While we witness a little return of interest towards psychedelic culture since a few years, it was quite rare that popular subculture would refer to psychedelia in those bleak mid 80’s (at least before rave would bring back rainbows, bubbles and acid). Still a few groups like Psychic TV and Spacemen 3 kept the endless trance inducing jams and the quest for musical (et al.) mind exploration going.
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“taking drugs to make music to take drugs to” – psychedelia in the 80’s and early 90’s with Spacemen 3
20 FebPsychedelic Tableaus: “Book of Days” by Meredith Monk and “Power” by Kanye West
13 FebWhen I first saw the video to Power by Kanye West something about it struck me as surprisingly psychedelic. But I could not really put my finger on it: was it the heavy and over the top symbolism, was it the kaleidoscopic yet very straight sensual overload or was it just the idea of a painting slowly beginning to move and expand?
I lost track of this intuition until I just reacently saw this excerpt from Book of Days by Meredith Monk. And there it was again..
Psychedelic Independent Gaming: The Devil’s Tuning Fork
6 FebYou can download the game for free here.
“I wish I could talk in technicolor…”
30 JanThis is footage of an experiment from around 1956. A dose of LSD25 is given to a “normal” woman. She is interviewed for the experiment by Dr. Sidney Cohen just before taking the LSD and also while she experiences its effects.
There are so many things remarkable about this! But see for yourself…
so intense: double rainbow high on autotune with the Gregory Brothers
23 JanMy question to you today is: can the youtube hive mind trip? or: whose hallucination is this?
V stands for..: Bert Brecht had his V-fx (distancing effects). Originally intended to make you think all the way “across” the distance set by the “Verfremdung” (estrangement), it seems by today’s standards you have to put in lots and lots of V’s to get things at least a little bit real.
Exquisite corpse: The surrealists had automatic writing. It was a bit uncanny to realize that language was making sense while you did not intend to. Who is making sense here? And when language can make sense without your intention, who did just say that, or: what exactly is dependent on your intention? Thoughts like that can easily become psychosis inducing.
So before the internet, before the notion of the hive mind the question of superindividuals was there, too. Social technologies like language can be conceived as collective unconscious mind. So, why shouldn’t it trip?
“I believe that one day we could have an accidental singer on top of the charts” The Gregory Brothers gave us “accidental singing”. What a nice term!
Sleeping Beauty In meta-musicals like Singing in the Rain people started dancing in the middle of everyday situations. A rhythm surfaced from a silly walk and the dance – it seemed – just followed naturally. By the act of movies like Singing in the rain the world was enriched with virtual dance waiting to be released from the rhythms surrounding us. Now our world has been enriched by a song sleeping in every news flash, voice or video post, in virtually all recorded language, waiting to be kissed awake by autotune.
Maybe V-effect has been translated to virtualizing effect without anyone intending, maybe the rainbow has never been so bright, so vivid, so intense, maybe one of the most familiar things today is living in a post-psychedelic culture.
Amiga Demo and the size of space
16 JanThe Amiga 500 was my very first computer system. It used DD floppy disks with 880 kb storage space. On those less than 1 mb disks you had games like elite and frontier: elite II that allowed almost limitless exploration of a virtual space literally bursting with solar systems.
But with the copies of those games came something else that challenged the notion of space maybe even more. The teams that “cracked” the copy-protection of those games often attached so-called demos to the code that was run from the disks. So before the game would load you would see – just like a little intro – demonstrations of crazy coding skills in the form of often mind-blowing animation, flickering images and pulsing color.
Those demos were at a most a few kb of code generating ever-changing images in real-time. Usually what you saw was far beyond the things you thought were possible within the technical limitations of your system. Typically some more or less abstract and alien imagery was rotating in front of your eyes, bursting into millions of colorful pieces, turning itself inside out into something totally different, dancing in fluid animation or travelling into impossible depth of space.
Somehow the dense economy of the code resulted in aesthetics and images not unlike the things you see under the influence of psychedelic substances (of course psychedelic substances were not unknown among the members of the demo scene). So, what does math and geometry have to do with psychedelic aesthetics?
feed the head
9 JanThis is a video of a complete walkthrough for a little game called “feed the head“. In the game all you do is experimenting with the psychedelic logic of the possible interactions. And it is fun to do so!
If you think about playing the game, do it before you watch this video. It’s free and very calm and played right in the browser window.
now, do as the dormouse said..
Sun Ra meets the Pink Elephants and the Wind in the Willows
2 JanThis is almost like a tiny ode to this blog: the pink elephants from Dumbo in sync with the Sun Ra version of the song. Both the Dumbo scene and Sun Ra have been featured on this blog last year.
And as a special bonus: the mind warp trap door to childhood memories of long winter evenings. Uncanny and curiously those guys seem to be moving with the uplift of boredom and the glamour of a little temperature (if you have not made all of your childhood memories yet.. don’t wait another year).
Love to you!
beauty between the natural and the digital
12 DecThese works by Shawn Knol are constantly transgressing the border between pure natural marvel and digital access until something silently emerges that can not be reduced to neither naturalism nor digitalism.
The Daily Psychedelic Video 