today, using similar techniques as the pioneers of the genre.
Of course, psychedelic music has evolved over time; Tame Impala makes psychedelic and pop influenced tracks that are fun, relatively radio-friendly, and extremely accessible for the masses. In fact, they’re not the only project from Australia that is doing so, albeit they are probably the most popular. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have made a good amount of psychedelic music, although they are well known for consistently pivoting from genre to genre. One of my favourite bands from the Australian psychedelic scene is Pond. The current iteration of psychedelic music makes use of excessive vocal effects and strange sounding synthesizers, something that has been made possible by digital technology that did not exist when psychedelic music was first made popular. Pond mixes this use of digitization seamlessly with real instruments in their live shows; and the entire experience of the music is amplified by sweeping multicoloured lights. Another band also hailing from down under, The Babe Rainbow, would not look at all out of place in a crowd of 1960s flower children. Their songs “Sunflower Sutra” and “Cosmic Now” have titles that you would come to expect from a psychedelic band, and oftentimes their songs feature the sitar, an element that was a staple in much of the psychedelic music from the 1960s.
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It seems that as time progresses, we are moving away from strictly placing music into a singular genre, rather opting to recognize the various influences which musical artists draw from. Many artists are being inspired to use popular sounds and themes from the psychedelic genre, blending them with other genres to create something completely new. Goat Girl’s most recent album On All Fours, which was released earlier this year, has clear psychedelic influences, but the sounds on this album also simultaneously reference house music, Britpop, and garage rock in equal measure. Goat Girl’s brand of psychedelia is fun and accessible, employing catchy pop hooks while still incorporating the whimsical aspects of psychedelic music that are familiar to fans of the genre. Goat Girl even make visual reference to the psychedelic genre in their music video for “Sad Cowboy,” depicting surrealist landscapes and absurdist costumes that one would dream up in a hallucinatory state. Another psychedelic band I’ve discovered recently is Altın Gün, an Anatolian rock band from Amsterdam. They offer up psychedelic renditions of Turkish folk songs. Their music is extremely reminiscent of psychedelic music from the 1960s and 70s, and sometimes includes disco and funk influences as well. Toronto’s very own, Luna Li also incorporates bedroom pop, psychedelic, and folk influences in her tracks, creating a dreamlike atmosphere in her music.
Psychedelic music offers us an escape from the stasis of the everyday, but it also allows us to find comfort in its visual incoherence, allowing us to better cope with the often incoherent nature of life. It seems to me as a listener that the revival of the psychedelic genre has already been well underway for a while, although many artists of our time are perhaps more subtle in invoking the themes, sounds, and visuals of the classic psychedelic music that we know and love from the latter half of the 1960s. Psychedelic music allows me to get lost in lush and fantastical soundscapes, to temporarily forget the responsibility and anxiety of daily life and just be consumed by the music. ■
Graphics by Adela Hua