psychedelic
aardvarchaeology | March 29, 2016 Space Whale
The past two weekends were a lot of fun.
The Royal Technical College's orchestra and several combined student choirs from Sweden and Finland performed Giuseppe Verdi's 1874 Requiem, an intricate and operatic farewell to fellow composer Gioachino Rossini and poet Alessandro Manzoni. Hallwyl House: carving in the doorway between the ladies' drawing room and the Golden Salon.
Gig with King Khan and the Shrines. Imagine a tall, psychedelic, semi-nude, portly, Canadian Wilson Pickett of Indian extraction belting out soul rock with a band consisting of extremely enthusiastic…
aardvarchaeology | September 21, 2013Junior's buddy expressed an interest in psychedelic pop. Here's a selection of good albums, one for each decade. There is of course also heavier psych rock with prominent blues guitar in the tradition of Hendrix.
60s. Beatles, Revolver
70s. This decade produced a treasury of psych rock, prog rock and space rock, but I haven't got a recommendation for something both poppy and psychedelic.
80s. Stone Roses, The Stone Roses
90s. Olivia Tremor Control, Music from the Unrealised Film Script 'Dusk at Cubist Castle'
00s. Of Montreal, Aldhil's Arboretum
10s. Tame Impala, LonerismSee also my blog…
aardvarchaeology | August 26, 2012In this guest entry, my friend Milka Zelić reports on the gritty realities of public transport in Slumberland:It wasn't enough that I had a rough time at work last night. When I finally got to bed I ended up working a second shift.
Because of construction work on the subway a temporary ticket booth had been set up in the home of an Ethiopian family on the Rinkeby council estate. I had to settle in with my cash register, stamp and stuff in their little bathroom, which could somehow accommodate an extra table and chair (pretty many chairs actually, I had some trouble choosing). I relieved a…
aardvarchaeology | May 18, 2012Now this is how you sell pens!The squaw had disappeared into the thick under growth, leaving a track Queen Elizabeth I 2010 Mont Blanc Limited Edition White Rollerball like a hippo in the snow. Bud could have overtaken her, of course, and he could have made her take the baby back again. But he could not face the thought of it. He made no move at all toward pursuit, but instead he turned his face toward mont blanc boheme bleu Alpine, with some vague intention of turning the baby over to the hotel woman montblanc hemingway there and getting the authorities to hunt up its parents. It was plain…
aardvarchaeology | March 22, 2012
I've been following Californian rock singer and guitarist Ethan Miller off and on since Comets on Fire's 2002 album Field Recordings from the Sun. I love his singing and psychedelic song writing. And so recently the song "Nomads" from the 2008 album Magnificent Fiend (with Miller's current band Howlin' Rain) has been playing in my head. I couldn't quite make sense of the lyrics, so I checked on-line, and found them (perhaps predictably) to be stonerishly meandering. But also bluntly self-referential in a way that is either really stupid or neatly self-ironic. You be the judge, Dear Reader.…
aardvarchaeology | August 11, 2010In the podcast liner notes to his new album (starting at 14:21), George Hrab talks to Milton Mermikidis for a space about how neither of them does any heavier drugs than caffeine. I realised that in close to five years of blogging, I've never talked specifically about my own drug abstinence, though I've mentioned a few times that I'm tee-total. So I thought I might say a few words on the subject.
The culturally accepted heavy drug in Sweden is alcohol, which is strongly mind-altering if used in a sufficient dose and lethal if overdosed. Drinking is so common here that if you don't, then it…
aardvarchaeology | March 31, 2010When I was in school I read a great story about a man who took opium, felt that he had a great philosophical insight, wrote it down, and then found, after sobering up, that what he had written was "I perceive a distinct smell of kerosene", Jag känner en distinkt doft av fotogen.
Mucking around on the blessed web, I now find that the man was Oliver Wendell Holmes, an American 19th century physician and author. But it was ether, not opium, and turpentine, not kerosene. Here's what OWH writes in his essay "Mechanism in thought and morals : an address delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society…
aardvarchaeology | January 1, 2010
I found this sign at the Slussen commuter train station the other day.
aardvarchaeology | September 19, 2009
Somebody calls you and you answer quite slowly: a girl with kaleidoscope eyes.
aardvarchaeology | July 24, 2009
One of the major influences that combined to form Western psychedelic rock was traditional Asian music. But musicians in Asia picked up the vibe pretty quickly and started to play their own versions of it. Lately I've been listening to a great compilation of the stuff, and I'm particularly struck by the 1975 track "Gönül Sabreyle Sabreyle" (hear it streamed here). The band playing it is the brother trio Ãç Hürel, "The Three Hürels", and the song's title would in English be something like "Oh Sabreyle, my heart, Sabreyle". Reading up about the band on the web, I've learned that the…
aardvarchaeology | June 10, 2009Here are some excellent albums I've been listening to lately on my trusty smartphone. If you're into power pop, alternative rock, US folk and psychedelia, then check them out!
