Ryan Larkin (1943-2007) was a Canadian animator, who in 1969 was nominated for the Academy Award for is short psychedelic animation “Walking”. Three years later he released the acclaimed film “Street Music”, again, a tripy colorful short film, hand drawn with no narrative, but with a distinct and simple theme.
Soon after that, Larkin fell into severe drug abuse, alcoholism and homelessness. In 2002, another Canadian animator, Chris Landreth, Made this short film about him and won an Oscar for it.
A psychedelic light show from the legendary UFO club in London 1967, done by Marc Boyle who was also responsible for the light shows in some of the Jimi Hendrix and Soft Machine concerts in the Sixties. Here to the sounds of the Pink Floyd, playing Astronomy Domine.
Ultra-capitalistic mega-synthetic pop star Ke$ha has recently released a highly psychedelic video with lots of references to drug culture, psychedelic culture, shamanic culture and hippies.
This time Ke$ha, formerly in love only with the $ sign, wakes in the desert and finds herself in love with some hippie. Throughout the song she is dancing around in the desert, playing with motives of indigenous and shamanic culture (Wearing native-american styled clothing, putting on a totem mask of a tiger, or wearing glowing body painting reminding of shamanic wall and body painting) seeing hallucinations and singing about being addicted to this hippie like a “drug”, referring to herself as a “crackhead”.
Things get really wild around 1:30. In this sequence Ke$ha and the hippie are inside a boat in the middle of the desert, probably hallucinating on the “love drug”, they are trying to stir the boat through the sands when they go into a full fledged hallucination whose style kind of reminds one of “Yellow Submarine” animations and this eventually develops to fractals and more modern style psychedelic imagery.
Has Ke$ha had a new psychedelic revelation or is this just another cash-hallucination on the way to stardom. Time will tell, but we will be hoping for more psychedelic videos from Ke$ha in the future.
You can find an interesting and more world-conspiracy style interpretation of Ke$ha’s video here.
Another psychedelic classic by Disney. In 1940 Fantasia introduced shimmering abstract figuration morphing to the pulse of music as a subject of public viewing. Synaethetics for the masses.
In 1966, the height of the psychedelic revolution, this television-play was made by British theater director Jonathan Miller. There is nothing Disney-like in this film, no talking animals and no flamboyant settings. Still, it has a strong haunting atmosphere of a deep plunge into the unconscious of the Victorian mind. The soundtrack is by Ravi Shankar.
“The camera could not capture the vivid intensity and brightness cause the camera wasn’t on drugs” wrote someone on YouTube regarding this hilarious video. I am not sure what these guys took, or if they even took anything but their reaction to this amazing rainbow sure leads me to believe that they were in some state of cosmic enlightenment, and the camera does manage to capture the mood of that moment. Funny, amazing video!
The Daily Psychedelic Video 