27 Sept 2013

The Guardian get psyched out on Goat and the current psych scene


This story about the current psych scene popped up in The Guardian today, and they proclaim "World Music album is regarded as a latterday psych classic":


Psychedelia is everywhere right now. There are original psychedelic bands making comebacks, and legions of young psychedelic bands, from Toy and Temples to Tame Impala. There is psychedelic celluloid, with an imminent biopic of guitar visionary Jimi Hendrix, starring André Benjamin of OutKast as the psychedelic dandy. There are psychedelic festivals, both in the UK and abroad, designed to showcase psychedelic talent, new and old, from across the globe. But it's not a surface culture of trippy hippies with flowers in their hair spreading the message of peace and love like we saw in 1967; it's about pockets of activity in every country, micro-scenes with a shared consciousness making contact via the web.

"What makes this version of psychedelia unique is the global nature of it," says Craig Pennington, organiser of the Liverpool International Festival of Psychedelia, which takes place over two days this weekend. "They've been brought together by the internet," he says of the thousands of zealots who will be converging on the city, and the dozens of acts on the bill. "We've got bands from Santiago in Chile and Mexico City alongside bands from LA and Denmark. You wouldn't have been able to have this in any other period in history. It's like a global psychedelic village."


The festival comprises "two days of worship" of the "weird and warped", with "mind-expanding visual delights" and music from guitar-bass-drums outfits stretching the possibilities of the standard rock band set-up to electronic artists. There are so many acts that it raises the question: is all music, if it's doing its job right (experimenting, blowing minds), psychedelic?



Read the full article here: The Guardian