Brendan Benson. Alternative to Love. 2005.
Grand Duchy. Petits Fours. 2009. It's Frank Black and his wife Violet Clark!
Love, Peace and Poetry - Asian Psychedelic Music. A 1999 compilation of cool 60s and 70s stuff.
Maggi, Pierce & E.J. Silver. 2005.
Mopeds. Fortissimo. 2005.
Super Furry Animals. Dark Days/Light Years. 2009.
Teenage Fanclub. Man-made. 2005.
bioephemera | May 30, 2009
I finally got around to reading my backed-up RSS feeds, and had the chance to peruse these, well, demented 1970s biology textbook illustrations uncovered by Crooked Timber. I mean, what? No - what??! Crooked Timber calls it a "Groovy Prog Rock Wannabe Biology Text." I don't know what to say, except that I went to Artomatic yesterday, which had something like a thousand artists, and this psychedelica is far trippier than anything I saw there. Whoa, man.
For the record, if I had, as a child, learned to associate biology with angry disembodied leopard heads flying towards me on Frisbees of fire…
aardvarchaeology | October 21, 2008After over a year's near-invisibility on the net, cyberculture guru R.U. Sirius resurfaces as editor of H+ Magazine, a web zine about transhumanism. Explains Wikipedia, transhumanism is a "movement supporting the use of science and technology to enhance human mental and physical abilities and aptitudes, and overcome what it regards as undesirable and unnecessary aspects of the human condition, such as disability, suffering, disease, aging, and involuntary death". Shades of R.A. Wilson!
The first issue has loads of interesting content including an interview with hyperclocked science fiction…
aardvarchaeology | October 17, 2008
I worry about of Montreal's musical motor, pop genius Kevin Barnes. He first got records out in 1997-98, when he was an elegantly naivistic singer of sad love songs. Then he shot like a lysergic rocket straight into Pepperland with four beatlesque albums in 1999-2004. On his 2005 album he suddenly said goodbye to his old band members, returned to confessional mode and sang the praises of married life and parenthood in Norway of all places. And two other new themes appeared: 80s-style electronica and deep depression. That's where he still is.
With his recent album, Skeletal Lamping, Barnes…
aardvarchaeology | August 6, 2008The R.U. Sirius Show is/was a great weekly counterculture podcast that aired 88 episodes until about a year ago. Then it went on unannounced hiatus. I miss the show! Can anybody offer information on what R.U. is up to, and whether he has any plans to recommence his podcasting?
The latest interview with Sirius that I've been able to find dates from February. There he offers no comment on his silence.
Update 10 February '09: In an interview on the Right Where You Are Sitting Now! podcast from June '08, R.U. Sirius explains (about 10 minutes from the file's end) that his podcasting halted…
aardvarchaeology | July 28, 2008
So it's the 80s, Estonia is under Soviet rule, and your job is to direct movie commercials. And when you get the assignment to promote kana-hakkliha (processed chicken meat), you know exactly what it will take to make the product a big seller. You need nightmarish imagery, a heavy, psychedelic sound track and dramatic cutting. Because after all, you want to convince the viewers that anyone who overdoses on kana-hakkliha will spend days or weeks out of their freaking mind.
(Though I suppose this must be a humorous re-mix of what the real commercial looked like.)
aardvarchaeology | June 23, 2008Over at Podcastle, I just heard an amazing reading/performance of an amazing surrealist love story, "Fourteen Experiments in Postal Delivery". It was written by John Schoffstall, first published as text two years ago, and read by Heather Lindsley at Random Jane. It's got some gore and a few naughty words, it's nerdily intellectual, it's lyrically written and it's really, really funny.
aardvarchaeology | June 9, 2008The micro-SD flash memory chip that came with my new smartphone has some interesting issues with data integrity. I mostly use it to store sound files in the mp3 format, both pop songs of a few MB each and podcasts taking up tens of megabytes. And while listening to podcasts, in the middle of them, I have repeatedly come across three interesting and disturbing errors. The flash memory makes psychedelic remixes of my sound files!
As I listen to one mp3 file, I suddenly hear several seconds from another file before the original recording resumes.
As I listen to one mp3 file, I suddenly hear…
aardvarchaeology | April 22, 2008There was a time, around the age of twenty, when I saw some pretty weird movies. First I lived a short bike ride from the Swedish Film Institute, where I caught Kenneth Anger and Luis Buñuel (neither of whom I liked much -- I walked out on Anger's shorts). Then I moved to a place with a TV set just as Swedish commercial television took off. The stations didn't have much money yet and would broadcast the weirdest, cheapest feature films on weekend afternoons. Two stuck in my mind: one a low-budget Italian Conan rip-off whose title eludes me, the other an American picture from 1989 named…
aardvarchaeology | April 17, 2008
I'm spending tomorrow in a cultic field with Per Vikstrand and a metal detector. So I reckon it were best if we all had a look at the druggiest bit in all of Monty Python first.