Psychedelia

The definitive monograph on the work of celebrated mind-altering artist and album cover designer, Leif Podhajsky. Over the past decade, Leif Podhajsky’s kaleidoscopic artwork has helped popularize the resurgence of psychedelia by reinventing the style for contemporary culture. By exploring the relationship between the organic and digital realms, Podhajsky’s work speaks to a new generation of curious minds. Best known for his striking, Grammy-nominated album covers for musicians, like Foals, Bonobo, Lykke Li, and Young Magic, Podhajsky deftly crosses the boundary between sound and visual art. The reverberating, ethereal vocals of Tame Impala’s debut album Innerspeaker, for instance, are embodied in the visual space of Podhajsky’s iconic, ever-retracting dreamscape cover. Fascinatingly, synaesthesia, which manifests itself for Podhajsky as the appearance of colors with sounds, plays a significant role in his creative process. Music becomes a pebble dropped into a pool of color inside his mind, causing ripples to spread and shades to surface. The results are his hypnotic one-of-a-kind graphics, presented in this volume for the first time.

Recounting research on hallucinogenic drug treatments during the 1950s and 60s, Psychedelic Revolutionaries shows how public fears, stoked by partisan politics, can hold back scientific advancements.

This book is a pioneering effort that presents psychedelia as a culture and lifestyle with its own history, philosophy, art, visions, and traditions -- Back cover.

In the early 1950s, the leading centre of the world for LSD research was Weyburn, Saskatchewan, where two psychiatrists sought to revolutionize the treatment of mental illness and, in the process, gave rise to a new form of therapy: psychedelic psychiatry. Psychedelic Psychiatry is the tale of medical researchers working to understand LSD’s therapeutic properties just as escalating anxieties about drug abuse in modern society laid the groundwork for the end of experimentation at the edge of psychopharmacology. Historian Erika Dyck deftly recasts our understanding of LSD to show it as an experimental substance, a medical treatment, and a tool for exploring psychotic perspectives. She recounts the inside story of the early days of LSD research in small-town, prairie Canada, when Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer claimed incredible advances in treating alcoholism, understanding schizophrenia and other psychoses, and achieving empathy with their patients. In relating the drug’s short, strange trip, Dyck explains how societal concerns about countercultural trends led to the criminalization of LSD and other so-called psychedelic drugs. In this well-written and fascinating book, she confronts the ethical dilemmas of the time and challenges the prevailing wisdom behind drug regulation and addiction therapy.

Listen to Psychedelic Rock! contains more than 50 entries covering the people, records, places, and events that shaped one of the most exciting and influential periods in popular music. This addition to the Exploring a Music Genre series concentrates solely on psychedelic rock music. Listen to Psychedelic Rock! Exploring a Musical Genre covers over fifty topics, arranged alphabetically, that are central to learning about psychedelic music and will enable readers to understand the breadth and ongoing influence of psychedelia through to the present day. The title contains biographical sketches on selected artists, "song-by-song" descriptions of many albums, and short, informative essays on participants who were influential in the original psychedelic movement. A background section introduces the genre and a legacy section shows how psychedelic music has cemented its place in the world, while another section shows the tremendous impact the music has had on popular culture. Information on record labels and year-of-release dates for all musical entries make it easy for any reader to navigate this title - a must-have for high school and college readers as well as for music scholars and fans of the genre.

Recognized for its distinctive musical features and its connection to periods of social innovation and ferment, the genre of psychedelia has exerted long-term influence in many areas of cultural production, including music, visual art, graphic design, film, and literature. William Echard explores the historical development of psychedelic music and its various stylistic incarnations as a genre unique for its fusion of rock, soul, funk, folk, and electronic music. Through the theory of musical topics—highly conventional musical figures that signify broad cultural concepts—and musical meaning, Echard traces the stylistic evolution of psychedelia from its inception in the early 1960s, with the Beatles' Rubber Soul and Revolver and the Kinks and Pink Floyd, to the German experimental bands and psychedelic funk of the 1970s, with a special emphasis on Parliament/Funkadelic. He concludes with a look at the 1980s and early 1990s, touching on the free festival scene, rave culture, and neo–jam bands. Set against the cultural backdrop of these decades, Echard's study of psychedelia lays the groundwork and offers lessons for analyzing the topic of popular music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

It wasn't just clothes and hair that changed as the 1960s progressed - social awareness crept into youth culture and music ceased to be simply about dancing. A counter-culture gradually emerged, and rock 'n' roll was its defining feature. Pop music broadened beyond the traditional guitar-bass-drum format and started to experiment with new sounds. Musicianship reached unsurpassable levels, and for a brief, glorious time, genuinely experimental music coincided with the popular taste. The explosion of imagination and ambition that characterised the psychedelic movement of the late 1960s stretched the possibilities of the pop song to their limits. Never before or since were so many classic albums made in such a short time. Psychedelia is the most colourful, detailed and authoritative guide to these albums ever published. One hundred of them are evaluated here, using contemporary reviews, rare photographs and interviews, accompanied by a plethora of iconic images and reproductions of cover artwork.

From the street, New Westminster's Hollywood Hospital didn't look like much - just a rambling white mansion, mostly obscured behind the holly trees from which it took its name. But, between 1957 and 1968, it was the site of more than 6000 supervised acid trips, as part of the burgeoning (and controversial) field of psychedelic psychiatry. Under the care of Medical Director J Ross MacLean, and ex-spy/researcher Al "Captain Trips" Hubbard, it became a mecca for alcoholics, anxiety patients, and unhappy couples (as well as celebrities like Andy Williams), its unorthodox methods boasting a success rate of nearly 80%. But the same media attention that brought the hospital to prominence also assured its downfall, as prohibition forces drove their work underground for more than 50 years. Written by 49.2 regular Jesse Donaldson and academic historian Erika Dyck, The Acid Room takes readers into the hospital's inner sanctum, charting its meteoric rise and fall as it opened up brave new worlds in medicine, and put Canada at the forefront of a movement that is only now being fully explored.