PSYCHEDELIC MUSIC was born in the 1960s, a predictable mutation of psychedelic drugs and popular culture. The roots of the word psychedelic mean "revealing the mind" — a revelation that turned out to be both colorful and unpredictable.
Psychedelic music aimed to reveal an expanded version of the mind, using audible distortion and warped perspective, sustained floating textures and drones, fractal repetitions and feedback, liberally seasoned with sounds from nature and exotic cultures, especially India.
As a trend, it ran its course in the 1960s, was revived in the 1970s, quoted lovingly by fashionable bands in the 80s and 90s, and became a core influence on millennial genres like Trip Hop, Shoegaze, Acid Jazz, Acid House, and the many varieties of Trance — to name a few. We just can't seem to quit it.
Like an aesthetic virus, the pure electronic form of psychedelic music invented in the 1960s and 70s infected musicians using sound as a vehicle for inner space travel and consciousness alteration. In a word: trippy.
Along the way, these sonic explorers found kindred spirits in archaic traditions like shamanism and pagan rituals. What began as free exploration with mind-bending chemicals ultimately became a quest for new modes of perception, psychological therapy, escape from the normal boundaries of self, and at its most extreme — visions and hallucinations at the borders of oblivion. These grassroots experiments paved the way for the massive tribal-Electronic Dance Music festivals of today, with their promise of transcending self through ecstatic group experience.
On this transmission of Hearts of Space, a journey in the altered soundscapes of psychedelic space, on a program called PSYCHETRONIC SUMMER.
Music is by THE FUTURE SOUND OF LONDON, SCANN-TEC, ISHQ, LIGHTWAVE, FORREST SMITHSON, CYBERNIUM (MICHEL HUYGEN & PASCAL LANGUIRAND), and CSILLAGKÖD.
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