Gathering of the Tribe: Acid: A Companion to Occult Music On Vinyl Vol 1

By Mark Goodall

The records discussed in GATHERING OF THE TRIBE: ACID explore the key aspects of the acid experience, these being principally the way in which psychedelic drugs intensify sensory impressions (sound and vision); the ability to experience different dimensions simultaneously and mystical dimensions where the individual feels unified with the cosmos. This music also explores aspects of the infamous ‘bad trip’ or the ‘terror that was wrong’, where positive feelings are replaced by paranoia, depression, anxiety and disturbing flashbacks, the ‘other side of anguish’.

About the series:

GATHERING OF THE TRIBE is an on-going series about the mysterious power of sound and tone, with each book devoted to reviewing records that reveal divine and cosmic laws, voyages to other worlds or use sound as a tool for transformation. While highly selective, the series offers a practical guide to the ultimate occult record collection.

Rare album sleeves complement each review.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Headpress
• Release date: Oct 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9781915316042

Mark Goodall

is a lecturer in the Bradford Media School at the University of Bradford. He writes about film and music and is the author of Headpress' Sweet and Savage: the world through the shockumentary film lens. He is the singer and guitarist with beat combo Rudolf Rocker.

Book preview

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Acid

LSD IS REVOLUTIONISING THE PERSONALITIES OF INDIVIDUALS WHICH IS THE FIRST STEP IN REVOLUTIONISING OUR SOCIETY (ED SANDERS)

Although ‘acid’ is associated with the drug LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide), it can also be conceived as a state of mind, a philosophy even. This ‘acid philosophy’ began after World War II with the existential questioning and artistic exploration of the Beats, a group of writers and poets seeking to better understand and explain modern living in the second half of the twentieth century. The Beats were American, but the spirit of the movement to confront the fear of nuclear catastrophe and fascist tyranny soon spread to other cultures. Counterculture icon Jim Haynes defines the Beat philosophy as ‘do your own thing, and if you like what you are doing that’s fine and don’t be critical of others’, 1 in essence a new manifestation of the alternative aesthetic of the ‘hippie’ ideal. The development of psychedelic drugs expanded the dimensions of ‘freedom’ to go beyond the social world to the realms of the interior mind and the revolutionary spirit to cosmic dimensions, the point being to ‘explore not to explain’ (Marshall McLuhan) through what Karlheinz Stockhausen defined as a ‘supra-personal cosmic consciousness’.

Music was a significant site of creative expression in these new and expanding fields of human experience. Drugs such as psilocybin, mescaline and LSD (first introduced into America in the early 1960s by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert) became gradually interwoven in the jazz and rock scenes where new forms of sonic expression were developing, often accompanied by revolutionary language and thinking drawn from core texts such as The Tibetan Book of the Dead and Aldous Huxley’s Doors Of Perception. Psychedelic drugs were another (relatively quick) way of breaking patterns — changing your world and finding ‘new sensory experiences’.2 The way in which, under the influence of the drugs, single thoughts can branch out into a vast hierarchy of related fields and that the user generally experiences MORE of everything (including sound) became a source of inspiration for creative expression.

In The Peyote Dance, Antonin Artaud describes how the taking of psychedelic drugs connects with other realms. The dances and music of the Tarahumara Indians that Artaud lived with created ‘a melody of remorse … a secret summons to I know not what dark forces, what presences from the beyond’.3 The drug allowed Artaud, in his mind, to ‘go back to the source and expand my pre-consciousness’. Prophets of psychedelic drugs also imagined a complete transformation of society through using the substances to the point that LSD became, for a short time, a ‘religion’. The music ritual played an important role in this transformation, and that is the focus of this publication.

It was especially the mind-expanding potential of acid that attracted the attention of musicians wishing to extend the boundaries of what sound could achieve. In The Acid Trip, Vernon Joynson states that psychedelic drugs brought ‘electricity, mysticism and musical freedom’ to the burgeoning rock scene of the mid 1960s, creating a revolutionary way of thinking about sound and consciousness — a ‘new radicalism’.4 The broader notion of the musician as an ‘artist’, where images, environments and design were as significant as sounds, was developed out of this counterculture. New instruments were incorporated into acid music (the sitar, for example), as were philosophical and spiritual ideas from non-western perspectives. In some acid trips, music was the only art form that could ‘save’ humanity; in the drug trip, you became at one with the ‘music of the spheres’.5 The delirium of the acid trip became integrated into ever more lavish LP cover artwork for a range of musical styles (see Fig.1).

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The records discussed here explore the key