I'd be interested in hearing whether everyone's in agreement on exactly what 'psychedelic' means.
To understand what makes music stylistically "psychedelic," one should consider three fundamental effects of LSD: dechronicization, depersonalization, and dynamization. Dechronicization permits the drug user to move outside of conventional perceptions of time. Depersonalization allows the user to lose the self and gain an "awareness of undifferentiated unity." Dynamization, as [Timothy] Leary wrote, makes everything from floors to lamps seem to bends, as "familiar forms dissolve into moving, dancing structures"... Music that is truly "psychedelic" mimics these three effects.
Has anyone else ever felt the swoon of horror when a utopian psychedelic bubble is burst by some interloping threat?
I'm thinking here of being at a festival where you're having a great time on drugs and then suddenly you see someone having a fit or doing a shit or something. Sundays at festivals, when you begin to see why people SHOULDN'T do drugs all the time.
That's how I imagine the Manson murders effected the hippies.
there also seems a bit of trend that after a mass cultural intake of positive drugs, everyone goes for the amphetamines
the thin line between ever increasing intensity and self-harm. it's how you get gabba
I always took it to mean sounds that are otherworldly in some way. floating, drifting, untethered. complicated as opposed to a drifting drone, though. usually in a positive sense but, like every other genre, there's eventually also a dark side. heavy dark psyche: bad acid, bad trips, bad vibes, "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida".
I thought was just what LA does to you
Based on experience of acid is it fair to say that there should be an element of paranoia or fear in any genuinely psychedelic music? As you say, that "the world is weird" thing which can be delightful but also horrendous.
I was going to say all the most potently psychedelic music is bad trip music. I didn’t know if that was just because my formative drug experience were with gross people.
What is the most potently psychedelic music?
It's funny the ideas that people have about LA
(I had them too before I moved here)
(Mark Fisher had a whole thing about LA based entirely on Michael Mann's Heat and the Baudrillard book America)