Tag: Acid Folk

Thursday August 22, 2019

Tap on Relatively Clean Rivers. Flash that archetypal Dayglo river-road landscape on the album cover, hint of the mid-1970s privately pressed Marin County-rooted psychedelic folk-rock contained therein. The record includes odd instrumental hollows, exudes a sweet blend of joy and melancholy: “weight off one’s mind,” as the band sings on “Hello Sunshine.”

To encounter it is to encounter a psychedelic beacon, the acid equivalent of the holy spirit, beaming a signal to fellow heads across time. What is it that we’re trying to tell one another, I hear myself asking, we who have had psychedelic experiences? Where did we find ourselves before, in the midst of, and after? The lyrical persona in “A Thousand Years” speaks as one frustrated by subjecthood and identity, disappointed to find itself left again with a face—but the voice persists in its attempt to communicate. It’s an Orphic persona: one who attempts to realize and comprehend the totality, one who bears news from the other side. The news seems to be that all that is Good is trying to win us to its side. Songs are credited to band member Phil Pearlman, a name that recalls past parables as well as poems from the beginnings of English literature. Pearlman’s two incarnations prior to Relatively Clean Rivers were called The Electronic Hole and The Beat of the Earth. After a conversion of sorts involving a bible on a beach, however, Pearlman changed his name to Seth Philip Gadahn. Quite a story there, for those who wish to look.

Saturday August 26, 2017

I found some hollowed-out nutshells the other day in the hollowed-out trunk of a tree. I interpreted these shells (because why not?) as a sign that I should dine at Five Guys. Is it wrongheaded to equate mental space or consciousness with something more fully social (or so I presume) like language or discourse? “All we have to do,” I’m told, “is speak our minds.” Singer-songwriters channel generic personal language from the muses. The cosmic babble that results achieves meaning only upon contact with Robbie Basho’s “Variations on Claire De Lune.”

Join that with Popol Vuh’s “Ah!” and you have my weekend. This soundtrack to the first stage of my new journey culminates, by the way, with the nature-worship of Bridget St. John’s “Ask Me No Questions.”

What can I say? My psychedelic war-chest skews toward the folksy. I become absorbed as I listen, my eye wrapping around my fingers as I wrap around my fingers the string from my hoodie. Trust me when I say, it’s a glimpse of the earthly divine. The inexplicable mystery of Being. And we can run with that directly into Asa-Chang & Junray’s “Hana.”

As Henri Lefebvre said of space, “our senses and our thoughts apprehend nothing else” (The Production of Space, p. 12). Lefebvre’s is a Marxism that can accommodate the satisfaction that results from tending to what psychologist Abraham Maslow called “metaneeds,” including the drive to know and experience truth, beauty, and goodness. Lefebvre’s writing also implies an everyday practice (or so I imagine) in line with the teachings of Anthony Storr’s Solitude: A Return to the Self. Make sure to parse all of this, though, via Nietzsche’s theory of the psyche as constituted by multidimensional layers and possessing an unfathomable complexity. Down we go, stricken with both terror and delight, into the depths of an unmapped maze. Fireworks in the space behind the back of one’s head: lean into them and absorb them as spasms shivering up one’s abdomen. “Get a load of the pull on that one!” shouts a young dwarven-shaped thing, afterwards becoming angered by the genocide that its country committed, the alternative lineages of consciousness extinguished. History has deprived us of whole peoples and whole ways of being. Get a load of the way this next part is spoken: I’m not here to virtue-signal. I’m here to touch the void.