Psychedelic music
Acknowledging this, author Michael Hicks explains: To understand what makes music stylistically "psychedelic," one should consider three fundamental effects of LSD: dechronicization, depersonalization, and dynamization.
Dynamization, as [Timothy] Leary wrote, makes everything from floors to lamps seem to bend, as "familiar forms dissolve into moving, dancing structures"... Music that is truly "psychedelic" mimics these three effects.
[9] Elaborate studio effects are often used, such as backwards tapes, panning the music from one side to another of the stereo track, using the "swooshing" sound of electronic phasing, long delay loops and extreme reverb.
[13] From the second half of the 1950s, Beat Generation writers like William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg[14] wrote about and took drugs, including cannabis and Benzedrine, raising awareness and helping to popularise their use.
[15] In the early 1960s the use of LSD and other psychedelics was advocated by new proponents of consciousness expansion such as Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley and Arthur Koestler,[16][17] and, according to Laurence Veysey, they profoundly influenced the thinking of the new generation of youth.
[21][22] The Pranksters helped popularise LSD use, through their road trips across America in a psychedelically decorated converted school bus, which involved distributing the drug and meeting with major figures of the beat movement, and through publications about their activities such as Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in 1968.
[23] San Francisco had an emerging music scene of folk clubs, coffee houses and independent radio stations that catered to the population of students at nearby Berkeley and the free thinkers that had gravitated to the city.
[35] These trends climaxed in the 1969 Woodstock Festival, which saw performances by most of the major psychedelic acts, including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane and Santana.
[37] The linking of the murders of Sharon Tate and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca by the Manson Family to The Beatles songs such as "Helter Skelter" contributed to an anti-hippie backlash.
[38] The Altamont Free Concert in California, headlined by the Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane on December 6, 1969, did not turn out to be a positive milestone in the psychedelic music scene, as was anticipated; instead, it became notorious for the fatal stabbing of a black teenager Meredith Hunter by Hells Angels security guards.
At the same time, a more avant-garde development came with the contingent of artists associated with Frank Zappa, including The Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart, Wild Man Fischer, The GTOs, and Alice Cooper.
[44] Music scholar Edward Macan notes that the "post-psychedelic hard rock/heavy metal styles" that emerged had "a weaker connection to the hippie ethos" and "strongly emphasized the blues progression".
[46] Other major pioneers of the heavy metal genre had begun as blues-based psychedelic bands, including Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Judas Priest and UFO.
[46][47] According to American academic Christophe Den Tandt, many musicians during the post-psychedelic era adopted a stricter sense of professionalism and elements of classical music, as evinced by the concept albums of Pink Floyd and the virtuosic instrumentation of Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Yes.
"In so doing", he adds, "they laid the foundations for a central tendency of post-punk" in the late 1970s, as evinced by the first four albums by The Cure (featuring blurry photographs of the band members) and Factory Records' dark-colored covers with serial numbers.
[58][59] Stoner rock is typically slow-to-mid tempo and features a heavily distorted, groove-laden bass-heavy sound,[60] melodic vocals, and "retro" production.
[68][69] The label was popularised by the British music press in the early 1990s,[70] and its most famous groups include the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets, the Charlatans and 808 State.
At that time, the Haçienda nightclub, co-owned by members of New Order, was a major catalyst for the distinctive musical ethos in the city that was called the Second Summer of Love.
The album marked a significant departure from the band's early indie rock sound, drawing inspiration from the blossoming house music scene and associated drugs such as LSD and MDMA.
AllMusic states: "Aside from the early-'80s Paisley Underground movement and the Elephant 6 collective of the late 1990s, most subsequent neo-psychedelia came from isolated eccentrics and revivalists, not cohesive scenes."
They go on to cite what they consider some of the more prominent artists: the Church, Nick Saloman's Bevis Frond, Spacemen 3, Robyn Hitchcock, Mercury Rev, the Flaming Lips, and Super Furry Animals.
"[73] The Atlantic writer Llewellyn Hinkes Jones identified a variety of music styles from the 2000s characterized by mellow beats, vintage synthesizers, and lo-fi melodies, including chillwave, glo-fi, and hypnagogic pop.
[76] In August 2009, "hypnagogic pop" was coined by journalist David Keenan to refer to a developing trend of 2000s lo-fi and post-noise music in which artists from varied backgrounds began to engage with elements of cultural nostalgia, childhood memory, and outdated recording technology.
The terms "hypnagogic pop", "chillwave", and "glo-fi" were soon adopted to describe the evolving sound of such artists, a number of which had songs of considerable success within independent music circles.
[92] Derived from acid house and techno music, it developed in Germany and the Netherlands with singles including "Energy Flash" by Joey Beltram and "The Ravesignal" by CJ Bolland.
Having gained some popularity in the UK in the early 1990s it was eclipsed by the appearance of new genres of electronic music such as trip hop and jungle, before taking off again towards the end of the decade and beginning to dominate the clubs.
In Britain in the 2000s (decade), the combination of indie rock with dance-punk was dubbed "new rave" in publicity for Klaxons, and the term was picked up and applied by the NME to a number of bands.
