Sometime ago I had asked the question whether or not psychedelic music was a vehicle towards inducing psychedelic states of consciousness or if it was to provide the backdrop to
pre-existing altered states. Is one an artifact of the other, or can music open up the possibility for experiencing consciousness expansion
sans the chemistry?
In the 1960s music was a reflection of an entire generation's response to not only politics, but to religion, and through this response to religion there was the attempt to change personal and political consciousness through the use of hallucinogens. Other things provided fodder; Eastern mysticism, a little bit of the occult, and an embrace of the natural world. But drugs were the key, and I think we as a culture still do not understand completely how LSD in particular fueled the counterculture's spiritual dimension. (By the time Ram
Dass returned from India and brought with him a spiritual path that was no contingent on drugs, that particular map of consciousness had already been drawn.) The music was merely a mirror.
But with the end of the sixties, psychedelic music underwent some significant changes. However it had defined itself previously, it was no longer part of the new spiritual movement, as that movement had become mired in new-
ageisms, hard drugs, and, simply put, the growing up of the hippies. Psychedelia became a musical language that could be shaped and
trasnformed in a number of ways. From the space rock of
Hawkwind to the pop-psych of
XTC, the 70s and 80s saw any number of musicians borrowing from a vast catalogue of ideas.
I won't go into the entire history of psychedelic music, but suffice it to say, almost fifty years later, we are living in a golden age of psychedelic music, and while some of it is creeping towards the mainstream, it is remaining a largely underground affair. And interestingly, there is a
Renaissance of sorts regarding the use of hallucinogens (more
accurately now called
entheogens), and it would be easy to suggest that once again psychedelic music is a reflection of a new spiritual movement.
Nevertheless, there is even more experimentation than even was going on in the seventies (although much of it owes almost all its everything to that time), and so there is no one sound that dominates the underground. There may be some often used tropes, but for the most part, the best musicians are taking risks to expand the definition of psychedelia. And most importantly, it's in their music that it seems possible to actually find altered states of
consciousness within the act of listening, rather than the music distilling a
pre-existing state of mind into a
musical form.
Part 2 will offer some specific examples...
.